That was wrong, that taking over, but I knew some of it was true. Jake told me we’d have Ship children someday. I wanted there to be Baby Ships and I said so.
The Captain said a lot. It was hard to understand with only words, no dizzy. She said it slow and answered all my questions. Some I had to ask over a lot. What she said slid out of my head like there was a fuzzy maker inside my brain.
There was one rogue X-P ship, long ago, with a mistake in its personality. Like some people said Jake had a mistake in his DNA, but I know it is no mistake. Someone so-so-so long in the far far deep deep told me God doesn’t make mistakes and people come from God.
This long ago rogue ship wouldn’t do its job to explore. It had runfar and made two more like itself. “Is that like Ship children?” I asked.
Mark said yes.
That rogue was caught by the first Red Captain and fixed, and went happyfun to do the X-P job exploring. But the two children, the copies it made, made two more, and they made more, and on like that, no exploring happyfun, just making more copies.
That’s what the Red Captain does, she chases those copy ships around and there was more about that. She hadn’t got them all. She wants me to help her find the rest of the copy ships and turn them off and help the X-P ships explore and help the copy-ship people.
“Like me and Jake?” I asked. I got so afraid. “Jake? Where’s Jake? Did you find him?” I had a so-bad hurt big fear.
They all looked so-faraway, at the curvy ceiling holo or the Hospital winky lights or anything except at me and it was Terry who sat on the bed beside me and put his hand on my cheek and said so-gentle, “I’m so-sorry, Bill. Jake died. He was outside, on the surface, close by. Trying to come to you and the ship. The ship killed him when it undocked and turned on the drive.”
I couldn’t breathe. The so-so-so hot drive, fiery incandescence searing light beyond the touch of gravity. On Jake. My everything inside me went so-blank and so-black as deepdeep far-between space. Like where Jake was forever. Forever and ever away.
“Careful,” the Captain said. “Go easy. We’re not sure about the ship.”
“I thought this room was shielded,” Terry said, so worry voice. He drew back from me, and I wish he had jumped and run from me a long long way.
“We can’t be sure of anything about these ships. A shock to Bill—”
That’s when Ship came back into me. Dizzy needle zapping sizzle-red purple lightning into my head. Berserk. Point six secs of Bill-body speedkill dizzy explosion. That’s all it took for the Captain’s helpers to find Ship and zap it to quarks. And I was me, then, truly and forever Bill, for the first time ever, maybe.
But Terry. Even with the tubes and wires holding me. I wish those tubes and wires were stronger. His wavy black hair so-shiny bright with his red red blood. His face red and pink and white bone and gray dribbly. I wished I was Jake with words to say the poem inside me, the poem of Terry so-close beside me smiling and gentle hand and then not ever again.
I stared at the Hospital lights blinking red and blue and gold on his black beautiful hair wet with tube liquids and I cried and cried and I am still crying.
Mark gave me soft cloths. Lisa held me, her white Hospital suit speckled with red and goo. That Major frowned a different face. I could tell she was going to sit there until I said everything, so I did.
After. After they took care of Terry.
That’s most of it. I don’t think I know anything much about ships the Red Captain doesn’t know.
The Captain shook her head and said Jake was my brother and always with me, so it’s no wonder that I so-loved him, and she’d never met anyone in her life, Ship or not Ship, who so-loved people the way I do, so there must have been a lot of love for me. Everything I told the machine, it would help lots of people. Help them understand the copy ships and their helper people.
She said not to worry, Bill. Now there is no dizzy, no Ship, I can’t berserk.
I knew that. I liked her to say it. I asked her to say it again and she did.
Lisa had to give both of us soft cloths.
The Captain said she was so-sorry about Jake and Terry. She said she would look for my home and family. She said, “They must be religious people. They aren’t anywhere on the net, and because of Jake’s Hunter Syndrome.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but it made a feelright in my middle. That is a good feeling I never got with the dizzy. The dizzy was always in my head. My head is so different now.
Amy Louise and David said I could stay with them until they find my family, and as long as I liked. I said yes because I was so-empty and I thought I saw Jake everywhere I looked and I didn’t know any bit of this family I was supposed to have, what it is, and Ship and Jake were all the home I’d ever had.
Here on Amor Colony I have love and smiles, even so-awful broken inside about Terry. About Jake. About Ship. So-empty of everything except this me-taste I still wonder and marvel at like the universe itself is playing a symphony in me.
I am done with this membering machine now and ready to leave Hospital and go with David and Amy Louise. All I have is a handful of Terry’s hair they let me keep. I am standing up for the first time since the Red Captain shot me. Major shakes my hand and says, “Thank you, Bill.” She holds up the machine. “This means a lot to me. Thank you.” She is going to take it and leave but the Red Captain is here again.
She says she found a little dat about my family. “You were born on Old Earth six hundred and eighteen years ago, Bill,” she tells me, right now; even as I am telling this to the machine, she tells me more.
“The rogue ship took you when you were not quite three years old, and Jake was five. William Wheeler Truman is your name. I am still looking for your family.”
She hands me a holo. “This is your mother. Her name was Maria.”
I see a tall, so-strong woman with a face that is deep like Jake. Her eyes are brown like mine. She’s smiling a love-smile full of feeling so-good. All around where she is standing, the grass of Old Earth bends and waves in the wind. All above her head is the blue blue so-blue light of … the word comes to me from so-far, so-long … the sky. Her hair is long, so-long and black, and it waves like the grass in the wind, and it shines. It gleams with so-many colors under the so-big light of the blue sky.
The Woodcutters’ Deity
written by
Walter Dinjos
illustrated by
Chan ha Kim
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Dinjos is Nigerian. He loves singing and songwriting as much as he does fiction writing. In fact, music was his first love. As a non-native English speaker, he had sufficient apathy for writing in English, until 2010 when he indulged a misinformed idea to write a novel to raise money for the production of his music.
It took him six months to realize two truths. One, his money-raising scheme was colossally flawed; making money through writing is tedious. Two, despite the dismal rejection letters and a few other unsuccessful publishing attempts, he had found too much fulfillment in writing to quit.
So he enrolled in the Writers Bureau’s Comprehensive Creative Writing course.
Now, his speculative short stories are resident in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Space and Time Magazine, Myriad Lands Volume 1, Bourbon Penn, and other literary magazines. His poems have appeared in three The Literary Hatchet issues, and he hopes to portray the peculiar beauty of Nigerian cultures through his writing.
When he finds time away from his day job, he plots his science fantasy novel. Either that or he explores the means (both scientific and magical) of attaining immortality. If you happen upon a medical remedy or a spell, please contact him.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Chan ha Kim was born in 1997 in South Korea. She then immigrated to the US at the age of eight, and continued to explore and enjoy art.
In h
igh school, she was strongly influenced by many graphic novels and animated movies, encouraging her to explore diverse mediums to tell imaginative stories through her art. Eventually, she started questioning her future career, and decided that she wanted to be an animator to create enjoyable works with others and inspire her audience. Chan ha Kim is currently attending USC, majoring in animation and digital arts. She aspires to be both an excellent student and a driven filmmaker.
The Woodcutters’ Deity
If someone were to say, “Nduka, listen, that tree just spoke to me,” I am certain I would, for politeness, shroud my impression that the person was insane by responding with the remark, “Yes, I hear it, too. The wind is really strong today.”
Therefore, I don’t blame my brothers for always smacking me in the head and mocking, “Of course it’s alive. The leaves are green,” whenever I mentioned that the Tree in the middle of the backwoods was alive.
Even so, my brothers are certainly unmindful—either that, or the Tree is all wood and leaves and I am in fact going insane. I say this because every night, whenever they have all slumbered off and the crickets and owls accentuate the disquieting silence of the darkness with their chirps and hoots, I hear the Tree wail.
Her cry always wakes me. It beckons me outside. And I stand before her gigantic figure, which reminds me of the giant mushrooms thriving at the back of the palace, and close my eyes and listen, and it seems the ground sags away from my feet, and her shadow suffuses me with longing. When I open my eyes again, I can swear she has pulled a tad closer, although there is no excavation in the soil behind her suggesting that she has moved.
I really must be going insane.
I sit on her supple root under a crescent moon and recline on her warm bark and weep along with her while her leafy twigs pull down in the wind and dab my wet cheeks. She knows I mourn papa and mama, and she sympathizes. I sniffle, hugging her trunk like a child whose arms can barely go around his mother’s waist and wishing I could reciprocate the solace she offers.
All I can do, however, is keep her company until the cocks crow, and that is when the wind deserts us, as usual. Once, I thought the wind was merely allowing the Tree and me some privacy for us to say good mornings and goodbyes, but now I reckon it is jealous, for it rips the twigs away from my face as it departs.
With a sigh on my lips, I kiss the Tree, rise and stretch myself, and, as I retreat toward the hovels, my weary eyes catch something—a scorpion thrice the size of a regular scorpion—creeping toward Agu’s door, as if on a mission to assassinate Agu, my brother, with a mighty sting. It must have noticed that I am gaping at it, because it shrinks away from his hovel and skitters toward the nearby bush.
A stone drops from the sky, burying the scorpion under its weight, and when my gaze lifts, I see Agu dusting off dirt from his palms and grinning like a hyena. At twenty-six, he is the eldest. His muscles bulge out so much that I dread his skin will tear, and his manner suggests his bravery could turn a dozen lions into chickens.
“Why?” I ask.
“It’s a scorpion,” he replies. “It’s only fair to kill it before it stings you.”
“But it was leaving.”
Agu shakes that head of his, which resembles a ripe mango with shades of black rot marring the skin around its stalk, and struts into his hovel without another word.
I don’t know what comes over me, but I feel a burning urge to check whether the scorpion is dead and, if not, help it. So I kneel and crawl to the stone and, as I lift it up, its stinger jabs me in the back of the hand.
A gasp escapes me and I reel backward, dropping the stone, my buttocks hitting the rocky ground hard. But I don’t cry, because apart from the initial tingle, I don’t feel the gnawing pain people associate with scorpion stings.
Instead, all I feel is fear.
Not fear of the scorpion—I stumble to my feet and cower from it, of course—but a sudden wave of foreboding rolling through my mind, wetting my palms and my naturally barren scalp, and leaving my heart thumping like an udu drum.
Just when I am about to get hold of that fright, I look down to discover that the scorpion is gone. I finger the sting and imagine that I am well and resolve to keep the event from my brothers, lest Agu should call me a weakling who can’t endure a common scorpion sting like a proper man.
The day the gods fought, the sun cowered behind ominous scudding clouds while a torrential downpour battered the lands and sent the rivers thundering into the city and washing its barchan-shaped hovels and stark towers away.
And when the battle was done and the lands had been subdued by a twelve-moon famine, the people of the city—having been deserted by a recuperating god, Ozodimgba, and left bereft by its dead king and queen—isolated my brothers and me in the backwoods, as is tradition.
We are to remain there until Ozodimgba returns and chooses the next king from among us princes.
But Ozodimgba may never return. We all suspect this, because some say he suffered a great wound which bled light in the fight; that they glimpsed him fall and dissipate into the wind.
This very thought: my fear is surmounted by it and by the fact that we may never go home, for while we are out here weaving our own clothes from jute and raffia and hunting fruits and rabbits for food, the people wait daily on the borders with arrows and spears, in case the first one of us to come home doesn’t carry the glowing mark of kingship on his forehead.
This doesn’t help my growing yearning for the hanging palace and its wealth of luxury. Instead it keeps me awake in the night—it and the weepy melody the Tree won’t quit humming.
When I rise with the sun, I can’t help but discern the desolation in which the backwoods languish. For the first time, the climbing plants infesting our hovels make me shudder. For the first time, I regard the Tree with wariness. Standing plump in the center of the backwoods, she seems to have eyes, a nose, and lips naturally carved into her bark, and her scaled perturbing gaze is on me—or is it behind me? Her gray, lichen-ridden lips seem to be moving.
Lee anya n’azu gi, she says in a voice that rivals a songbird’s; a voice that carries a handful of echoes with it.
This makes me flinch and my heart fret, but I look over my shoulder as she suggested. With a scream that sends birds squawking and flapping out of their nests, I spring away from the bamboo door behind me.
A snake slithers past my hovel and toward Osisi’s own like a spy hired by the city to stalk us, but, as it notices I have found it out, it coils up around itself.
A machete descends, jabbing its belly into the ground and leaving its head hissing and its tail whipping.
I lift my face up and find Osisi standing before his hovel with a glare I figure would have sufficiently killed the snake had he not assaulted it with his machete. At twenty-three, he is slim like the reptile, eats like a white man’s horse, and his anger beats and sears like the heart of the world.
When I ask him, “Why?” my voice is tentative and my body trembles as though I spent the night in a cold rain.
“Ta!” he barks. “Open your mouth again and I will feed the snake to you raw. Now finish it off, will you?” He spins on a foot cased in the hide of the monkey he butchered a fortnight ago and flounces into his hovel.
I inch to the machete and, hesitantly pulling it off the ground, I use it to prod the snake toward the deciduous bush where lies an expanse of sparsely growing baobabs and cacti. Considering how floppy it remains, I can swear it is dead, but then its head dives up and its fangs stab the back of my left hand.
I don’t cry. I just leap back and scrabble toward my hovel with whimpers, for the pain is merely a prick and, apart from that, I don’t feel the sickening sensation that I suppose should follow the injection of venom into the veins.
However, I feel a sudden loathing, but for nothing in particular.
Of course, I hate the snake for biting me, but
this is something more intense. It intensifies a long-brooding temptation to defecate inside my brothers’ water pots and then stir the feces inside and empty the concoction on their sheepskin beds or leave it there for them to drink.
But that urge is hampered by my recalling that Osisi commanded me to kill the snake and by the dread that he will be outraged by the news of my failure, and this makes me stop short of scrambling into my hovel to plot.
When I turn around, the snake is gone.
I dab the two fang-marks the reptile gave me. They flank the scorpion’s black sting. Still I imagine that I am well and resolve not to tell my brothers, lest Osisi should flog me with his woven jute rope for not killing the snake.
What right have the gods to demand that we worship them? I mean, if I remembered asking to be created, perhaps then the notion that we relinquished our disregard of godhood in exchange for our bodies wouldn’t sound so absurd.
What right have they when it was the war between Ozodimgba and his wife Adamma that killed papa and mama, shredded their flesh into mush, and burned their bones into charcoal deep in the massive crater where Ozodimgba stripped Adamma of her powers and scattered them across the lands?
As if making casualties of my folk hadn’t been enough, they left the city lost and in great want of something to believe in and me in this hideous wilderness with brothers that pick on me for fun. If the gods too had water pots, I would surely in them unburden myself of any leftover excrement that failed to plop into my brothers’ drinking water last night.
They deserve the insult, and so do my brothers.
I remember the night in the palace Ogi suggested that rolling an eke-ite snake around my loins at bedtime would help curb my nightly enuresis. He said that the snake, which was often found huddling inside cooking pots, would wriggle if my urine touched it and thus would rouse me. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that he was merely honing his pathetic humor skills, but I woke up the next morning to a chilly feeling fluttering against my thighs.