As her brother crossed the road, Fatima’s gaze stayed on that tanker and she daydreamed about plumes of smoke, boiling orange, red and yellow flames, burning the very air it consumed. Before she knew it, her brother was halfway across. She gasped.
“Fenuku,” she called.
He turned around. When he saw his sister still standing there, he threw his hands up with annoyance. Then he motioned for her to come. His actions were so dramatic looking that Fatima giggled.
“You can make it!” he called.
“Ok!” she called back, her heart pounding in her chest. A wave of heat rolled over her flesh and she wondered what those around her might have seen had they been looking at her. Nevertheless, few people noticed short dark-skinned little girls in dusty old purple and white printed dresses.
The tanker zoomed past, slapping her with gravel and a fresh plume of dust. She coughed as a woman beside her ran across. There was a gap in the traffic as a large group of cars approached. Fatima made a run for it. She laughed as she ran. Then she stepped into a pothole, stumbled and fell, skinning her knee. She felt herself pulse with heat from the pain and for this reason, she paused. The olive-green car was upon her before she even looked up. Her brother loved cars and Fatima had looked through the tattered car magazines his uncle brought him from Accra. In this way, she knew that the green vehicle barreling toward her was a BMW.
Fatima was flying.
She could see all the way to the city of Accra, though she’d never been there. Her mother said Wulugu was over three hundred miles away. But Fatima was that high in the sky now. She was finally seeing beyond her village. She wished she could tell her father about all she was seeing. Maybe when she landed.
Fatima heard the sound of blaring horns and smelled the smoke of screeching tires. She hit the ground, scraping the side of her face. People running to her. Her brother screaming her name, tears in his eyes. He’d never cried when the wasps stung her. “FATIMA!” he wailed, as he ran to her. “Sister!” He had never called her “sister.” She chuckled and doing so hurt.
Her face was pressed to the concrete of the street. She felt the sunshine on her skin. Warming her skin. Warmth on warmth. The market was emptying as people poured out to see what had happened. Her brother was screaming. He was almost to her.
Then the pain came. This was the moment when Fatima forgot her name. It was a pain that tumbled to her soul. Later she would understand that it wasn’t just a pain. It was a beginning. And this beginning annihilated all that came before it.
The red sharp aching radiated from her hip where the car had rammed her. She moaned deep in her throat. Something was coming. Then it burst forth. She was on fire and it was green.
She heard her brother sobbing.
A woman yelled, “What is…”
Fatima squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the blood strain in her ears. Then all went silent. Except the sound of idling vehicles.
When she opened her eyes, she gasped. Everyone was asleep. Her brother lay on the street. The woman who must have spoken, lay beside him. Everyone in the market, those who’d come out to see. A man in a car rolling to a soft stop. All asleep. Fatima’s body flared again with pain. And this time she saw it. A corona of green sickly light burst from her, growing huge as it traveled from her small body. A bird dropped from the sky. A drone fell beside her and she vaguely wondered if it was the same one that had just delivered a package to those girls. A mobile phone on the ground burst into flames. No more cars or trucks came up or down the road.
Slowly, gently Fatima stood up. She touched her head. Her cap of short hair was gone. Her left eye twitched and her body began to shake so severely that she sat down hard on the concrete. Sweat poured down her now bald head and she could feel every drop. It gathered at her chin, dripping to the hot road. She stared at her brother who lay beside her. One of his shoes was half off and his white kaftan was smudged with dirt. His face was turned away from her.
It left her as a butterfly leaves a flower. She felt it go. It wasn’t instant, just a gradual disappearance. Her name. She couldn’t remember her name. She whimpered, fighting to recall it. Nothing. “Home, home, mommy, the tree,” she whispered. “Fenuku’s dirty room. Papa’s cigarettes. Papa wanted his favorite cigarettes.” Still nothing. No name.
She shut her eyes tightly and her mind fell on an image of Shango in her mythology book. He was standing in the clouds looking down at a big city in Nigeria, his hands on his hips as lightning crashed around him. She’d always liked this picture because he looked like a superhero, but was not. She didn’t like this photo so much anymore. However, she opened her eyes. She rubbed them with steady hands. She slowly got to her feet. She pressed at her hip. The pain was big, but it was not sharp. Her hip still worked. She was ok. She looked around. No one stirred. She limped home.
She passed the mosque. Inside, everyone was asleep. Including her father. They lay in various positions, some as if they were still praying, including her father, others simply lay this way and that. At home, her mother was asleep. This made her run down the hall and she somehow ended up in her brother’s room. On his table were the birds he liked to carve—an owl, a hawk and a Sankofa bird. She picked up the Sankofa bird and ran her finger over the long neck that looked backwards as it took an egg from behind it. She felt a prick of pain as a splinter from the wood entered her flesh and her body flashed with light. She dropped the bird and its neck snapped. Tears fell from her eyes to the floor as she knelt down and picked up the pieces. She’d broken the bird, just as she’d broken her family and her entire hometown.
She threw the bird down and left the room. In the kitchen, she made herself a plate of fufu and soup from the dinner her mother had prepared. She ate until she was fuller than she’d ever been in her life. Then she slept like everyone else in town. Come morning, everyone else was still… asleep.
CHAPTER 4
GODDESS OF TRAVEL
After three days at home, she had to walk. As she walked, she wept. Her mother, father and brother were dead and she now understood this deeply. The dust on her face made her eyes sting and itch.
She’d left her mother’s body in the house. After a few days, it had started bloating. And then there was the smell. And the flies. They were all over Wulugu, sprouting from people’s bodies like fidgeting black flowers. The house was suddenly full of them. Maggots wriggled everywhere. The newly hatched flies crawled on the walls, slow and bewildered, their wings fresh and moist. The adults beat themselves against the windows, copulated and laid more eggs in her mother and under the carpet. She hated the sight and sound of them. She would hate flies forever.
She found that when the flies really angered her, her body would glow, not heat, glow, and every fly in the room would drop dead. Her body did this many times when she crept into the main room to see her mother’s corpse. But the flies always returned hours later. They emerged from her mother’s body, from other rooms, from outside when she opened the door.
And so the seven-year-old girl in her pink knee-length skirt and yellow T-shirt gathered what food she could find, soap, her brother’s Sankofa bird that she’d broken, her mythology book, her mother’s favorite gold hoop earrings, a wooden owl her brother had carved for her, and a jar of her father’s shea butter, put it all in the satchel she used for school and she walked up the road.