Chapter 15 #2
I want to heave and gag, but I don’t. I don’t moan with discomfort. Don’t fist my hands. I just lay there, still and silent, until the overwhelming feelings pass.
Then I sit up.
My mum is in the desk chair turned to face the bed, sitting just as quietly.
I’m thinking of when I was ten, my mother putting me in a pure white shift and scarf to match hers, both made of thin cotton.
She’d dipped a finger in a small bowl filled with goat’s blood, placing three dots along my forehead and my cheekbones, then had taken my hand, leading me barefoot out of Mama’s house through the back door.
Mama had been waiting by the gazebo, also dressed in white, her face also dotted with blood. The steps leading up to the small pavilion had been shifted, somehow, revealing a dark, previously hidden stairway leading down into the ground.
I’m still not outwardly reacting as I think of the woman locked deep down underneath, of her brown skin, pallid from years spent hidden away from the light of the sun, her eerily prone form and unseeing eyes, strange plants and flowers sprouting out of her limbs like her very flesh is their nourishment.
How I’d tried frantically not to stare, wondering why she looked so much like my mother and grandmother, but saying nothing because I’d been trained not to ask questions.
Mama plucking some of the plants brutally from their roots, ignoring the thick, dark blood spilling from the wounds—ignoring when said wounds immediately close, healing shut until the skin is left smooth and unblemished.
The gnarled roots of the plant immediately wrap tightly around each other once they’re exposed, forming a sharp, needle-like point.
It’s “flower” disappears into the air like the smoke it resembles, until something that looks like a harmless, if crudely-made toothpick is all that’s left.
The woman gasps awake out of whatever trance she’d been placed under, but remains unable to move, unable to speak, watching with a simultaneously furious yet empty gaze as Mama recites what sounds like a prayer in Ibiiom; a request to any gods listening to bless the food we’re about to eat, and an expression of gratefulness for providing the food in the first place.
My ten-year-old heart had raced, my mind swirling with a strange fear and confusion.
Then she’d slipped out a strange-looking dagger I hadn’t noticed had been strapped to her thigh, and carefully cut the woman open from underneath her jaw all the way down to her stomach, ignoring the torrent of blood spilling from the wounds, soaking into the woman’s pure white shift.
Ten-year-old me trying not to recoil with horror, gripping my mother’s hand tight as I frantically held on to my lessons, to my control as my grandmother broke open the woman’s rib cage, and ripped out her heart.
I don’t know what my mother expects me to do, now. Why had she given these memories back to me? Is this yet another test?
I don’t get an apology for my stolen memories, not that I’d expected one.
Mummy simply says, “Come,” and I go.
She’s being purposefully quiet—quieter than usual, so I automatically do the same. We sneak out the back door, and she leads me straight to the gazebo. I’m dressed in only a worn t-shirt and shorts, my feet in my plain black sliders.
I should be panicking maybe, but all I feel is numb. I think of the strange woman buried deep down in the ground, of Mama telling me, “Look her in the eye, edémi. You’re only where you are—alive and safe—because of her. Look at her, and thank her for her sacrifice.”
And I’d looked, trying not to be afraid, while getting the sense that if she’d been able to move, she would have spat on me.
Pretty paving stones surround the gazebo, while everything else is tamed grass. It’s elevated a few feet off the ground, with five steps leading onto it on either side.
My mother stops in front of one of the pair of stairs, then shifts. My eyes nearly bulge out of my head, I can’t help it.
She doesn’t look at me as her muscles grow nearly three times their size, her spine cracking until it’s a deformed curve.
I remember when she’d snuck into my room when I was eleven and stabbed me. Then again, when my body had helplessly shifted into something animal in defence. Again and again until her two lessons were imparted: stay alert; never let anyone sneak up on you and never, ever lose control of yourself.
Madness, I’d thought it was, blindly pushing aside the evidence of my inhumanity. Of my mother’s inhumanity.
And with my memories stolen from me, I’d believed it was just that.
Now, I know it’s something else entirely.
I’m too old to feel any betrayal as Mummy uses her enhanced supernatural strength to shove away the steps, revealing the familiar hidden stairway underneath.
“Quick.” She darts down, me at her heels.
It seems to go on forever, our eyes adjusting to the darkness. I don’t know how long this stairwell has existed, but the walls—bare concrete blocks—are covered in earth and greenery, in tiny roots crawling with worms and bugs.
The room at the bottom is small. Wires run across the naked walls, lighting a small chandelier sitting overhead in the middle. The woman herself rests on a slab, slightly tilted at a forty-five degree angle, so she’s not quite lying down but not quite standing, either.
The flowers, like miniscule trees, grow directly from her skin, their heads like tiny puffs of smoke dotted in a thin layer of black, resembling mould.
Some of the puffs are a sickening neon green, making me feel like they would glow in the dark, while the others are neon purple.
The branches are thin and winding, like twisted veins.
The plants cover her arms and legs, the rest of her body partially hidden underneath a sheer, white gown with slits on the sides going all the way up to her waist.
I remember Mama making Mummy and ten-year-old me clean her up …
after—cutting the bloodied white shift from her form, then carefully wiping her down in clean, warm water dotted with herbs and glittering with crystals, until she was spotless, smelling like sage, mint and something sweet.
Mama already had a new white slip waiting to replace the old one when we were done.
“Remove all the green flowers,” Mummy says now, making her way to the woman’s left arm.
I obediently go to her right.
The questions burn in my throat, stinging like raw pepper.
Something about being back this room, with this woman, makes my control start to splinter. Mummy is brutally plucking the tiny plants from their roots, so I do the same, swallowing desperately as dark, poisoned blood spills from the wounds.
“Orereowe. It keeps her sedated,” my mother whispers factually, like she’s imparting one of her lessons.
“That’s the green flowers. They keep her in a sort of coma.
The sisireowe, the purple ones, are a nourishment for her blood and her heart.
It makes us feel fuller when we eat. Makes it so we don’t have to feed again for another ten years. ”
My hands are shaking. I swallow the questions and accusations back down like vomit.
Something makes me look up.
In the memories of ten-year-old me, her eyes had been open but unseeing, until Mama had plucked some of the green flowers from her arms, then she’d woken up. When Mummy and I had stepped in just now, her eyes had been closed.
They’re wide open, now.
Those eyes flicker to the entrance behind me.
“So, this is your plan.”
Mummy and I spin around.
Next to my grandmother, my mother’s shift had been child’s play. I hear a sharp crack, then I’m slammed against the wall, held there at the throat by a tight, unrelenting hand.
When I open my eyes, my grandmother hasn’t moved.
Her arms have grown; they’re longer and thinner and with extra joints, lightly furred like a spider’s.
She maintains a human-like palm, thinner and with longer fingers, and claws that have dug into the earth, pinning both my mother and I in place.
The top half of her face is covered in multiple beady, black eyes—exactly like a spider’s, though she retains her human mouth and the rest of her human form.
It’s a ghastly sight. A thing from nightmares. I can’t look away, horrified and hypnotised.
Mummy’s form is morphing rapidly, fingers turning to different sorts of claws, then tipping with poison, trying to rip my grandmother’s hand off her throat.
The thin, hairy flesh replaces itself just as fast as its torn.
The bone refuses to budge, refuses to even crack.
My mother tries to shrink, but the hand shrinks with her.
She tries to grow bigger, and Mama accommodates for the added size.
She waits with a silently amused patience until my mother stops fighting, panting, helpless.
Mama eyes the woman on the slab. Her chest is heaving rapidly, her eyes wild, but she doesn’t otherwise move or react.
“Was this the end goal here, Natasha?” Mama asks patronisingly. “I’m begging you to help me understand. What is the point of all this nonsense?”
“We’re not human, Mama!” Mummy spits out the words like they’ve been clawing at her throat all day, waiting to be torn free.
“We never were and no matter how hard we pretend or act like it, we never will be. No one would crucify a lion for killing an antelope. If we’re the humans’ natural predator, then that’s the way the gods have deemed it to be. ”
“Talking about us not being human but speaking about gods in the same breath.” Mama laughs. “Is that why you’ve been teaching her like that? Training her to be a robot?”
My heartbeat flutters, though I don’t outwardly react. Mama laughs again.