Chapter Forty-One
Spurts of laughter forced my eyes open to blinding sunlight.
Or what I thought was sunlight. It was too bright.
I snapped my eyes back shut, afraid the brightness would burn my retinas.
This was what it feels like to be dead. My body felt crumbly, like cookie dough with not enough butter mixed in.
All signs pointed to dead. Yet there was sensation tingling in my body, my fingers and toes were wiggling.
Wherever I landed must have been the afterlife because nothing else made sense.
The laughter came again, sounding like kids. I started taking a mental scan of my body, going down section by section from my head until I reached my toes. They wiggled back at me. I was fine.
I opened my eyes, adjusting them to the brightness of a sky.
There was a slight breeze that was neither too hot nor too cold, soothing.
The place, wherever I was, felt soothing.
It’s the best I could explain it. I sat up, my hands landing in soft carpet-like grass, and took a good look around.
I was in a garden. No, maybe woods. There were trees of every kind all around, from southern oaks to baobabs.
The forest surrounding me was filled with tall trees. Taller than I’d ever seen. The path I was on curved, cutting though them. It was endless. The flora, plants and flowers I didn’t recognize, were vibrant with colors, as if I was looking at them through the latest high-def TV screen.
From Nana Ama’s stories, I was in the world of the Skies, the Oosoro, which stretched over Akanland. Her true homeland.
I recognized it all. Ahead, a mountain loomed into the sky, its peak hidden, with lights of gold and white moving slowly around it like a wispy haze.
Behind me, the path I was on continued down, and I could choose to head up to the mountain where the Sky God must live or down the winding path to the human world of Asase.
I heard laughter again, so close to me, and suddenly running past were two young women—maybe my age, maybe in their twenties.
Both wearing white gauzy fabric that shimmered when it caught the sun.
One had a top that wrapped like a bandeau around her chest. The other’s top came over one shoulder.
They wore skirts that hung low in the back and swept up over both legs in folds in the front.
With the skirts was a thin length of roped fabric, which knotted up beneath the belly button and cascaded down the front in several golden threaded ropes.
Sisters, wrapped in beaded jewelry of cowries and precious gems from head to toe.
The first sister, the one leading the way, wore what almost looked like a breastplate of golden chains and multicolored gems matching the cuff about her neck.
Rows and rows of singular strands hung low between her breasts, and in the middle of these hundreds of thin, golden strands sat a large blue gem, where they all attached and spilled out from.
The other wore a set of wrist cuffs that nearly took up the entire length of each forearm.
They were thick, forged golden metal with intricate designs and etchings that crisscrossed around them.
And in the middle of each sat brilliantly blue stones.
Stones within a pair of cuffs that I’d seen all my life.
They were heading straight for me, looking nearly identical, looking like child versions of my grandmother and her sister, looking at me.
No, looking through me. They could not see me even though I was right in their path.
The sister who led them said, “Come, sister, let us go see if what Uncle says is true. You know he is known for his stories and his little tricks. I want to see if he tricks us now. Before the gates close.”
My breath hitched. No way. My real world colliding with the countless spoken tales of Anansi the Trickster God.
“We mustn’t, little sister,” the elder sister said.
Her perfectly shaped eyebrows frowned with worry as she looked at the sky.
“The time is getting late for the gates to close. And the baby…” She gestured to her sister’s stomach where the tiniest round bump could be seen beneath the armor-like amulet.
That was when the younger one, who had stopped to face her sister, rolled her eyes, annoyance clearly written on her face.
“The baby, dear worried sister, will be just fine.” She said it with the impatience and attitude of a younger sister done with her older sister’s overprotection. “As will we.”
The elder sister continued, “Father says we are not to go to the human world. We are not to interfere in their matters. No one is unless he allows it, and he never does. It is his command.”
The younger twin in the lead stopped suddenly, spinning on her heels to give her troubled sibling her full attention. I inched closer to get a better look at them.
“Father should walk among the people more often, as he used to do. Then he’d remember that sometimes it is necessary for us to intervene. Those of us with power have the responsibility to help those of us who do not.”
She left her words hanging in the air, heavy with meaning that would stand the test of time. She took a deep breath as she placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder and patted it gently. Her voice became light. “But fear not, we will not ‘interfere.’ You, nervous one, don’t even have to go.”
Unease lined the elder sister’s face, so much so that everything about her drooped. “You are much too headstrong.”
“And you are much too safe. Like Father. Let your fears keep you here, sister,” the younger sister quipped, two tiny canines barely peeking out as she smirked.
She was about to resume walking when her sister told her to wait. Impatiently, her weight switching from one foot to the other, she played with the strands covering her chest. Her whole vibe said, Well?
“We must obscure the safoas that permit us reentry through the gates. Should something happen and they get into the wrong hands…” The elder sister trailed off, blinking away sudden tears, unable to continue. She let out a breath. “At least let us listen to Father in that regard.”
The younger twin wasn’t buying it, but she humored her sister anyway. Anything to stop her worry.
The elder twin placed her hands over the blue gem at the middle of her sister’s chains. The younger twin intertwined her sister’s arms so each hand rested on the opposite cuff. Together they bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and waited.
Three tiny specks of light like fireflies appeared beneath their hands and began to grow until they were the size of orbs.
I could barely understand what I was seeing.
Their hands glowed as they eased down, like when the sun’s rays moved throughout the day, shrouding the cuffs and the amulet in its yellowish-white glow.
I could hear a tiny sizzle as wisps of smoke rose from the jewelry.
The twins absorbed the pain of their jewelry being branded into their skin.
I felt the pain with them, my own face a mask of grimaces.
I hissed through my teeth imagining how the burn must be feeling.
Then, as quickly as it had started, the whole thing was done.
The cuffs and the amulet had been absorbed into their skin, becoming a part of them, looking like masterful art.
A network of designs etched into their skin, and the blue gems, no longer brilliant, were now dulled and branded on them.
The younger sister was the first to open her eyes. “There. Are you satisfied? Can we go or would you rather stay here? We don’t have to do everything together. You certainly didn’t marry like I did or make a child.” She rubbed her barely there belly.
The elder sister slowly opened her eyes. “I didn’t fall in love like you did, sister.”
“Stay. I will not mind.” The younger sister turned heel and made a break for it, running straight through me.
My body fragmented from the disturbance of her energy with mine. I reassembled as she shivered, muttered something about the chill, and charged forward, her arms pumping at her sides, into the woods on the trail to the Asase.
The concern was so evident in the elder twin’s face that I reached out. Her fear was palpable. She grimaced, and when she spoke, there was a whole lot of resentment packed behind her words. “Where you go, Effie, I go.”
Her words froze my incoming hand in midair, the confirmation of who she was making its way to me.
Ama, my grandmother, moved through me like a ghost, our energies merging, then separating when she went through.
But unlike her younger sister, she slowed until she stopped.
Ama turned back, her face full of wonder and question as she looked back at where I stood.
She stared hard at where I was, putting myself back together again.
But unlike before, when it was like they couldn’t see me, this time it was as if she did.
Not only was she staring where I was, it was like she was looking directly at me. Like we were looking at each other.
“Who is there?” she asked, squinting.
I tried to answer, to tell her to stop and to stop Effie from going down the trail, but no words came out. In this world Above—or in the memory of it—I was the voiceless.