The morning was quiet, unusually so. There was no pounding of yams in old mortars, no hushed calls of mothers to their children, admonishing and petting as they warmed pots of last night's soup, no farmers and hunters and palm wine tappers and market women causing a quiet ruckus, calling to each other in the dewy morning. It made me wary, but I shrugged it off quickly, quiet mornings were a rarity around here.
The sky was a blue that you do not see all the time, and plastered against it were the palm trees encircling the settlement, tall they were, those palm trees, immovable sentries. The leaves looked black against the slow, hesitant wave of sunrise and I wished the sun would shine without shining, "we could do without the heat" I muttered to myself as I set about making the fire for the morning.
You see, the fire must be lit in the mornings. Fire to boil herbs and water and yams and fufu and meat and roots. Fire to warm the bones and to throw seeds in and to curse others and to see the previous night in glaring clarity. Fire must be lit.
So I squatted, my wrapper scarcely covering my buttocks, but there was no one around to see what my husband had barely gotten used to.
The smoke curls up to the sky, calling on the women and children that live in the trees, the ones that dispose of naughty children on the ground, asking them to bless my blackened hands and swollen belly, asking them to tell me if the quiet was natural or if I should hide.
They say nothing. They do nothing. They are quiet too.
"You have finished me! Eeeeeiiiiii! Olanna, you have finished me!" My mother-in-law screams as she crawls out of her hut, a beautiful affair painted with the colors of the forest. She refuses to look up, screaming and pulling at the hair on her head, I stand there, confused, and run to meet her. She shrugs my hands off, crying bitterly, and soon the other wives are joining her. It is a comical sight, but appropriately sobering.
I wonder why they are all crying and crawling on the ground, the unswept ground. My mother-in-law would be yelling at Ginika on another day for "not learning how to sweep before the birds begin to search for their breakfast."
And then, I remember.
But it is too late.
You see, that day was quiet because Ihedioha came to the settlement the night before, and had not yet left. So, all the morning activities were banned temporarily.
Only I forgot.
I, delirious from loving and sweet promises. I, basking in my husband's light and picking names for our child, his first son (the dibia said so), only I forgot.
And the punishment for my forgetfulness was to be an everlasting remembrance.
Blood leaked from my body in a quiet rage, red creeks crisscrossing a brown highway, my baby's tiny body wrapped in banana leaves.
What Ihedioha wanted, Ihedioha got.
That's what his cult said.
The End.
Whew.
I took some liberties with the meaning of names in this short story.
Ihedioha is a dialectal variant of Ifediora and is short for the expression Ihe-dio-ha-mma which means "whatever or a thing that pleases the people."
I got this from myigbonames.com.
It works beautifully, doesn't it?
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