Her parents wouldn’t be home for a few hours. Her mother was on call and had sent a text to all of them describing what they could eat. And their father always came home late on Thursdays. Ugonna was at the kitchen table nibbling on an orange. He had a pencil in his hand. He was drawing again. Sunny considered leaving the kitchen, but she was hungry.
Ugonna had always liked to draw; he’d sketch things like smiling faces and vague images of girls, trees, cars he liked, and gym shoes. But in the last year, after discovering an instruction website on the Internet, he’d gotten more serious with his skill. Instead of going out with his friends, he began to spend more and more time at the kitchen table, drawing. He was best at drawing faces and abstract images of forests.
Some of these abstract drawings reminded Sunny of the Nsibidi she was learning to read. Not that they looked the same, but they carried a similar energy. His drawings didn’t literally move as the Nsibidi in her book did, but they seemed to move. The trees seemed to blow, the insects on the branches seemed to walk.
Then last month, he’d drawn what she’d been dreaming about since a week after facing Ekwensu. The city of smoke. It was a good drawing. Their mother had thought it was so beautiful she’d had it framed. Sunny had to look at that image on the family room wall every day now whenever she wanted to watch TV or exit the house. The dreams themselves were horrible enough.
They were worse than the vision of the world ending. The dreams were what happened as it ended. A city of smoke that rippled as it burned, that looked almost like another world entirely. It was like seeing through the eyes of a god. The first time she’d had the dream, she’d woken up, run to the bathroom in the dark, and vomited into the toilet. The second time, a week later, she’d fallen sick hours afterwards and been unable to leave the house for two days while fighting a horrible case of malaria. The third time, she woke crying uncontrollably. She’d told no one about the dreams. Not even Sugar Cream. Yet her non-Leopard brother was drawing it, and her mother had framed and hung it on the family room wall.
“Hey,” she grunted, walking quickly past Ugonna to the refrigerator.
“Good afternoon,” he said, not taking his eyes from what he was drawing.
She opened the fridge, her belly growling horribly. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, had forgotten her lunch, hadn’t had enough money to buy a snack during lunch, didn’t feel like asking Orlu yet again; essentially, she hadn’t eaten since the pepper soup Sugar Cream had given her last night after the attack. She brought out three ripe plantain.
“Is Chukwu still in his Jeep?” Ugonna asked.
“Yeah.”
“His head is so big,” Ugonna said. “I don’t know why Mummy and Daddy had to buy him that! He’s staying in the government hostel, how’s that even going to look?”
“Dad tried,” Sunny said with a shrug. Chukwu was going to make a big splash at the university. Not only had he been one of the top students in his graduating class, he was the best soccer player in the area. Still, his father wanted his oldest son to really experience university life. Thus, instead of having Chukwu stay in one of the cushier private student hostels off campus, he’d insisted Chukwu stay at the more stripped-down government-owned hostels on campus. He’d have to stay in one large room with five other students. Chukwu had angrily protested, but he finally shut up when he learned that their mother had bought him the used Jeep.
Ugonna chuckled. Sunny did, too. She slit the black-yellow plantain skins and peeled them off. As she sliced the plantain and heated the oil, she resisted the urge to look at what her brother was drawing. Yet again she wondered how it was that he’d drawn that horrible burning city. He wasn’t a Leopard Person. Was someone working some sort of juju on her? On her family?
She frowned, flipping the frying plantain over. She dished out the first batch, her mouth filled with saliva as it savoured the tangy, sweet fried fruit. Perfect.
She focused on her task, and not on the talk she planned to have with Sugar Cream tomorrow night. Not on the fact that she had been keeping such deep secrets from her friends. From Orlu, in particular, it was the most difficult. Soon, she’d tell them. All three of them would hit the roof.
She put the plate of plantain in the middle of the table. “You want some?” she asked, placing several slices on her plate.
Ugonna looked at the plantain, then got up to get a plate.
“Thanks.”
They both ate and watched a Nollywood movie on the kitchen TV. Minutes later Chukwu joined them. As they laughed at the stupid woman who was so dumb that she’d left her baby in the taxi cab, Sunny glanced at Ugonna’s drawing. It was of a tricked-out Viper with a sultry-looking woman draped on the hood.
She smiled and enjoyed her plantain and her brother.
That night, Sunny lay on her bed, gazing at the photo of her grandmother. Her grandmother, the only one of all her relatives who was a Leopard Person, the only person she could have talked to about all things Leopard. Where Sunny was albino, having pale skin, hair, and eyes, her grandmother was indigo black with closely cropped black hair. Sunny held the photo closer and looked at the juju knife her grandmother held to her chest.
It was particularly large, almost like a pointed machete, and looked made of a heavy raw iron. And both edges were notched with many sharp teeth and etched with deep designs. Did they bury you with it? Sunny wondered. Did you even have a body to burn after Black Hat murdered you? She shut her eyes. It was late and she was tired. This was not a place to go in her mind right before bed. She put the photo aside and unfolded the only other item that had been in the box with the letter from her grandma, the thin piece of paper with the Nsibidi symbols on it.
Sunny tried to read it yet again. When she felt the nausea setting in, she folded it back up. She shut her eyes, willing the nausea to pass. The first time, she hadn’t heeded her body’s warning; she kept trying and trying to read it. She wound up vomiting like crazy. It was so much that her father was overcome with wild worry no matter how much her mother, who was a medical doctor, assured him that Sunny was okay.
“What’s wrong with taking her to the hospital, anyway?” he kept angrily asking, as he stood at her bedside with her mother. “Kai! This is a regular illness, isn’t it? Then the cure is regular!” Eventually the nausea did pass, leaving Sunny with the nagging question of what the Nsibidi on the piece of paper said. She’d have to get better at reading Nsibidi in order to find out. She glanced at the piece of paper just for a brief second. Then she put all her grandmother’s things away and grabbed her book Nsibidi: The Magical Language of the Spirits instead.
She wasn’t ready to read her grandmother’s complex Nsibidi page, but each day, she got better and better at “reading” Sugar Cream’s book—particularly when she was rested, had eaten a good meal, and managed to go most of the day without talking to anyone. One did not simply read Nsibidi as one read a book or even music. Nsibidi was a magical writing script. It had to call you, and it only called those who could and wanted to change their shape.
Shape-shifters who saw Nsibidi would see the symbols moving and even hear it whispering. Sunny had experienced this the moment she picked up the book of Nsibidi at random in Bola’s Store for Books last year. And though the book had cost some heavy chittim it was worth it. It was her first lesson in mastering a Leopard art. Learning to read Nsibidi was initially intuitive, forcing the reader to reach deep within and understand that the symbols were alive and that they were shape-shifters, too. And when Nsibidi symbols changed shape for you, the whole world shifted.
The first time it happened had been two weeks ago, after Sunny thought she’d already learned to read Nsibidi. She’d managed to get through the first page, which was basically an introduction to the book, or at least, this was what she thought. Sugar Cream wrote that her book would never be a bestseller. So few could “hear” Nsibidi and even fewer wanted to listen. She said that Nsibidi was more a language of the spirits than one for the use of humankind. Then she beg
an explaining how the book was split into sections. The book was quite thin, so the sections were very short. This was as far as Sunny had gotten.
For some reason, no matter how much she turned the wiggling symbols over in her head, unfocused her eyes, and strained to “hear” what the whispers were saying, she could get no further in her reading. She’d hit a wall.
Sweating and frustrated, she’d set the book down on her bed, the thick pages open. She leaned against the pillows on her bed.
“Come on,” she whispered tiredly.
Understanding that first page had been deeply satisfying. With all that she’d experienced in the past year, here was something she felt made sense. Every part of her being loved and wanted to learn Nsibidi. And it seemed as if the understanding came to her because of this. It was exhausting, mentally taxing and frustrating, but she loved it. So it came. Then she hit this wall.
Now, as she looked at the thin book with thick cream-coloured pages and maroon, almost jellylike symbols that wiggled and sometimes rotated, shrank, and stretched, she relaxed. She sighed.
“It will come,” she whispered. She relaxed more. Her heartbeat slowed. She had other homework to do. Nsibidi was her friend, not a lion to tame or anything else to beat into submission. She was about to go get something to eat. Her stomach felt empty, though she had just eaten dinner.
“Sunny,” she heard someone softly whisper.
When she looked at her book, she felt cool, soft hands press her cheeks to steady her head.
“Hold,” the voice said.
Everything dropped. Away.
Nothing but the whispering symbols.
Oral and written words combined.
There was warmth on her face, like sunshine.
Sunshine now, not before her initiation into the Ekpe society. The Leopard society. The sunshine didn’t burn.
She walked along a path, wild jungle to her left, wild jungle to her right. Drums beat but she could hear Sugar Cream’s voice clearly; Sunny saw the symbols dancing before her when Sugar Cream called them, burrowing into the dirt when spoken, swirling into a tornado-like cycle when uttered.
“This book’s titled Nsibidi: The Magical Language of the Spirits. But this book is tricky. Like me, it shape-shifts. It goes by another name, an inside name for those who can read it. Trickster: My Life and My Lessons, by Sugar Cream, is its inside name, its true name. This book is a part of me. It is wonderful that you are here and you are hearing. It is good.”
Sugar Cream went on to tell/show Sunny that this jungle was where she grew up. She was introducing an old fluffy baboon from a clan that she called the Idiok when Sunny suddenly came back to herself. She had to blink several times to get her eyes and mind to focus. There was knocking at the door, and she glanced at the time on her cell phone. Two hours had passed! She’d turned one page.
“Sunny?” her mother called again. Sunny tensed up. No one in her family knew a thing about a thing. They could not, by both juju and Leopard law. Among many other issues, this sometimes made reading the Nsibidi book difficult. Her mother knocked on the door. “What are you doing in there?”
Chink, chink, chink, chink! Ten heavy copper chittim fell onto the floor in front of Sunny’s bed. The Leopard currency dropped whenever knowledge was earned, and these were the most prized kind. Shaped like curved rods, chittim came in many sizes and could be made of copper, bronze, silver, or gold—copper being the most valuable and gold being the least. No one knew who dropped them or why they never injured anyone when they fell.
Sunny jumped up and quickly grabbed the chittim and piled them in her purse. Yes, she’d learned something big, and she knew she could look into the book and “hear” Nsibidi in the same way again. “Wow,” she whispered, putting her heavy purse beside her, the chittim inside clinking loudly. The pain in her belly hit her then, and she doubled over. Hunger, but a terrible aggressive hunger. She cleared her throat and tried to sound normal. “I’m just studying, Mum.”
Her mother tried to open the door. “Why is the door locked, then?”
Sunny dragged herself to the edge of her bed. She placed her feet on the cool floor. “Sorry, Mum,” she said, forcing herself to stand.
When she opened the door, her mother stared at her for a long time. She searched Sunny’s face, sniffing the room, listening for anything, anything at all. Sunny knew the routine. The unspoken between her and her mother increased every single day. But the love remained, too. So it was okay. “I’m… I’m okay, Mum,” Sunny stammered. She smiled the most fake smile ever.
“Are you sure?” her mother whispered. Sunny wrapped her arms around her. At thirteen and a half, Sunny was as tall as her mother’s five foot eight.
“Yes, Mum,” she said. “Just studying… really hard.”
“It’s ten o’clock. You should get ready for bed.” Her mother glanced over Sunny’s shoulder at the book on her bed that was not a textbook.
“I will,” Sunny said. “After I eat something.”
“But you just ate dinner.”
“I know. But I’m hungry again, I guess. A little.”
“Okay, o,” her mother sighed. “There’s plenty of leftover plantain.”
Sunny grinned. “Perfect.” She could never eat enough fried, juicy, sweet, scrumptious yummies. When she finished, she brushed her teeth again and returned to her room. She shut off her light, fell back into bed, and was asleep within thirty seconds. Five minutes later, she was dreaming about the end of the world…
The city was burning so furiously it looked like a city of smoke. She witnessed it from above the lush green forest. She was flying. But she was not a bird. What was she? Who am I? she wondered.
It was always like this here. She could smell it as she rushed towards the burning city. She did not smell smoke, however. The wind must have been tumbling away from her. She smelled flowers, instead. Sweetness, as if the trees below were seeding the air with pollen.
She tried to stop, but the force that she was riding wanted to go towards the city. She was a mind in a body that had other plans. There were spiralling edifices. Smaller structures on the ground, bulbous like giant smoky eggs. All of it undulated with smoke. This was the end. Was this Lagos? New York? Tokyo? Cairo?
Closer.
She felt like screaming. She didn’t want to look anymore. But she had no body to look away with. It was like reading Nsibidi. Nsibidi? she thought, panicky. What is that?
She was too close to the burning city. Soon she’d be upon it. What were those flying out of it? Bits of incinerating building? They looked like bats. Demons.
She could feel her heart beating. Slamming in her chest; it wanted out. My heart? I have a heart? She was shaking. She was falling now. The forest trees crashing towards her…
Her body jerked as she hit the floor. Her eyes shot open as she thrashed in the darkness. The floor was hard. Familiar scents. She calmed. Her scent. She touched her mashed up Afro; she’d forgotten to take out the comb Mami Wata had given to her. Then she climbed back into bed and lay there until she slept a restless, yet thankfully dreamless sleep.
4
READING NSIBIDI IS RISKY
Saturday evening, Sunny went to see Sugar Cream in the Obi Library as usual. She was used to crossing the bridge to Leopard Knocks alone. The river beast made her nervous, but each and every time, she stared it down as she crossed. Even this time. It lurked just beneath the surface, a shadow the size of a house with eyes that glowed a dull yellow. Watching. Waiting. For what, Sunny didn’t know. But when she brought forth her spirit face, and Anyanwu filled her up with confidence, poise, and courage, she didn’t care. She dared the river beast to do its worst; then she’d have a reason to kick its backside once and for all.
When she arrived at Sugar Cream’s office at around eight o’clock, her mentor was not there yet. One of the ancestral masks on the wall, the red one with inflated cheeks and wild eyes, opened its mouth and silently laughed at her. Another stuck its tongue out. The masks were
so annoying. They were like having a chorus of children behind Sugar Cream’s back who jeered and made fun of her as she was scolded or when she made mistakes.
“Oh, stop it,” she said to the long-faced ebony mask that narrowed its eyes and sucked its teeth at her as she went to Sugar Cream’s desk. There was a note on it. Sit. We will practice gliding today. So clear your head. I will return shortly.
Sunny groaned. “Sit” meant “Sit on the floor in front of her desk.” She sighed, scanning the dark wooden floor. She spotted four of the large red spiders scrambling across the floor. There were always a few. Where they were going, Sunny didn’t know, but they were always going somewhere. They were like scary ugly ants that were spiders.
She slowly sat on the floor. She shut her eyes and took a deep slow breath. She blocked out the spiders and took another deep slow breath. Unfortunately, as her mind cleared, it made room for the very thing she wanted to stop thinking about. Her dream. The smoking city. She frowned, trying harder to clear her mind. Sweat beaded on her forehead as the dream lost its sharp edges and began to grow fuzzy in her mind.
Her body began to relax. Her heartbeat slowed. Well-being. Nothing else. It would last about thirty seconds. So far, this was how long she could hold it. But this half minute was bliss. Ten seconds. A smile spread across her lips. Fifteen seconds. She began to hear that soft, slow hum again. It came from beneath her feet, beneath the floor—deep, deep, deep. It was beautiful. Eighteen seconds, she felt something scratchy.
Her eyes shot open, and she looked at her hand. One of the red spiders was crawling onto her pinky and ring finger.
“Eeeeeeeeee!” she screeched, flinging it off. It landed on the floor and ran towards Sugar Cream’s desk. Sunny was on her feet, still in mid-screech when her eyes fell on the woman sitting behind the desk.
“Good evening,” Sugar Cream said. Today, she wore a creamy yellow dress with a creamy yellow headwrap. The yellow bangles on her wrists clicked as she shifted her position.