Before the horror settled in, she wondered whether they were both made of the same shade of blue, but she knew they were not. Amare was made of steel blue, and his shadow had already left the room and lodged itself between the corn plants — free, out in the fields of Yerer Ber.
Then it came: the scream she screamed only to herself, a wound gashing so deeply into her shadow, she did not know how to swallow it, how to collect herself together into a colorless being. She rushed back to the living room, where the guests were gathered for her mourning. She screamed at them, wailed, threatened to reveal their secrets, cried, implored them — but nothing. That very moment, that was what it felt like to be a shadow: it was an achromatic world without sound, without a soul to hear her thoughts, a world where a mother dies and grieves for her son soon after.
Weyzero Fantish’s shadow was now filled with streaks of a cavernous burgundy. She did not know it, but that was the thing that lit her fire into being again. That was what brought her back to Yerer Ber.
On a stormy night, her body would have been dragged under the buttery shadow of a split-cheek moon and taken three or four kilometers away to Mebrat Haile or Gurd Shola. It would have been loaded into a wiyiyit taxi, the lump of it resting where a passenger’s feet would have otherwise been. The ride would not have been smooth, but it would have been slow and steady because her lover was a patient man with an impeccable driving record. Then the corpse would have been discarded in an open field, as if it were a sack of teff in the middle of the night, when there was no one else to watch it happen, no one around to witness its last doom. But this was neither a stormy nor ordinary night, and though Weyzero Fantish may have left her body, her blue shadow was still refusing to leave, itself having now undergone a transformation: the head turquoise, the chest flattened with cobalt veins, arms now long blocks of lapis lazuli, feet sprawling in cyan grass, her mouth spewing flames of a cerulean gray.
She was finally coming to terms with her death.
Weyzero Fantish was standing too close to her body, which was now claimed by women with grim eyes in black dresses. The women busied themselves with delicate gestures, washing, clothing, and preparing the body for burial. Weyzero Fantish watched them for a moment, her gaze lost between them and the priests who came to perform her last rites. For the first time since she departed, Weyzero Fantish felt cold, as though ice had been injected deep into her body and her bloodstream was filled with hail and sorrow. Her eyes were searching for her son, but he wasn’t in the house. The place looked so small now with fifty or so mourners inside, and more outside waiting to be seated to pay their respects.
Weyzero Fantish approached a group of women quietly chatting by the doorway and overheard that Amare was in fact alive and well — he’d simply had one of his attacks.
“It must have been difficult to see her like that,” one said.
“Where is he now?”
“Tending to affairs. He must have gone with the boys.”
The other women seemed puzzled.
“Why isn’t he acting like someone in his situation normally would: grieving, staying in the house, and waiting for the townspeople to come and offer their condolences?”
“Maybe he was afraid he was going to have another attack?”
They shook their heads.
“But he didn’t have to go with the boys to work. He must not even realize his mother is gone.”
Amare walked quietly with the strongest boys. They were called in on days like these, when death disembarked unexpectedly in Yerer Ber. They were called from all corners of the neighborhood, and they came obediently in pairs, dragging their little brothers with them toward the hazen bet, the home of sorrow. They were fast, diligent, and efficient in their work because they had done this many times before. They were sent in small groups of five or six, and they walked briskly through unpaved streets into the residence of the idirtegna, where they would fetch auburn tents, folding chairs, pots and pans, and other utensils to bring back to the house of the mourners. Though the boys were often jovial in their work, this time silence swallowed their bodies whole and sewed their mouths shut. They walked as if they were part of a small army, all to the same rhythm. The afternoon rain had created a softer and more viscous mud around the neighborhood, and the green sea of cornfields was now turning emerald-quartz, prepared to be enveloped by a thin fog. They knew whose mother had died; what they didn’t understand was why Amare was working with them as if nothing had happened. Or worse: why did he seem so normal, so unaffected by her death? But it was not their job to question such things, so they did not.
Weyzero Fantish stared at him from a distance, relieved to glimpse him alive. She had seen him sick many times before, but she never actually witnessed one of his attacks, at least not like this.
By the time Amare had uttered a few words, the tents were already up outside, chairs aligned for mourners, and the food steaming hot. No one addressed him directly or called him by his name, and from this he knew how people must be looking at him then, a steel cloud still hanging beneath his eyes. He bit his tongue sharply to swallow the tears that came rushing like river water. His tongue went numb, and so did his limbs, but the numbness protected him from the bloodless sorrow that would have split him in half.
When the food was blessed and the men stood in their dark suits, the women were still laboring, their clothes smelling of sautéed onions and berbere. Amare clutched his abdomen, trying to contain a scream that lodged itself between the bones of his rib cage, small explosions already starting to bloom in his chest.
His breath was heavy, his saliva sour.
Before he had a chance to collect himself, two strong hands grabbed him and directed him to his mother’s bedroom. Her body was still there, along with a priest, the maid, and Weyzero Asnaku, their neighbor. Amare was told to sit on his mother’s barciuma, and he did so obediently. The detective’s hands were used to these kinds of situations, and his words fluttered out quickly from his mouth, his spit landing onto Amare’s face. It was a somber evening, and it would be a long night of sorrow.
The aslekash’s long arms flapped heavily when she hit her own chest, thumping rhythmically as if the seamless sound of a lost song was trapped inside her body. Though her eyes were dry, her mouth was moist with fresh saliva; each phrase she spoke was followed by a whirring sound, her head swiveling, back bent then thrust forward into the tumultuous dance of grief. This was not mourning: this was storytelling in its finest form. Her inquiries about the deceased were always detailed and poignant, but since she had actually known Weyzero Fantish, her grief was more personal, more detailed. She was not interested in death itself, but rather in the life Weyzero Fantish would have spent if she hadn’t died so soon: how many New Years she would have celebrated with her family, how much joy she would’ve brought to her neighbors and friends, how happy she would have been to see her teenage son marry, how much she had longed to hold a grandchild, and so on.
By the time the storytelling began, the aslekash had already done her job; words spurted out of her mouth quickly, as if Weyzero Fantish was someone she loved and treasured deeply, as if she was the person most affected by the tragedy of it all, as if she had never experienced death before, and the pain was too great, too much to bear in her lonely heart. And the best part came after that when the crowd roared all at once, as if it was awakened from a deep sleep. It was an incoherent wailing, crying, and screaming that caught them by surprise, enveloping them in a black cloud of grief they didn’t know they had birthed in their souls, filling their tents, all the rooms. Their voices lifted up to the mountains, past the tops of eucalyptus trees, deep into the night, flowing into the next morning. Every passerby who heard the aslekash would be touched, because grieving was communal in Yerer Ber, as was everything else. By the time the funeral was announced for the next day, it would look like the grief had quieted down, but in fact it would have only just begun to sink its deep claws into tired eyes and beaten chests.