Winner of the 2023 Contest in Prose. Read judge Thalia Field’s blurb here.
Witnesses
Okike
The first dead paddles onshore, soft-foots sand catching his breath, scales petaling off him, drifts of silt hissing on his gills. He coughs up opals and twists of yarrow and calls to the company bowed in the trembling haze of a bonfire. A girl gowned in black velvet, eyes sutured shut, his wife for all eternity. A diviner with obsidian skin and crowded teeth, chalk crushed in circles across his chest, his beaded skirt puffed bell-like in the wind. A son whose silence is the lightless eternity of the seabed, a man-shaped stillness in the roaring night.
“Biawa,” the diviner breaks out in a smile. “Biawa. Biawa.” The others stand and chant with him. Okike’s limbs, numb with nautical miles, warm as if stretched beside the fire. His webbed toes scoop shells and reeds in his haste. Three weeks dead, buds still stuffed in his nostrils, he strides to each hiss and pop from the fire and drops between his son and his youngest widow.
“You could have fought harder,’’ the boy says, and chokes back all the other blames he’d stored for this reunion, teary words he’d pressed along with ash and coconut oil in his father’s ears during the wake.
“I was unarmed,” Okike says. Here is his final purpose: to tell the truth about his death. Then they will bid him farewell, cast him into the outer dark, where tribesmen line up to be reborn. They sit forward, but the only sound in his mouth is of the shore. He was carried past this spot as blood gurgled from the hole in his chest, laid on a wood crate and bathed in palm oil and wrapped in banana leaves. It would have been pointless to treat him if the river wanted him. Every life that hung in the balance was offered to the river first. If the river was full, speckled with ships and steamboats leaving for Leeds and Portugal, it spat all wounded onshore. If it had room, the waves latched onto the bodies and rid them of the will to live.
Okike had jerked like a captured eel against the river’s pull. He’d dug his nails in mud and called for his dead mother. Still the river peeled his armor of leaves and snuck ice in his wound. Spectral fists knocked on the crate—kom kom kom kom—and upturned it. Ancient fists that caught warriors and seasoned divers with the same tenacity it did newborns tossed inside. Alien spawn crumbled in the river’s grasp without so much as a cry. True sons thrashed free and frothed atop one another for land, where fathers scooped them up and planted jubilant kisses on their cheeks.
“Our harvest brown overnight,’’ Okike says.
The grim, viscid brown of cow dung. Rows of okra and cassava sunken to mildewed mush. Farmers huddled by the rot, fanning raffia hats at its stench, whispered about the colonel. His voice of falling gravel. The heels of his boots that would not let the dust retire. His iron horse. The crack of his whip on swollen backs. He could snap fire from his fingertips and lock men in his gaze. He loomed all over the creek at once, in outsize breeches and the red fedora handed him by Churchill’s cabinet.
“Me sure say na Colonel Rhodes spoil am.”
The son shakes his head. “Anyone but the colonel.”
“For sure not we,’’ Okike says. “We that pour all the sweat inside our body for ground, to feed plant. We that almost run mad on top heat.”
With the same fervor it wraps itself around strangers, pinning down their arms, jeering in their ears, daylight in the creek has incited locals to shed their clothes altogether. It has made canoers abandon their nets and leap in the water. It has made the palm trees shudder as if acrawl with spiders. It has peeled the eyes and loins of the coast guards. For it, the colonel once shrugged off his coat and flung it on the ground and made a fist at the sky, fled to the shadows parched leaves cast, crouched among deers and lemurs in the brambled dark, paler and sweatier than if he’d rubbed uli in his skin.
“Now you know why I didn’t want to come here.” Okike’s widow mopes at the waves, but feels for his son’s hand, grips it. “Tell your father all the good things the colonel has done for us. He taught me how to speak proper English. He has shown me his father in heaven.”
Okike snorts, though salt wells in his eyes; he blinks his vision clear. “Make I go?”
“Continue,” his son says testily.
As Okike pictures the colonel stabbing a finger at him, then a pistol, he grows saucer-eyed and open-mouthed. He tries to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth, to heave out the tiny knot of anxiety in his chest. “I sure say colonel spray poison on our harvest.”
‘‘Stop.’’ Vapor thrusts from his widow’s nostrils. “The colonel is different.”
“For him mind,” Okike says, “we suppose starve until thy kingdom come for what our neighbors do.”
“You mean the uprising in Kavu?” The girl stands, huffing. “No one here took part in it. Why would the colonel punish us for their sins?”
“To keep us in check,” the diviner says. “After the crops were destroyed, we still had salmon and periwinkles. We hunted stags and rabbits. We ate our fill.’’
The diviner may have as well told Okike, laughing, “You died for nothing.” Okike’s last words on that fated day, as the colonel slipped out of shadow, gloved hand angled to his holster, as if summoned by Okike’s accusation, happened to be, “Wetin we go eat now? This thing wey colonel do no good at all.” He had looked to the other farmers for support, for faint nods and murmurs of solidarity, but a hush had fallen over them. In the silence the colonel’s heels clicked. Then came the crank of his pistol. Okike stared down the nozzle as a primal dread of loss welled in him. That moment has crept over his thoughts and muddled his dreams underwater. It drums now in his chest, vibrates along his bones. Loss of a week’s earnings (the colonel decided who got what), a pint of blood, his aura of invincibility. But the bullet wanted more. It plumbed a red mist from the vein over his heart. He sat on the field, drawing his knees to his chest, then fell sideways.
“The other farmers say you attacked him.”
Okike seizes up. ‘‘Yes. I go now. I go. Good night.”
“That he was only defending himself from the spirit of rebellion inside you.”
His son gazes, unblinking, into the fire. Its weak glow scrapes at his features, almost peels them off.
‘‘Kachifo,’’ Okike says.
He gropes through starlight to the roaring shore. The word, rebellion, floats an image of the Kavus in his mind, those descendants of miners now scattered at the bend of the river. The colonial office had not strayed there since it made the mistake of imposing birthing tax on Kavu women. Faces heavy with paint, spears and machetes poised for slaughter, the women launched on gondolas down an immense reflection of sky, to the only port in town, where every chained man was set free. They braved miles of tangled roads to take over commercial arteries and block the governor’s convoy. It mattered little that their mad yelling was in a faraway tongue choked with consonants. The message was clear: Leave our bodies. Leave our land.
***
Sister Meredith
The only woman from the colonel’s homeland to survive the journey across the Atlantic.
Before she died, she could hear a sound and echo it neatly—the locals went wild over her tiger’s roar. They jigged their shoulders and hooted.
Hers was the first case of death by dreaming, an eternal plunge into the world of sleep. They could not take her body to the river because of the rumors. The locals funneled hands over their mouths and passed the story on: so heavy was her grievance against the colonel that she opened herself up, to let it out. Or pricked her skin, to release it.
Each night, on a moonlit patch, the toddlers mimed how she must have passed—they flopped back with strangled sighs, their eyes unseeingly wide. The outcast who had served her admitted she’d drifted off before she could slide a needle out of her arm. Somehow the whole creek heard this whisper, and turned to one another, aghast. Needle was the same as knife in their dialect. If they dared offer this lady to the river, it would crush every bone in her body and dump her on the bank.
Their voices rose in the night, flapped together from tin roofs: How did the colonel hurt her?
The way men hurt women, said the servant, which could have meant anything in another settlement, but here meant only this: forced entry.
***
She swans along the edge of the diviner’s mirror, which he holds up to the waves. Between steps, the hem of her habit rises and reveals scaly shins, talons scraping dried reeds, streaking sand. Murmurs rise from her necklace of kraal stones as from a brook. She sits on a log, rubs her palms and huffs into them, meets the diviner’s gaze in the mirror.“His house is still and quiet as a mountain when I arrive,” she says. “I have come to see the light generated along Niger Delta and wired here for a day. But he says, plodding downstairs in his undershirt, ‘Permit me to use you for a moment.’
I walk up to him and search his face, rub off the smidge of tobacco lodged in a corner of his lips. ‘You promised: no work today,’ I tell him.
‘I’d do it myself, but my arms hurt.’ He cuts me a look. ‘Have you shaved a man’s head before?’
I cover my face. ‘Surely not all of it? You’ll be mistaken for a monk.’
‘To the last follicle.’ He sighs the way men do when they’ve made up their minds.
‘Oh, but I love your hair!’ I say.
‘The blokes at the station in town will have a good laugh. Also,’ he says, ‘you get to hold this thing called a clipper. It’s a marvelous invention, you’ll see.’ He eases one hand from my face—‘We’ll have lunch after.’—and leads me down the corridor. He rummages the medicine cabinet in a bathroom as big as the local church. Copper lines snaked through the window end in a flickering bulb. Before he pulls off his vest, I gape at the light and can feel the street lamps in Yorkshire, which cast a glow that sizzles on skin. Then I am faced with the sheen of sweat on his back, the glaze of light brown hair on his arms, the arch of his pelvis. He rests on the edge of the tub and clicks a wheeze from the clipper, spreads his legs and beckons me.
I squeak when he passes the clipper to me, and he laughs. He folds his hand over my grip on it: ‘There.’ His stare latched to mine. I hoist the clipper and splay my fingers in the hazel waves, trace the shore at his forehead, learning its swoops and ebbs by touch. I should say, ‘I’ve never shaved anyone’s head before’ but I tilt the clipper away and say, ‘Your hair will fall in and clog the drain. We should move to the sink.’ Before standing and trailing me there, he tightens the string over his pants.
I do a little hop for the lip of the sink, but slide off and splash into him. He relieves me of the clipper and scoops me with his other arm on the sink. He parts my knees and fills the gap between us. Any closer and his skin would turn mine to dust. With excruciating slowness, he bows, and by an instinct that feels older than me, present in the ether before I was born, I tilt my head to meet his pout. ‘Shave top-down,’ he whispers, and I press the buzz downward from the crown of his head.
The waves stretch, then spring from their pores and blob in the teeth of the clipper. He sighs, rubs the tip of his nose against mine. I hold a hand to his chest, for the heady sensation that I am about to slip and drown inside him, the fear that if our bodies met no force on earth could separate us.
The first kiss jolts me out of my skin; I huff against his face, find his lips again. The clipper tumbles and splinters on the floor. We’re grasping at our clothes and writhing against each other, making illicit sucking noises with our tongues, when the girl who has served me since my arrival pops her head around the door. ‘ … those apples you like,’ she says, and then freezes.
He spazzes from our embrace and smudges his lips clean, thumbs off all traces of the kiss. ‘Who let you in?’ He is panting like a marathoner.
She withdraws and slams the door. The knob quivers from the other side with the strength of her fear.
I stroke the fuzz on his chest; he slaps my hand off.”
The diviner almost drops the mirror, which seems increasingly to weigh the world that it contains: fire, woman, forest, sky.
“Did you own a knife?”
“It was hers,” the woman says.
***
Breathing Furniture
A breeze combs the ash into yellow tendrils. The diviner stiffens as a voice stains the seething blank of his mind:
What an awful time to receive your summons. I have reached the head of the line—if I step away for a temporal second, the grandmother behind me will crawl into this bride’s waiting womb.
What do I remember about the colonel?
He climbed me to reach the tops of his shelves. He ground his heels down the knots of my spine to avoid puddles. He was served breakfast, lunch and supper on my aching back, and once the tray was removed, he crossed his ankles on my head and slackened into sleep.
You can rest now, my body told me, the day it quit.
***
‘‘God sees everything.’’—Colonel E. Rhodes (1901–1999).
The diviner splays his arms and howls. A layer of morning shimmers on his skin like gold dust. He doubles over in the middle of the empty shore, grits in the chatter of his teeth. He hops this way and that, dodging an invisible onslaught. “Arusi,” he whimpers. And he takes hoarse, steadying breaths. “The left one,” he says, and stretches that hand, and something in the air grips it, uncurls his fingers, and drives a spike through. “Ah!” The diviner yanks his impaled hand free, cradles it to his chest. Blood twines to his elbow and ticks on his toes. An unseen tongue smears the dribble clean, grunting, its hot breath pimpling his flesh. He forms a fist, and the tongue drools on his fingers. He grimaces into the unpeopled distance. With some effort, he closes his mouth. “Arusi,” he says. His jaw hangs again.
“Yes?”
“How many of my brothers died this month, outside our land? You follow those who leave,’’ he says, ‘‘you would know.”
The blueness of the water threatens to fill his head. Dirge blue. Whatever is plunged in it will be lost forever.
“Five hundred and three,” Arusi says.
As he adds this figure to the tally for the year, the diviner’s heart puffs against his chest. “Were they in pain?”
Arusi lets the question wane unanswered.
The diviner nods and gathers himself.