Sunny paused for a moment, thinking. Since Anyanwu had disappeared, she hadn’t thought about much else. What did anything else really matter? Then she remembered. “I’ve been having dreams of the . . . end,” she said. “Before I discovered I was a free agent, I was shown the world’s end in the flame of a candle. Sugar Cream says that some of my spirit friends or enemies from the wilderness showed all of that to me. I don’t know why. But in a lot of ways, it led me to Leopard society. But these new dreams . . . they’re different.” They leave me asking myself who I am, she wanted to say. But she’d never admit something so pathetic in front of Orlu. “I just want to know . . . what the dreams mean. Do they mean that soon . . .”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Bola said, dismissively waving her hand at Sunny. “Shut up now. I’ve got it.”
Sunny was glad to shut up. Once she started talking, it was as if she had diarrhea of the mouth. Words gushing forth like . . . water, she thought, getting up. Orlu was already standing to Bola’s left, his hands deep in his pockets, something he only did when he felt perfectly safe, which wasn’t often at all. Bola’s home must have really been protected.
“This can’t be anything but interesting,” Bola said as she knelt on the floor. “Let’s see what the cowry catcher will show us today. Mouth open or mouth closed, only the cowry catcher knows.” She blew on her handful of cowries. “I know some, but soon I’ll know more.”
“I hope it’s good news,” Orlu muttered.
“Whatever it is, at least I’ll know what’s going on,” Sunny replied.
Bola brought the handful of shells to her lips and whispered something. Then she pointed and looked upward and said, “Inshallah. Chukwu is not concerned and only Allah can make it so.” Then she threw the cowries. As they fell and tumbled to the hardwood floor, Sunny’s right ear began to ring. She pressed her hand to it, and Bola looked at her and nodded. “That’s the sound you hear when someone is talking about you. They are discussing your past, present, or future. I would tell you to whistle into your fist and say ‘Let it be good,’ but you cannot control those who inhabit the wilderness. Not when you are more than halfway there yourself.”
Sunny pressed her ear harder as she watched the cowries settle. They took longer than was normal. Some of them tumbled in a circle over and over. Others hopped and bounced like popcorn kernels on a skillet. Some came to rest and then flipped back over. And several of them clicked together three times before going into a feverish dance on their sides. But finally, after nearly a minute, they all came to rest.
The room was silent as the three of them looked hard at the shells—Bola with the gaze of an excited, intrigued expert, and Sunny and Orlu with confusion. Ten minutes passed and Bola still hadn’t moved. It almost looked as if she were in suspended animation.
“Is she breathing?” Sunny whispered.
But Orlu was looking around, his hands out of his pockets. “Did you hear something?”
Sunny frowned, suddenly on edge. “No.”
“Shhh,” Orlu said. “Someone’s here.”
Sunny scanned the entire room. No one. The sun shone through the large wall of windows and the room was pleasantly warm. But . . . she smelled something. She flared her nostrils. “What is that?” she whispered. It wasn’t sour, pungent, sweet, oily, or foul. It wasn’t stinky, delicious, stinging, perfumy, or dirty. She couldn’t describe it. But it was strong and it was permeating the room. She and Orlu moved closer to one another.
Suddenly, Bola turned to Sunny. Her eyes were twitchy, her face blank of emotion. She stiffly stood up and came closer. Sunny grabbed Orlu’s arm, but she stood her ground, facing Bola . . . or whoever it was possessing Bola’s body.
“Sunny Nwazuuuue, who are youuuuuu?” she sang. She chuckled drily.
Sunny shuddered, pressing closer to Orlu.
“I see you.”
Bola stopped, squinting her eyes at Sunny. “Yes, the free agent lucky enough to twin with Anyanwu and unlucky enough to be untwinned from her twin.” She looked Sunny up and down. “So young and you’ve lost one so old.” She stepped closer. “But you still live. I can speak to you. It is you who is having the dreams and asked what they are about.”
“Yes,” Sunny squeaked. “I want to know . . .”
“If the end of the world will come tomorrow. You wake up quietly afraid every morning that the sun will rise only to burn everything to ash and you’ll have nowhere to hide but back on the other side where you were such a powerful guide. Warrior Sunny Nwazue of Nimm by way of Ozoemena of Nimm. But who are you really, anymore?”
Sunny felt her face growing hot, tears behind her eyes. The words of the one possessing Bola were like the slash of knives.
“Yes, words can cut deep,” the one who was not Bola said. “They are clearer than images, more exact. Especially the magical kind, like the Nsibidi. Keep learning Nsibidi, you will need it; the answers are within it, and so much more. Your dreams, you have misinterpreted. Think, think hard. What you saw. It was not like what the wilderling forced upon you. This was something else and you know it. This was you using what you have. Shape-shifter, who can step into our wilderness when she learns that she can. Time folder, who can stop it when she hates someone enough.” She crept closer to Sunny and cocked her head. “Smoking city or city of smoke?”
Orlu gasped. “Oh my God!”
“What?” Sunny asked.
“Ah, finally it dawns on you. See what happens when you only assume the negative?” Bola said, focusing for the first time on Orlu. “It’s not always the worst.”
“What? WHAT?!” Sunny asked him.
“Your man understands, that’s what,” she said. “The vision was just nudging toward where you must go to do what the world needs.”
“But Osisi isn’t . . . We can’t get there,” Orlu said.
“Yes, you can,” Bola said. “Find Udide beneath the city of Lagos and have her weave you a flying grasscutter. Those can fly to Osisi easy. It will take you, if you can convince it.”
“Lagos?” Sunny said. “How are we supposed to get to Lagos?! That’s hours away! And what’s Osisi?”
“Udide, she will be there? In Lagos?” Orlu asked.
“Yes.”
“Through the market, as it says in the beast books?” he asked.
“Yes, for now.”
“Flying grasscutters are obnoxious,” he said, pinching his chin as he thought. “It’ll get us all caned, or worse.”
“Ekwensu has made it here. Time has run out and now it’ll be more difficult. A flying grasscutter is the fastest way to get to Osisi,” Bola stressed. “If Ekwensu comes, a caning is the least of your worries.”
Bola’s face squeezed with pain and she stumbled back. She rubbed her eyes, opened her mouth, and hacked loudly. “Sunny,” she gasped. “Both Leopards and Lambs in this world have jobs to do. It is not just you, but you have a job. You four, really. Ekwensu is getting her rest. She will strike soon. Gather yourselves. Sunny, you need Anyanwu. That old one is like an ogbanje. Tempt her back to you with love.” She hacked again and sat down hard. Sunny then saw it, a periwinkle haze rising delicately from Bola’s mouth and then dissipating into the air.
Slowly Bola stood up, straightening her skirt. She cleared her throat. “Temitope!” she gasped. She coughed and this time shouted, “Temitope!” The little girl came walking in with her professional walk.
“Yes, ma,” she said in her tiny voice.
“We’re done here,” Bola said. “Send in the next client.”
Once Sunny and Orlu were outside the gate, it was like stepping into another world. One that was not so full of water.
They walked in silence for several minutes. Then Orlu finally asked, “She’s just . . . gone?”
Sunny nodded.
Silence for several more minutes.
“I’m sorry,” Orlu finally said. ??
?I can’t even . . .”
“I’ll get her back,” Sunny said. Though she had no idea how. As she walked, she clenched and unclenched her fists. Doing so made her feel a little stronger. She kicked a large stone down the dirt road with her sandal and watched it sail far ahead. “I know her best.”
“Yeah,” Orlu said. But he sounded doubtful and . . . disturbed. As if Sunny had an unsightly gash in her cheek.
“What’s Osisi?” Sunny immediately asked.
“You know how the living world and the wilderness are two places but they coexist?”
Sunny nodded. “Wait,” she said, remembering. “I’ve read about full places. In Sugar Cream’s Nsibidi book, she talks about how she and the baboons who raised her lived in a patch of forest that was full. Lambs were terrified of it because they saw it as a bit of forest they’d just never come out of.”
Orlu nodded. “That can happen, yes. Osisi isn’t just a patch of land, though. It’s big. It’s a town that is miles wide and long. It’s somewhere between Igboland and Yorubaland and Hausaland . . . No one really knows exactly where but . . . wherever it is, you need to go there.”
“Why?”
“Your dreams apparently are telling you to . . . probably yourself, somehow. Sunny, Osisi looks like a city made of smoke.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how Sasha, Chichi, and I didn’t put two and two together. I guess we all just assumed . . .”
“The worst,” Sunny said. So she wasn’t dreaming of the world’s end this time. She was seeing a world that was full.
“Yeah,” Orlu said. “The only way to get there, for us to get there—you’re not going alone—is by having a beast called a flying grasscutter take us. I’ve studied these before because they’re fascinating. There was one living in Night Runner Forest some decades ago, and there’s information about it in the book I have.” He shook his head. “You’ll have to just see it to understand it. Fact is, we have to get to Lagos somehow.”
Sunny just held up a hand. Enough. Enough. Enough. “I’m going to Sugar Cream’s. I’ll see you later.”
18
CLOUDY SKIES
The next morning was a Sunday and Sunny was glad. She hadn’t slept at all. Every time she started to drift off, she remembered that her spirit face was missing and she’d wake up. “Sleep is the cousin of death,” she’d once heard, and the saying came back to her now. She didn’t want to meet death without Anyanwu.
So, all night, she stared at her ceiling. Thinking and thinking. Where could Anyanwu be? What if she met Ekwensu? Where did one’s spirit face go? Did it actually “go” places like a thing with a physical body? Did it return to the wilderness, where it could lose itself in the ebb and flow of spirit? Or did it just wink out of existence like a puff of smoke? All of these possibilities made her feel ill with worry and self-pity.
She’d only been a Leopard Person for a little less than two years. Prior to that, she’d had no such relationship with the spiritual existence that was her spirit face. It shouldn’t have been so devastating to return to the oneness of Lambdom. Nevertheless, if there was any evidence that she’d become a full-fledged Leopard girl, it was the fact that this was not the case. She felt the absence of Anyanwu so profoundly that she experienced moments of complete and total despair.
She lay in bed staring at the window watching the sun come up. She saw her wasp artist zoom out of its nest and out through the part of the screen she’d left open. She heard the morning activity of nearby neighbors. And she heard all this alone, as less than herself. While staring out the window, she had an idea. It made complete sense.
She rolled out of bed, glancing at the Leopard Knocks Daily newspaper on it. She considered reading through it for any possible news about Ekwensu or even more oil spills in the Niger Delta. Instead, she let it fall to the floor and went to her desktop computer. She put on her headphones and clicked on one of her favorite links, titled Six Hours of Mozart, and turned up the volume. The music washed over her and she closed her eyes, conjuring up an image in her mind of a ballerina she especially liked named Michaela DePrince.
She imagined her in a grassy field wearing jean shorts, a white T-shirt, and black pointe shoes. As the music danced, so did Michaela, leaping, stretching, and swaying. Sunny smiled as she sat back in her chair, feeling more relaxed than she’d felt since before the lake beast incident. She called Anyanwu to come and enjoy. She called and called. And then she opened her eyes, her joy gone. She slumped in her chair. She pulled off her headphones. She crawled back into her bed and got under the sheets. She didn’t sleep.
She spent the day hanging around her mother, who was cooking her favorite red stew. She helped slice onions, ginger, and garlic, and blended tomatoes and bell peppers while her mother chopped and baked chicken and smoked turkey. As the stew boiled, she sat at the table and stared into space while her mother watched a Nollywood movie.
Sunny was glad her mother didn’t ask why she wasn’t out with Chichi, Orlu, and Sasha. She was glad her mother didn’t ask her much of anything. It was nice. Just being around her, working with their hands, cooking. Then later on, it was nice just sitting at the dinner table with her father eating rice and stew. He read the newspaper and she read her current book, a graphic novel called Aya: Love in Yop City.
All this soothed her, but by the time night came, it all sat right back on her shoulders, weighty as bags of sand. It was an overcast night and thunder rumbled in the clouds above. She’d slept poorly, as she had for the last two nights. She hadn’t spoken to Chichi, Orlu, or Sasha, she hadn’t worked one small juju, no Leopard Knocks, which meant no Sugar Cream. She’d have said that this was her life before realizing her Leopardom, but it wasn’t. Before, she’d had a group of other friends, and she’d never known of that other side of her that was now gone, and Sunny knew she could never ever go back. It was like being left on an island. Her Saturday meetings with Sugar Cream and Wednesdays with Anatov and the others. Even Lamb school would be a problem. How would she face Orlu?
No going forward, no going backward. “It’s like being dead,” she whispered. The thunder rumbled some more and she suddenly jumped up and strode to her closet. She threw on some shorts and a T-shirt, sandals, grabbed her soccer ball, and was out the back door. Her parents might wonder where she’d gone, Ugonna, too. Let them, she thought, tears streaming down her face.
The field where they played soccer wasn’t far. Especially when she walked with purpose. Her long, strong legs got her there in no time, and when she stepped onto the empty, slightly overgrown fields, she dropped the ball and kicked it hard. She jogged after the ball into the center of the field and stopped it with her foot. She looked up into the churning gray sky. There was a flash of lightning and then several seconds later, the rumble of thunder.
She knew the juju to prevent being struck by lightning, a variation of the rain-deflecting juju one used when caught in a downpour. Sunny chuckled bitterly to herself and kicked her soccer ball. “Let it strike,” she muttered as she worked the ball with her fast feet. Back, to the side, tapping it in the air and catching it with the bottom of her foot behind her back, kick it lightly forward, behind, around. She smiled as she moved and dribbled the ball. She did a turn and kicked it back toward the other goal.
She ran across the field and shot it into the goal, the soft whisper of net against ball making her heart leap with a familiar joy. She grabbed the ball with her feet and worked it across the field to the other side and did it again. And then she did it again. All alone under the churning sunless sky, she enjoyed her own footwork, imagining that she was playing a one-on-one game against herself. The air rushed in and out of her lungs. She threw off her sandals so she could feel the hard, uneven ground with her tough feet.
She imagined she was trying to move the ball around her self, and this made her feet move faster. She did a bump and run, shoving herself out of the way and then taking off with the ball across
the field. She laughed, because it had almost felt like she’d shoved someone. She’d shot the ball directly at the goal when she realized it. And her realization was immediately verified when the ball didn’t go in. Instead, it was deflected by a seemingly invisible force.
Then the force became visible, and Sunny thought for a moment lightning had struck the field. She stood before the goal as the ball rolled to her feet. She rested a bare foot on it and wiped sweat from her brow. All the movement had cleared her mind, eased her muscles, and filled her with joy. Nevertheless, it was almost as if the clarity made it so that the anger could flow through her blood more easily. It flooded her system so hot and full that the world around her seemed to swell.
“Why’d you leave?” she shouted.
Then she blasted the soccer ball right toward the blurred but bright yellow figure standing in the goal. The ball sailed through it, and then the blur dissolved to nothing. Sunny stood there staring with wide eyes. Raindrops began to fall.
“I had to attend a meeting.”
Sunny felt fury and surprise flip her belly as the rain came down harder. “A meeting?” she shouted. “You . . . you left me to go to a meeting?” Hot tears squeezed from her eyes and mixed with the cool rain.
“Rain Shelf yourself,” Anyanwu said.
“I can’t!” Sunny snapped. But maybe she could, now that Anyanwu was near. She decided to try, bringing out her juju knife. She blinked away tears as she worked the simple Rain Shelf juju and immediately the rain stopped falling on her, as if she held an umbrella.
“You’re foolish,” Anyanwu said. “And needy. And insecure.”
Now the tears came harder for Sunny, and she plopped down on the grass. The squelchy wetness of the grass felt as awful as she felt. When she looked up, she found herself facing a figure of soft, glowing yellow light. They stared at each other for what felt like minutes. Around them, heavy rain splashed down, lightning flashed and thunder responded. They sat in the middle of the soccer field, and for the moment, to Sunny there was no one else on earth.