“Shush,” a woman hissed from the group of adults. “No ghetto talk.”
“Oh come on, Mom,” Edgar said, rolling his eyes. “First I can’t say ‘chalé,’ now this? Why even bring us to Ghana?”
Sankofa relaxed herself and her glow faded and then winked out. Someone immediately flipped the lights on.
“What is this town called?” she asked, getting up.
“Tah… tamale… sorry, I can barely pronounce it. There’s an American food with the same name. T-a-m-a-l-e,” Edgar said.
“Relax, Ye,” Sankofa said. “You won’t see me here again.”
Ye wiped the tears from her face. “I hate this country,” she said. Then she got up and ran out of the room. Sankofa and Edgar looked at each other.
“So where are you going next?” Edgar asked.
“To a place I’m not even sure exists anymore,” she said. Sankofa smiled, glad that he had not run like his sister. She hated when that happened. It always made her feel that ache she worked so hard to mute.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s time.”
“So, you really can’t ride in cars?”
She shook her head.
“That’s so cool,” he whispered.
“Not really.”
“Are you a child of the dev…”
“No,” she snapped. The conversation ended there.
Sankofa left the house an hour later having eaten her fill, taken some leftovers, and showered. She’d traded No Orchids for Miss Blandish for another paper novel Edgar insisted she read, titled Mouse Guard. He said he’d gotten it from the trip his family recently took to the UK and though it was one of the only paper books he owned, she could have it. She hadn’t wanted to take such a precious item from him, but he insisted.
She walked up the empty dirt road, now wearing a brand-new blue and white wrapper, matching top and headband, all made of soft, weather-treated BioSilk. She held her head up and looked into the night with the confidence of a leopard. Sankofa liked to imagine that she was a Mamprusi princess walking the moonlit road toward her long-lost queendom. If she had to guess, her mother would have been proud of the way she chose to carry herself… despite it all.
“I’m almost there, Mama,” she muttered, clenching her fists. A twinge of anxiety about the incident in the road days ago. Then the feeling was gone. Onward. It had been way too long.
She stopped, hearing footsteps behind her. She whirled around. It was the gateman from the house she’d just left. The one who had looked at her as if she were a smear of feces on some child’s underwear.
“Anyén!” he cried. He switched to English. “Evil witch!” He was sweating and weeping. “Kwaku Agya. Do you know this name? Do you remember my brother’s name? Does the child of the devil remember the names of those it kills?”
“I know the name,” she said. Sankofa remembered all the names of those she took as a kindness.
Surprise and then rage rippled across his face. He raised something black in his hand. Bang!
Time always slowed for her during these kinds of moments. The misty white smoke plumed from the gun’s muzzle. Then the bullet, this one golden, short and dented. It flew out of the gun’s muzzle followed by a larger plume of white smoke. The bullet rotated counter-clockwise as it traveled toward her. She watched this as the heat bloomed from her like a round mushroom. In times like this, it was near involuntary. From somewhere deep within her soul, a primal part of her gave permission to her unearthly power. That part of her had been on the earth, walking the soils of the lands now known as Ghana for millennia.
The night lit up.
The empty road.
The trees.
The houses and huts nearby.
The eyes of the silent witnesses.
The gnats, mosquitoes, flies, grasshoppers, beetles, some in flight, some not. The hiding, always observing spiders. The birds in the trees. The lizards on the walls. And the grasscutter crossing the road a few feet away. Movenpick the fox standing nearby, never far from Sankofa’s heels. Washed in light that did not come from the moon.
The corona of soft green light domed out from Sankofa. To her, it felt like the shiver of a fever. It left a coppery smell in her nose. The bullet exploded feet from her with a gentle pop! The molten pieces flew into the flesh of a palm tree beside the road.
Sankofa shined like a moon who knew it was a sun. The light came from her, from her skin. It poured from her, strong and controlled. It washed over everything, but it was only hungry for the man who’d shot at her. It hadn’t always been this way. In the past, her light’s appetite had been all-consuming.
The man stumbled back. The gun in his hand dropped to the ground. Then he dropped, too.
Sankofa walked up to him, still glowing strongly. She knelt down, looking into the gateman’s dying eyes. She spoke to the man in his native language of Twi, “Your brother’s name was Kwaku Samuel Agya and his cancer was so advanced that it had eaten away most of his internal organs. I did not cause this cancer, gateman. I happened to walk into his village when he was ready to die. He asked me to take him. His wife asked me to take him. His son asked me to take him. His best friend asked me to take him.” Tears fell from her eyes as she spoke. Then she pushed away the pain in her chest. She muted it as she’d learned to do over the years. Her tears dried into trails of salt as her skin heated. She stood up. “When was the last time you spoke to your brother, gateman?”
His skin crackled and peeled as it burned orange. It blackened, flaking off into dust. His entrails spilled out in a hot steaming mass when his skin and abdominal flesh burned away. Then that burned, too. The muscle and fat from his limbs flared up and then fell to ash, as well. There was little smoke but the air began to smell like burning meat. A mysterious wind came and swept away the ash and soon all that was left was one bone.
“I will never know or understand what that is,” she whispered. “But at least it’s clean.”
The bone dried, its surface snapped in several places, splintered and then cooled. Someone would find it.
“Now you will talk to your brother,” Sankofa said. She turned away, opened her bag and brought out the jar of thick yellow shea butter. She scooped out a dollop. She rubbed it in her hands until it softened then melted. Then she rubbed it on her arms, legs, neck, face and belly. She sighed as her dry skin absorbed the natural moisturizer. She glanced at Movenpick who stood in the bushes to her right. The fox walked up the road, leading the way. Sankofa followed the fox into the night as if she were her own moon.
CHAPTER 2
STARWRITER
For the first five years of her life, Fatima was a sickly child. Mosquitoes adored her blood and so she had malaria every few months. But she still found ways to be happy. When she was well and old enough to crawl into the open area in back of the house, Fatima discovered dirt. She would sit beneath the large shea tree that grew closest to her family’s small house and revel in the earthy smell of the dirt. She’d sift it between her fingers when it was dry and mold and squeeze it when it was moist. She especially loved to draw in it and the bigger her drawing, the more delighted she was with the dirt.
One evening, Fatima was outside with her grandfather. She’d been carving one of her giant circles in the mud around the shea tree. She sat back, satisfied, and looked up at the darkening sky. And that was when she discovered the stars. They were twinkling and blinking and shining like insects and tiny fish all in the same space. Her grandfather had always been a star gazer and her intense interest in the stars delighted him. He’d taught her all she knew, coming over more often to spend time with her in the evening and show the little girl that space was amazing. Before long, she’d learned the location and names of the constellations, though she sometimes preferred to name the stars herself. Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Milky Way were nice names, but “white spark,” “palm kernel,” “owusu” and “spiderweb” were better.