“Onuna has blessed you.”
Elijah’s mother had often told him that when he was a boy yet he had never shared the sentiment. His mother’s goddess had cursed him, making him a harbinger of bad news and death simply because he dared to leave his mother’s heaving body not as a daughter but as a son.
For as long as he could remember his dreams had been home to visions of women not yet dead heralding their impending doom like a bullhorn in the night. And out of all of his night visitors it was his mother’s appearance that haunted him the most. Even as an adult he could hear the words that had slipped forth from her lips the night before his sister had phoned him with the foul news of her passing.
“She hungers for her bread water.”
Words he was never supposed to understand due to his gender but his sister Anita had still taught him the tradition of their mother’s people when he was ten years old.
“We don’t bury our dead,” she said while working another plait down the side of his head. “Not the women at least. We give them back to Mother Onuna in order to nurture her and prepare her body to birth her daughters once more.”
“And what about the men?” Elijah asked.
The lack of men in the village often perturbed him. As far as he knew the ones he did see weren’t from there and appeared solely to find a wife. They’d stay only during the hot summers to do heavy labor fearing that another man with similar intentions would take their place. As for the boys, Elijah could recall perhaps two aside from himself. Sons were fed to Onuna at the time of their births while the lucky ones were secreted off to places where they could live away from The Mother’s resentful eye. Elijah’s mother had done neither.
Anita hadn’t answered right away as she busied herself with scooping her knuckle into the pot of hair grease he’d been tasked with holding. She’d made it herself, the hair grease, sold it too with exceptional success.
“Why would you ask that? You plan on dying on me or something?” Anita sniped. She rubbed her finger a little too hard across his scalp when spreading the grease that her nail scraped the sensitive flesh.
He knew she hadn’t done it on purpose but he’d spent a week picking at the itchy fibrous patch until she popped his hands and slathered his parts with a healing salve.
Looking back on it Elijah couldn’t help but wonder if things might’ve been different had he upped and died on his mother and sister. Perhaps it would’ve saved them, his death somehow working to appease Mother Onuna. The village midwife had been so sure he’d be a girl after all and she’d never been wrong in her thirty some odd years of bringing babies into the world. But then he was born and Onuna cursed him with all the spite only a woman could have. So when the opportunity to leave came Elijah didn’t hesitate to take it.
Unfortunately there was no distance the souls wouldn’t cross to hound him in his dreams. He saw the woman who had pulled him out of his mother’s womb kicking and screaming and the auntie who sent him on errands the minute he learned to walk without toppling over and could parrot back the things he was told. Even the girl who declared the first day she met him that he’d marry her had shown herself. All of them too had said the same thing, all of them screamed at him until Mother Onuna with her insatiable appetite finally devoured them.
The visits stopped after his mother’s death and like a right fool Elijah thought himself free. Years had passed without a single disturbance. He was thirty-one now, Anita just having turned forty in December. From where he stood he’d have another good forty years before anything happened, if at all. But that’s what positive thinking got you he supposed.
When his sister first materialized in one of his dreams, dancing around his flat laughing with her infectious glee he thought nothing of it. The second time she came to him he’d fallen asleep in the bath and saw her sitting on the edge, her hand swaying back and forth in the water slowly dissolving. Startling awake, Elijah scrambled out the tub and emptied his stomach onto the floor. Samuel, his husband, found him hours later curled up beneath the bed, eyes swollen from crying.
“Not my Anita,” he wailed.
Without hesitation Samuel crawled under after him, holding him until soft hiccuping and uneven breathing vibrated between them.
Only once had Elijah ever attempted to explain his ‘affliction’, albeit briefly, to Samuel and that was when the man had wanted to date him. For five years he’d gotten away with pretending his disturbed moods were caused by creative anxiety and an irreconcilable childhood. Now he had no choice but to come clean at the risk of his marriage and own sanity.
“So you’re something like a clairvoyant?” Samuel asked after a week and a half of Elijah pussyfooting around the subject.
Patiently he listened, allowing Elijah to trail off in the middle of sentences just to get lost while pushing his fingers into a slab of clay in a half-assed burst of inspiration that really was just him stalling.
Shaking his head he chuckled. “Nothing as nice, I’m afraid.” His husband took things so well no matter how terrible. He envied that. “I don’t know what causes their death. I don’t even know when it will happen,” he said, his hands now clean as he joined a smoking Samuel on the windowsill.
His husband was quick to wrap his arms about his waist to press a kiss against his shoulder.
“And are you sure it was Anita? I know what you said but dreams can play tricks on us. Make a puzzle seem whole even when half the pieces are from three other sets.”
Maybe in another life, with another person, Elijah might have found the question patronizing but Samuel was too cautious with his words despite looking like a man with an unwavering confidence. It had taken him a month of leaving meandering notes for him to finally admit that he liked the idea of them getting married. The poor sweet bastard was probably regretting that now.
“Eli?”
Elijah inhaled sharply.
“I wouldn’t mistake her face for anything,” he said, voice sounding strangled in his ears. But then he was up on his feet, eyes bright and fists clenched in determination as he spun around to face his husband. “I have to call her, Sam.”
The look he got was like a fist to the gut. Samuel had the most expressive eyes he’d ever seen but at the same time he always looked as if he’d swallowed a thousand angry beasts that he knew could never be released back into the world. It was the type of look you pitied but also hated because no matter all the hurt and pain you felt you knew he was hurting more and he’d never tell you why.
“There’s no phone lines, remember? You told me yourself that Anita had to come by boat to the nearest town in order to call you,” Samuel said. His right hand trembled making the mess of uneven colored scar tissue there jump as he reached for the cigarette pack. He never did tell Elijah what happened.
“I’ll take a damn boat then.” His anger made him freeze. “Sorry—”
“Don’t,” Samuel cut him off, lighting another cigarette. “Don’t ever be sorry. Not to me or anyone else.” He took a quick drag then, pushing the smoke from his nose as he chewed at his bottom lip then said. “I don’t think we’ll find anyone. That storm’s nearly on our doorstep and you know how those watermen can get about cyclone season. Couldn’t even bribe them at this point if what I’m hearing on the news is to be believed.”
Elijah took Samuel’s cigarette before he’d even realized he was doing it. He didn’t smoke but choking on an inhale beat the helplessness he felt as he stared out the window. They had a clear view of the sky and the storm clouds amassing in the distance, dark and foreboding.
“After the storm clears then,” he said more to himself but he knew Samuel was listening, waiting there on the windowsill. Waiting and watching.
The forecasters could have been painted as oracles with how right they’d been about the storm. Elijah and Samuel had fortunately prepared in advance. They had never been the type to sneeze at Mother Nature, their upbringing though completely two distinct and separate experiences strangely overlapped when it came to their utter awe and respect towards the natural forces of the world.
There was a moment during the damaging winds and torrential rainfall where they thought they’d be forced to evacuate when the first floor of the building flooded with nearly two feet of water. Then what looked like a patio table had come hurling through the window of the apartment two floors down in the middle of the second night. All the while Elijah could only think of that small little village on the mountain with its greedy goddess that killed the women. He feared he might dream of Anita running down the street with her mouth open trying to swallow the rain but she never appeared. He did however hear her voice at the end of the week when the power was restored.
“Little brother, is that you? Speak up now. I’m at a shelter on the mainland and it’s a bit loud,” Anita’s voice greeted him over the phone.
Elijah collapsed on the stool in the kitchen in relief. Silent.
“Hello? Elijah are you there? Damn signal must still be on the fritz. Listen, I’ll try again later when-”
“No!” he yelled. “I’m here, I just didn’t expect to hear from you. I was actually planning a visit to make sure you were alright. You are alright aren’t you?”
She must’ve heard his unease because Anita’s voice dropped an octave as she spoke again. He could imagine her cradling the receiver close to her face, her knowing eyes narrowed the way they did when she wanted the truth out of him. “Why are you speaking like that? Did something happen? Where’s Sam?”
That was just like her. Even now when she had been the one forced to flee her home she was worrying about them. He would have laughed if the sight of her hand slowly stretching out, the flesh becoming soggy and gumming up his bathwater wasn’t still fresh in his mind.
“No, it’s nothing like that. The first floor flooded but we’re fine, don’t worry. I need to tell you something though,” Elijah said. He inhaled sharply. “Anita, I saw you in my dreams. Twice now.”
The silence that answered was so deafening he would’ve thought his sister had hung up had it not been the fact there was no dial tone.
Anita sighed then like a woman tired instead of a woman damned. “You’re going to be fine Elijah.”
“How can you say that? You know what happens when I start seeing people like that.”
“How can I say what? That my little brother is strong enough to do what he needs to do when the time comes? Look, it’s only been two times, right?”
“Yes.” It was only now that he realized he was shaking.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” He was about to start yelling but she started talking again.
“Would you and Sam mind putting me up for a week or two? Watermen wont sail until they get the docks all cleaned up.”
She didn’t have to ask and she knew she didn’t but that was Anita for you. She could lose a hand and still ask if you minded helping her out. His sister was too good to him. Elijah felt a rock settle in the pit of his stomach as he buried his face in his hand and sniffed.
“Don’t be stupid, we’d love to have you. For as long as you want,” he said.
“For as long as I can.”
He ignored that. “Sam will come pick you up when you’re ready. Just give us a call.”
Anita had always been a beautiful girl growing up, tall and full of life but as she embraced Elijah with her powerful arms, her lips pulled into a smile she looked otherworldly. She looked just like their mother.
And just like their mother his sister brought with her a relentless gaiety that seemed almost surreal. If he focused his attention on his sister and husband Elijah could almost pretend Anita never showed up in his dreams.
Almost.
“We always come back, you know?” Anita said one night as she ran her fingers through Elijah’s loose curls. Samuel had given them the bed opting instead to take the couch through the duration of Anita’s stay. “Of course I didn’t believe it until I saw Old Tesha come back when I was thirteen.” His head pressed against her chest Elijah could hear the uptick of her heartbeat. “She returned as this beautiful baby girl but it was her. I felt it as much as I saw it. Those eyes Elijah. When she looked at me I saw that same gaze she’d follow us with when we were children and now she’s walking around the village like nothing ever happened.
Inhaling Elijah asked, “Why do you think she does it? Mother Onuna.”
“She’s lonely I suppose. But like every mother in the world she knows she has to let her children go eventually.”
“Just as long as that child is a daughter, I guess.”
“Sometimes we do terrible things when we’re hurt.”
Elijah pulled from her touch and sat back to watch her face. “What does that mean?”
Anita sat back as well. There was a look on her face, the same one she had when she had first told Elijah about their mother’s goddess.
“The story goes that Onuna once had a sister named Saluh who was the complete opposite of Onuna in every way. She was a great warrior, her sister’s champion but Saluh was never happy. As Onuna became known as the Mother of Daughters her sister tore across the world looking for an opponent who could make her feel alive again. Well Saluh found what she was looking for and died because of it. Grief stricken, Onuna took her sister’s body back up into the mountains where she bathed her in the river until her flesh became tender enough to swallow without chewing. Some time later she gave birth to a daughter, she gave birth to Saluh and Saluh wasn’t pleased.”
“What happened afterwards?” Elijah frowned.
Anita shook her head looking at him. “A cycle of push and pull. While Onuna wanted to keep her sister at her side Saluh wanted to run across the world searching for that small sliver of happiness once more. And each time she died she was brought back. But the last time Onuna gave birth to Saluh she found herself with not a daughter but a son. As the Mother of Daughters, Onuna had finally lost a hold of her sister.” His sister reached out and caressed his face. “Do you understand now, Elijah? You dared to come into this world and be something else than what was expected. To her you are Saluh. This is why you suffer with your dreams. A punishment for denying her gift.”
Elijah hadn’t had a single dream after Anita returned home and so logically assumed they had been false flags triggered from the stress of several unfinished projects. For once he felt things would be alright but then in the midst of some of the best sleep Anita crawled up onto the bed and settled her sodden form in between him and Samuel. She hadn’t spoken, just wrapped her frigid body around him as the scent of yeast permeated throughout the air.
That smell was still there in the morning but the bed was bone dry. It wasn’t until he’d stepped out of the bedroom as the smell of yeast grew stronger that he realized he was smelling the result of Samuel baking his weekly loaves.
“Do you want to talk about it?” his husband asked when he finally spotted him. He looked like he slept worse than Elijah felt.
“What’s there to say? The goddess of my village wants to eat my sister.”
It sounded ridiculous saying it out loud like that but Samuel didn’t laugh. He lifted the cloth from his pans and peeked at the soft mounds before fixing his eyes on Elijah.
“I have about an hour that I can dedicate to holding you. Would you like that?”
Elijah didn’t have to fake the smile that came to his lips as he stared teary eyed at Samuel. “Yes.”
When Elijah requested Anita to start visiting every two weeks she didn’t question it. She understood what he was unable to put into words and for that he was glad. With Anita and Samuel at his side he felt like a new man. A man who could live as he pleased, not unlike the way he moved clay beneath his fingers to work his sculptures. Somewhere amongst the trepidation and cursed dreams he found inspiration that allowed him to meet his impending deadlines.
“You bring the best out of him,” Samuel told Anita as she finished a braid. Elijah sat obediently between her legs, one hand holding the pot of hair grease while his other gripped his pen, scribbling furiously in his sketchbook. A new commission had just come in and he’d been given carte blanche to do as he wished.
“I thought that’s what you were here for.” Anita laughed.
Glancing up, Elijah could see the teasing smile on his husband’s mouth as he selected something from the bookshelf in their living room. “Didn’t he tell you? He only agreed to marry me for the same reason he agreed to date me, he couldn’t bring himself to kick a man who was already down.”
Of course none of that was true so Elijah kept silent as Samuel sat himself at his keyboard, book open and began to entertain them with the story of Prometheus Bound while tickling the ivories. It was a quirk that Elijah had never understood. In all his years he’d never heard of a librarian who had an affinity for tragedies the way his husband did. Never mind one who liked to read such sordid tales aloud for anyone willing to listen while composing music as the backdrop.
This is how life was for a while. Anita would visit and all would seem right in the world but when she left Elijah dreamed of her. He saw her in the marketplace drinking from jugs of water with an unquenchable thirst. Her perfume and the ripe scent of yeast always assaulting his nose.
“Come. Let’s walk, little brother,” she urged him one night, shaking him awake from where he’d fallen asleep on the couch with Samuel.
His last three sculptures had been sold to a collector in one of the larger cities so they had celebrated the entire night. Drinking and eating like they had just hit the lottery. Good news had a way of chasing away the darkness even if only for a while.
Walking together arm in arm in the midnight air reminded Elijah of how he and Anita used to go night fishing as children. They’d stand in the ocean waist deep bent over, hands ready to grab anything that moved. A few times they had made a game of it. He always lost.
“I didn’t want Samuel to hear us,” Anita said, smiling as a warm breeze rustled her thin summer dress. The cowrie shells in her locs jingling like wind chimes.
He was about to tell her he didn’t want to hear it either but she tugged him closer making him swallow his protest.
“When I go you’ll need to know what to do.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Don’t be childish.”
“I’m not. I just . . . ” Elijah trailed off as his tongue swelled up in his mouth. To finish the sentence would be the same as acknowledging what his sister already had. She was going to die and there was nothing he could do about it. “You did this for Mama?” After the procession and day of festivities Elijah had been sent back to the mainland. He never saw what had become of his mother.
“Yes, and you’re going to do the same for me,” Anita said.
“Mama’s in her teeth.”
That was the last time Elijah heard his sister’s voice as she sat on chest and choked the air out of him. He’d been roused so violently from his sleep right after that he nearly jumped out of the bed.
“What?” he hissed to find Samuel over him, his hair way too neat for a man who should have been sleeping. That’s why he noticed his husband’s wheezing breaths. “Sam?”
Leaning over to turn on the bedside lamp he could now see that haunted look that had always been swimming behind Samuel’s eyes on full display but it looked worse than ever. He held out the receiver. Elijah didn’t want to touch it and probably never would have had his husband not grabbed his wrist and shoved the phone into his hand.
The call went as expected. The woman on the other end had been a childhood friend, one of the few who left the village but unlike him often came back because she had a home there.
“Elijah? It’s Anita, I’m so sorry.”
Samuel had grabbed the first waterman to cross their paths and pushed several colorful notes into the man’s calloused hands without a word. Elijah had insisted that he would be okay going on his own but the truth was he knew he wouldn’t be. The way Samuel held his hand the entire way, never saying a word said that he thought the same. By the time they reached the shore where Helen, the woman on the phone, stood waiting for them with her belly near bursting Elijah had left four bloody crescent moons imprinted into Samuel’s tender flesh.
The whole thing was one beautiful bad dream if only because the artist in Elijah couldn’t deny the beauty in the colorful yellow fabrics the women swirled above their heads, their faces painted in a tradition he was never meant to be privy to. He had fully expected them to make Samuel wait on the outskirts but he’d been treated like family despite the look of him, male parts aside.
Halfway through the ceremony four women, one of them being Helen, brought Anita out. Elijah had bent over his knees, hands shielding his vision like blinders as he stared at his feet. Samuel in turn rubbed small indiscernible patterns between his shoulder blades. He was afraid he was going to throw up.
“Tell me when it’s over,” he said.
Samuel had but Elijah remained hunched over sucking air noisily through his teeth until someone announced the start of the procession. They would take Anita around the perimeter of the village. Two rotations one way and then the other before carrying her up into the forest to lay her at the altar. After that it would be up to Elijah to finish the ritual.
“Will you be alright up there alone?” Samuel asked. They now stood just outside of the circle of the altar. Just them alone. And Anita.
Even under the shade of the canopy Elijah could make out the teary eyes that stared at the still form beneath a yellow shroud. He’d been so fond of Anita, said she was like the sister he wished he had. That’s why he didn’t ask Samuel to accompany him. Alone it would be hard enough but to have Samuel there too with his already haunted eyes. No, he couldn’t bring himself to be that cruel even if Anita wouldn’t have minded. She had told him that night on the street that he had her blessing to bring Samuel along.
Crossing the invisible threshold Elijah felt himself nod. “Got to be. She entrusted me to do this for her.”
“You’ll come back right after?”
The question masked the one not asked. Even with his penchant for tragedies Samuel was too soft-hearted to actually voice the concern that had likely been eating at him ever since Elijah explained the dreams to him.
“Yeah. Be right down. Promise,” Elijah said.
With steady hands he lifted Anita up. He’d kept the red ropes over his shoulder the entire walk up there so it was easier to fix them around both his and Anita’s bodies once he got her situated onto his back. Only once he was sure he had her secured did he dare to turn and look at Samuel.
“Ask Helen to show you the pictures she has of us from when we were kids. You’ll finally get to see what I look like with short hair.” This time his smile was fake.
By the time that Elijah reached the rock wall the sky had begun to turn orange. Anita had taken him this far out only a handful of times as a child and out of that handful had only let him attempt to climb it twice. Now that he stood before the wall as an adult he realized just how little progress he had actually made. No more than six feet at his estimation compared to his sister making the entire climb of what he could now approximate somewhere around twenty-two give or take.
Reaching back, he felt along Anita’s silent shape for reassurance before finding the first crimp in the wall. With a slow exhale of air Elijah began the climb.
He was heaving for breath and panting in the cool night air when he finally dragged himself up and over the edge of the wall and onto a flat surface. He wanted to lay there until he remembered Anita’s words.
“Once you climb the wall start running and don’t stop until you get to the river,” she said.
“Why?” he’d asked.
The soft look that his sister habitually carried grew hard when she met his gaze.
“Because you’re several feet off the ground with a dead loved one on your back. The longer you stand there the quicker it will hit you all at once.”
Elijah started running. He ran until his legs and lungs burned. He ran until the sound of his own heartbeat was drowned out by the thunderous roar of a river he’d never seen before. But there it was, its surface glittering under the dying rays of sunlight.
He knelt in the green grass just at the edge of a row of stones slicked with lichen certain Anita would have approved of the spot and began undoing the knots. With as much care as he could muster he eased his load carefully onto the grass. There in the silence with only his sister to keep him company he settled his hand upon her and waited. He wasn’t supposed to start until the hue of the sky shifted again and when it did he finally got to work.
Under the aid of moonlight that cut through where the canopy had opened up and the flashlight he’d brought with him Elijah unwrapped the shroud. Anita’s dress and underwear followed soon after, each item laid out next to the other methodically. For the first time since she last left his apartment he stared down into her serene face, a face that could fool him into thinking she was just in a deep slumber.
“We could feed her together,” he had told her as they stood outside of the apartment complex.
“No, Elijah. That’s exactly what she’d want you to do but you can’t,” Anita protested. “You can’t do that to Samuel. To yourself. Besides, we come back. We always do.”
Anita felt heavier in Elijah’s arms now, much heavier than she had on his back. Cradling her against his chest he stepped out into the river, his body shaking relentlessly from something other than the frigid bite of the water that seemed to glow beneath the surface.
“Once you put me under, keep me there. She’ll come and feed.”
Not wanting to let her go, especially not that easy, Elijah kept his sister above the current that threatened to knock him off his feet. He held her close, staring resentfully at the blue shimmer that seemed to spread, only allowing the water to lap at the flesh Mother Onuna craved. If she wanted her precious bread water then he’d make her wait, spoon feed her instead of filling her bowl to the brim even if it hurt to do so. And God how it hurt. The cold cut into his flesh, his legs were near numb, his fingers burned and ached but none of that compared to his heart as Anita became malleable in his hands, her cocoa flesh pliant like the clay he worked with. If only he could reshape her and bring her back to life.
For a brief second he shifted his sister’s body in his arms so that he could reach with one hand for the parts of her that seemed to stretch out under the surface of glittering blue only to be stopped by Anita’s voice in his ear.
“Be strong. Mama’s almost here. I see her in Onuna’s teeth.”
He didn’t know what that meant but as he looked down into the water he saw a large face staring up at him, the mouth open wide mouthing a name as it swallowed the water and the parts of Anita that had sloughed off in greedy gulps.
“Saluh. Saluh. I see you stubborn sister.” It cooed at him. “Let go and come home.”
Mother Onuna sang as she ate Anita right out of his hands. And as tempted as Elijah was to submerge himself he heard his sister’s voice yell above the rushing water and Onuna’s beseeching words.
“Mama’s back, Elijah. She’s back.”
When dawn finally broke Anita was gone and Elijah’s flesh was pruned and ashy as he made the long trek back. It wasn’t until he heard Samuel’s voice and found himself looking up into his husband’s face instead of down into it that he realized he was kneeling in the dirt just outside the village. He blinked, staring up into eyes that shone bright with relief and then began to sob an ugly heartbroken thing that was soon joined by a cry much more shrill and full of life instead of woe.
Choking on his tears he peered around him confused. “Who is that?”
“Helen went into labor last night shortly after you left,” said Samuel.
With the help of his husband Elijah made it back to his feet and together they approached the house to find the woman in her bed beaming down into the face of a squirming bundle with a mother’s pride.
“Look, Elijah,” Helen whispered in awe and beckoned him closer in order to present the child. “She’s come back.” And as Elijah peered down at the child he saw the beautiful eyes and face of his mother.
“We always come back.”
