Chapter 15 #3
“How many times do I have to say this before it sinks into your thick skull? We do this not just for our safety and longevity, but the safety and longevity of the humans. Or do you think the humans are stupid? Do you think if you stop the ritual, letting yourself lose control and start killing without prejudice, that no one will notice? What do you think made our ancestors start this tradition in the first place? With this,” she jerks her chin in the direction of the prone woman on the concrete slab, “you only need to feed once every ten years. What you plan on doing is suicide.”
“No, what I plan on is acceptance. You’ve been wearing that flesh for so long you’ve forgotten what you are.”
Mama’s jaw clenches, then relaxes. She smiles a wicked smile. “You know what I think?” She steps closer to my mother. I notice her feet are bare. She’s dressed only in a wrapper, an old cotton thing with the colourful dyes faded, tied tightly around her throat with the hems brushing the ground.
She doesn’t stop walking until she’s standing directly underneath my mother.
“I think you’re the one who’s forgotten what you are. Tell me honestly, Natasha, why are you here? What does your plan to supposedly “accept” yourself have to do with the ritual? Why try to free the sacrifice?”
My mother remains silent.
“Do you feel guilty, edémi?” Mama asks silkily.
“Is that why you took your daughter’s memories?
” Mummy’s eyes widen. Mama latches on to the reaction like a Venus flytrap snapping shut on its prey.
“You think I didn’t know? I saw your face that day, when your precious child tried so hard to be brave.
When she’d eaten her first heart, and you’d first spotted hints of the monster. ”
Mummy is shaking her head. “No, no—”
“I raised you to somehow believe you’re human, and I will regret it for the rest of my life.
Of course you feel guilty. Of course you don’t want your daughter to keep up with this supposedly “barbaric” tradition.
But you’re the one who keeps forgetting that you.
Are. A. Legbaju.” My mother flinches. Mama smiles with cold satisfaction.
“You’re the one forgetting what’s at stake because of your silly, ridiculous bleeding heart.
You think all those lessons—yes, I’m well aware of them—will somehow train those instincts out of you and your child?
You think if you stop the ritual, try and beat yourself into bloody submission, it’ll be enough to change nature?
Sete mi agbomi.” You’re so fucking stupid.
“Refusing to kill—denying your blood—won’t make you any less of a monster.
Look at how desperately you’ve tried. And yet, just like back then, here you are again. ”
“This isn’t like back then. I am not here for the ritual.”
“Liar.”
“I refuse to—”
“Please, save it,” Mama dismisses with a scoff. “What did you say ten years ago? And where are you right now?” She kisses her teeth. “Miss me with that nonsense.”
My mother’s chest heaves. “Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe all my work—to at least try to be something different—something better, will fail. But at least she won’t turn out to be a monster like you.”
Silence.
Mama’s expression is dark. “She’s no different than you are. Than I am. And she never will be.” She takes a single step back. “Watch.”
With sickening cracks, Mama grows an extra spidery limb, this one even thinner and hairier than the other two. The arm shoots straight into the chest of the woman on the slab, unceremoniously punching a hole through her rib cage. Her body jerks, blood spilling from her lips.
Brutally, she rips out the woman’s beating heart. The bloody sight of it makes me immediately grow stiff. My stomach cramps. My mouth waters.
“No, no, stop!” Mummy screams. “Stop!”
Mama shoves the heart underneath my nose.
The shift comes completely without my permission.
All those years of my mother’s painfully taught lessons, completely forgotten.
Tears fill my eyes even as my jaw elongates into that of a wolf’s, spittle flying from my lips as I bite and snap, trying to eat what my grandmother is holding just out of reach.
She’s laughing madly when she finally lets me have it, and I chomp it down greedily, gasping at the taste, the feel of the weakly thumping flesh giving underneath my sharpened teeth.
I taste evidence of the sisireowe plants as I chew—a mix of blood, raw flesh, and boiled, ugu leaves.
The hunger I’d thought would be ever-present for the rest of my life abruptly quiets.
All the noise in my head stops. I savour each bite but finish chewing too soon, licking frantically at my lips to catch any stray droplets.
I feel my mother’s heavy gaze. I can’t look at her. I don’t want to see the horror and disgust no doubt painting her expression.
I’m sorry, mummy.
I tried.
I tried so hard to be normal.
My mother is still at first, then she begins to struggle. Mama fights to keep her pinned. Which means she doesn’t notice when the fingers of the woman on the slab start twitching.
She’s already come back to life. And she’s regaining control of her limbs.
I’m not sure what my goal is when I don’t move. Don’t speak. Both of her arms are twitching now. She’s coming to quickly, like she’s rushing the sedative out of her bloodstream by sheer will.
“Stop fighting me,” Mama growls.
She notices the danger too late. She spins around just as the woman gains enough mobility to yank one of the orereowe plants from her arm, and shove it directly into the slowly closing hole in her chest.
“NO!”
The woman convulses as the plant immediately takes root, sinking into the flesh of her already regrown heart. I see the roots forming underneath her skin like snakes, rapidly digging a path through her veins.
“You bastard!” Mama screams, her voice a furious, inhuman screech. “Look what you’ve done! You’ve poisoned her!”
I hear a loud, sickening crack. Mummy screams.
Mama lets go of me and I drop to the floor, coughing. I look up just as my grandmother slams my mother so hard onto the concrete her skull smashes like a watermelon, spilling blood and brain matter all over the floor. Her scream is abruptly cut off.
“MUMMY!”
There’s blood flooding my mouth. I think I bit my tongue.
Before I can stand, run to my mother’s prone form, my grandmother swipes one of her freakishly long hands.
Something sharp pinches into my temple—into several spots on my arms and legs and begins to burrow. I cry out, my hands flying up to remove the protrusion from my head, but I’m already losing the strength in my limbs.
I collapse to the ground on my front, twitching, while the roots of the orereowe flowers find purchase in my skull, under my skin, digging a pathway in until they’ve settled happily in my bloodstream.
I watch as my grandmother stands, unmoving, staring down at my mother’s corpse.
Those eerie, neon green puffs, dusted lightly in black, have sprouted from the chest of the woman on the slab. Her eyes are closed, but she’s still breathing. Still alive. But something about her expression tells me she’s at peace.
Mama makes a noise I think sounds like a hitched sob. Then silence. She stares and stares. Her lips tremble. She keeps shaking her head, like a dog trying to dislodge a fly. I think I’m in shock, my soul floating above my prone body.
I stop breathing when she begins to shift.
Her bones crack, her arms extending, her neck elongating.
My chest heaves. I don’t know why I feel so panicked, why I want to yell at her to stop.
That animal instinct in me knows what she’s about to do, and is screaming with horror and anguish at the sheer wrongness of it.
In a few seconds, she’s in our original legbaju form.
A humanoid thing, perched on all fours, limbs dramatically elongated with three extra joints each, all facing different directions.
Its back is a perfect arch, and brushes against the eight-foot high ceiling of the underground room, covered in a mess of wild, dark hair.
Its skin is a dark grey, gleaming in the orange-yellow light of the old chandelier.
Those humanoid eyes are pure darkness, sucking in all the light like a black hole, it’s mouth—a gash on its face—filled with a row of sharp teeth. The nostrils are three vertical slits, gently expanding and contracting as it breathes.
No, I’m wailing internally, as my grandmother reaches for my mother’s lifeless, headless body, forever frozen in the human form she’d so desperately coveted. No, no, no—
My vision goes blurry, the tears overflowing and spilling down onto the concrete in a tide. The grief is crushing, stealing the air from my lungs until I’m gasping, everything in the distance going spotty. The sight is so wrong it makes my limp body heave.
I watch as my grandmother, every movement heavy and slow, bogged down with a sorrow to rival mine, unhinges her jaw and devours my mother’s body whole.