There were ten of them and I could no longer braid them into my family’s code pattern as I had done with my own hair. I pinched one and felt the pressure. Would they grow like hair? Were they hair? I could ask Okwu, but I wasn’t ready to ask it anything. Not yet. I quickly ran to my room and sat in the sun and let them dry.
Ten hours later, when dark finally fell, it was time. I’d bought the container at the market; it was made from the shed exoskeleton of students who sold them for spending money. It was clear like one of Okwu’s tentacles and dyed red. I’d packed it with the fresh otjize, which now looked thick and ready.
I pressed my right index and middle finger together and was about to dig out the first dollop when I hesitated, suddenly incredibly unsure. What if my fingers passed right through it like liquid soap? What if what I’d harvested from the forest wasn’t clay at all? What if it was hard like stone?
I pulled my hand away and took a deep breath. If I couldn’t make otjize here, then I’d have to… change. I touched one of my tentacle-like locks and felt a painful pressure in my chest as my mind tried to take me to a place I wasn’t ready to go to. I plunged my two fingers into my new concoction… and scooped it up. I spread it on my flesh. Then I wept.
I went to see Okwu in its dorm. I was still unsure what to call those who lived in this large gas-filled spherical complex. When you entered, it was just one great space where plants grew on the walls and hung from the ceiling. There were no individual rooms, and people who looked like Okwu in some ways but different in others walked across the expansive floor, up the walls, on the ceiling. Somehow, when I came to the front entrance, Okwu would always come within the next few minutes. It would always emit a large plume of gas as it readjusted to the air outside.
“You look well,” it said, as we moved down the walkway. We both loved the walkway because of the winds the warm clear seawater created as it rushed by below.
I smiled. “I feel well.”
“When did you make it?”
“Over the last two suns,” I said.
“I’m glad,” it said. “You were beginning to fade.”
It held up an okuoko. “I was working with a yellow current to use in one of my classmate’s body tech,” it said.
“Oh,” I said, looking at its burned flesh.
We paused, looking down at the rushing waters. The relief I’d felt at the naturalness, the trueness of the otjize immediately started waning. This was the real test. I rubbed some otjize from my arm and then took Okwu’s okuoko in my hand. I applied the otjize and then let the okuoko drop as I held my breath. We walked back to my dorm. My otjize from Earth had healed Okwu and then the chief. It would heal many others. The otjize created by my people, mixed with my homeland. This was the foundation of the Meduse’s respect for me. Now all of it was gone. I was someone else. Not even fully Himba anymore. What would Okwu think of me now?
When we got to my dorm, we stopped.
“I know what you are thinking,” Okwu said.
“I know you Meduse,” I said. “You’re people of honor, but you’re firm and rigid. And traditional.” I felt sorrow wash over and I sobbed, covering my face with my hand. Feeling my otjize smear beneath it. “But you’ve become my friend,” I said. When I brought my hand away, my palm was red with otjize. “You are all I have here. I don’t know how it happened, but you are…”
“You will call your family and have them,” Okwu said.
I frowned and stepped away from Okwu. “So callous,” I whispered.
“Binti,” Okwu said. It exhaled out gas, in what I knew was a laugh. “Whether you carry the substance that can heal and bring life back to my people or not, I am your friend. I am honored to know you.” It shook its okuoko, making one of them vibrate. I yelped when I felt the vibration in one of mine.
“What is that?” I shouted, holding up my hands.
“It means we are family through battle,” it said. “You are the first to join our family in this way in a long time. We do not like humans.”
I smiled.
He held up an okuoko. “Show it to me tomorrow,” I said, doubtfully.
“Tomorrow will be the same,” it said.
When I rubbed off the otjize the burn was gone.
I sat in the silence of my room looking at my edan as I sent out a signal to my family with my astrolabe. Outside was dark and I looked into the sky, at the stars, knowing the pink one was home. The first to answer was my mother.
Binti: Sacred Fire
The fact that the bridge is shaky does not mean it will break.
I even missed my sisters.
And it wasn’t just because it was one of those nights. You see, there’s something that happens to a child of the soil when she leaves her soil. It’s a death, then a painful rebirth… but first you have to walk around the new world as a sort of ghost. I was a ghost at Oomza Uni. Displaced but still in the place I needed to be. The place where I wanted to be. If only people understood that. Understood me.
And I even missed my sisters.
I squatted there in the dirt. This place beside my dorm was a favorite spot of mine because the soil here was dry like back home. There was also a flat green sturdy plant that grew in a crack at the edge of the dorm building’s wall. It grew in fives, five leaves on five branches in bunches of five. And the plant smelled nice at this time of day. My mother would have loved these plants as much as I did and my father would have wanted to study them and see if their leaves conducted current. They didn’t; I’d tried running a current through them already. Nothing. But the plants knew mathematics, which was even godlier. Praise the Seven for these plants of the fives, my new favorite number.
I shut my eyes and tried to imagine I was with my sisters. Anything to drown out the sight of Heru and his always bursting chest. Over and over, warm blood spattering my face, no sound coming from him. His face frozen with shock. The stinger of one of Okwu’s people driven through his back… or was it the stinger of Okwu itself? I refused to ask. Never. But I wondered wondered wondered. The one Person on this university planet whom I had a connection with, who was the closest thing I had to family, family through war, may have killed the boy I had a crush on, killed Heru right before my eyes.
I grabbed my okuoko and squeezed, knowing I was smearing off some of the otjize I’d rolled them with. My okuoko had a firm yet almost gelatinous texture and it was still strange to me, but gradually I was getting used to them. As much as I could. They had sensation like any other part of my body, so grasping them was like grasping several long fingers. Shuddering, I let go.