She hadn’t spoken to anyone in two days. “She had been in one of her moods,” her uncle later told the elders when they asked about the incident. It had been a month since her father had passed and people hadn’t started avoiding her yet.
“No!” Ozioma shouted when she saw her uncle face-to-face with the cobra. She dropped the drink and ran over on her long, strong legs. Thankfully, neither her uncle nor the cobra moved. Eyewitnesses said that she then knelt down and brought her face right up to the snake’s face. Her uncle was shoulder to shoulder with her, frozen in terror.
“It kissed her lips with its tongue as she whispered to it,” her uncle later told the elders with a shudder of disgust. “I was right there but I could not make out a word she spoke.” The elders were equally disgusted as they listened. One even turned to the side and spat. Nevertheless, Ozioma must have said something, because the snake immediately dropped down and slithered away.
Ozioma turned to her uncle grinning with relief—grinning for the first time since her father passed. She missed her father so much. Using the ability she’d had all her life yet only shown her parents a few times was exciting. And using it to save her uncle who looked so much like her father broke the clouds surrounding her heart and let in sunshine. She loved her uncle as she loved all of her relatives, in her quiet way.
Nevertheless, her uncle did not return her grin. Instead, he surprised her with a frown that would make even the proudest flower wither. Ozioma shrank away from him, quickly got up and went home. After that, her uncle didn’t speak a word to his “evil, snake-charming” niece.
Her uncle went on to tell the elders and several of his friends about what she did, making sure to describe how he’d been about to chop the snake in half before she came and conversed with the beast as if it were her best friend. Then these people told others and others told others. Soon, everyone in Agwotown knew about Ozioma and her wicked ways. Everyone said they saw it coming. A girl of a poor family without a father was a girl prone to witchcraft, they said. Nevertheless, the day the spitting cobra came down the giant kapok tree in the middle of the village, do you wonder who they turned to?
Ozioma was standing over the large pot of bubbling red stew humming to herself. Her mother was chatting with her aunt in the back. Her mp3 player was connected to some old speakers and it was playing an afrobeat song her father used to love. Outside, it was thundering and it would rain any minute, but that didn’t concern her. She was cooking, something she’d loved to do since her mother showed her three years ago. Cooking made her feel in control, it made her feel grown.
She’d cut the onions with care, savored in the soft, firm perfection of the red tomatoes, shaken in a combination of thyme, red pepper, salt, and curry, and marveled at the greenness of the greens. She had brought out and cut up the half chicken that she’d salted, spiced, and baked hard and dry. So now she was humming and stirring slowly so as not to break up the baked chicken she’d added to the stew.
“Ozioma!”
Her eyes, which had been out of focus, lost in visions of yummy food, immediately grew sharp. She blinked, noticing a classmate from school, Afam, standing at the window. Afam was one of the few who didn’t call her “snake kisser.” And once, he’d asked her to show him how to talk to snakes. She’d considered, but then decided against it. Sometimes snakes were tricky. They didn’t always do what you asked them to do. Though they wouldn’t bite her, they might bite Afam. Snakes liked to test the toughness of skin.
She frowned questioningly at Afam, now. She wasn’t in the mood to speak to anyone today. She just wanted to cook.
“Come!” Afam said. He paused. “Hurry!”
It was the pause that got to Ozioma. And a feeling. She let go of the spoon and it sunk into the thick red stew. She ran out the door without bothering to put sandals on. The air was heavy and humid. It pressed at her skin.
She followed Afam up the road. Past Auntie Nwaduba’s house, where Auntie Nwaduba had once slapped her for not greeting her loudly enough. Past Mr. and Mrs. Efere’s house, the old couple that liked to grow flowers during rainy season and hated when Ozioma got too close to them. Mr. Efere sat on his porch in front of his tiger lilies, suspiciously watching her run by. Past her uncle’s home. To the back. Through his yam garden where she’d saved him from the cobra. And finally, up the road to the center of town, the meeting place at the giant kapok tree that reached high in the sky.
Afam stopped, out of breath. “There,” he said, pointing. Then he quickly backed away and ran off, hiding behind the nearest house and peeking around its corner. Ozioma turned back to the tree just as it began to rain.
Shaped like two spiders, a large one perched upside down upon a smaller other, the thick smooth branches and roots were ideal for sitting. On days of rest, the men gathered around it to argue, converse, drink, smoke, and play cards on different branch levels.
Ozioma frowned, as thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. This was the last place anyone wanted to be during a storm. Aside from the threat of being struck, the tree was known to harbor good and evil spirits, depending on the day. Or so it was said. Today, it was clearly harboring something else. As Ozioma stood there taking in the situation, big warm droplets fell like the tears of a manatee.
It was the season where the tree dropped its seedpods. In the rain, fluffy yellow waterproof seeds bounced down like white bubbles along with the drops. Six men stood around the tree, in shorts, pants, T-shirts, and sandals. They were as motionless as the tree. Except for one. This man writhed in the red dirt, which was quickly becoming soupy like the stew she’d left to burn. The man was screaming and clawing at his eyes.
Ozioma caught the eye of her oldest brother. The son of her father’s second wife, he always turned and walked the other way when he saw her coming. He stood still as a stone beside the writhing man. Ozioma didn’t allow herself to look too closely at the man in pain on the ground. She’d recognize him. She looked up at the tree and beyond it and felt her heart flip, then she felt her body flood with adrenaline. She blinked the raindrops from her eyes, sure that she couldn’t be seeing what she was seeing. But she was. It was just like in the stories the local dibia liked to tell.
The enormous chain dangled through the heavy grey clouds between the tree’s top branches. It looked black in the rain. Ozioma knew it was made of the purest, strongest iron that no blacksmith could bend. It was older than time, the ladder of the gods. And something had slithered down it.
“How many?” Ozioma asked in a low voice, addressing the man closest to her. It was Sammy, another cousin who’d stopped talking to her after the cobra incident. She was worried he wouldn’t hear her over the rain but she couldn’t risk speaking any louder.
“One,” he whispered, water dropping from his lips as he spoke. “Very very big, o! Under the roots.”
She could feel all eyes on her. Everyone wishing, hoping, praying that she would get them out of this. All these people who otherwise wouldn’t see her, who refused to see her. Ozioma wished she could go back to cooking her perfect stew.
She could see the creature between a cluster of the tree’s roots. Part of it, at least. She let out a slow breath. This one would take some convincing. This one was bigger than two men. It could certainly raise its forebody to her height. The better to spit its venom into her eyes. A spitting cobra. The venom would be a powerful poison that burned like acid. Its victim wouldn’t die; he or she would be blind for days and then die.