A Day in the Death, Part 2.

The coffin, he rested against a tree again. His staff, he asked the coffin's occupant to please hold onto, and so leaned it against that.

He then found himself a nice, sturdy stick with one tapering end that he didn't mind getting damaged. With this, he struck the earth. He dug and raked, and then cleared the debris away with his feet, until he'd made himself a clearing. Then he bit deeper into the topsoil, using both hands to twist and wedge the digging stick in and turn up dirt from a single deep hole. He did this several times, each at the edge of the clearing, until he'd completed a ring several paces in diameter.

Back into the trees he moved then, ears trained on the distant sound of trickling water.

It was a fine stream, small but clear, cut deep into the earth with the passage of time as it flowed down from the western hills. It did not take long for him to find the right type of rock at its banks, but it did take him a time to shape it. Until then, the clash of smooth, flat river stone on stone rang out up and down the banks. Eventually, he was satisfied with the edged fragments he held in his hands. The smaller, sharper flake, he tucked into his clothing, while he used the larger axehead on his way back to the clearing.

He whispered apologies and thanks to each flexible sapling as he struck its base with the rock. There was a woody knock, and a sharp rattle of foliage with each. It was a satisfying rhythm to beat out, and it only interrupted the dull roar of wildlife around him for a few moments each. Before long he was dragging several felled saplings with him. He stripped their branches and the more fibrous bark, which he thought would make fine rope later on. The first sapling was driven into one of the holes in the earth at the clearing. The old man mounded earth up around its base and packed it in tightly, and then he reached up to bend its other end down toward the ground.

He was lifted off of his feet before he could bring the other end down into its own opposite hole, which he also filled in.

Several more times he did this, each time tying the middles of the tense saplings together with fibers stripped from the bark. The finished frame was comfortable enough to sit down in, with room for tools and a bed if he was diligent. But for now, the skeleton needed ribs. These, in the form of shorter branches, he lashed in rings around the frame with thin vines once he ran out of softer bark. The lowest two were left open at one end, where he would put the door facing south. The bones needed skin, and so he ventured back out into the brush, confident that the coffin would keep an eye on things for him.

With the stone flake, he harvested the fronds from ferns and other plants along the ground level. And with each frond harvested, he spoke the words due to someone who was having a limb cut off. He took the time to study their leaves and their pinnation, thumbs running over every feathery edge briefly. A bushel was made, and a bushel was peeled apart to arrange tips-downward along the future wall, lashed to the branches with more creeping twine from the bushes. The old man felt a sweat coming on, and winced at the ache in his back from stooping for so long. But he had much more to do before he could rest.

The hours wore on and the sun began to blush dark and flirt with the western hilltops before he had angled the last series of leaves and tied them in place. A roof cap would be able to wait until morning- he expected no rainfall, at least not where he was. Hunger and thirst would not wait for him, however. He could already feel the pangs, and before long they would add to the shake in his hands.

First, he crept back down to the bank and laid down supine before its burbling current. He drank deep with his hands, until his stomach felt cold and swollen. Then he sat back on his bony arms and waited for it all to settle. Someday, he thought. Someday he would allow himself the luxury of a clay cup to drink from. Or perhaps a gourd.

Once it felt as though his insides weren't sloshing around with every step, he rose and moved back onto greener ground, where his digging stick once more became of use. The root vegetable bulbs he found were small and bitter, but if they spent a few hours soaking in the water, they'd be leeched of their toxins. He wouldn't be able to eat them that evening, but they would make for a decent breakfast. A small pile of rocks kept them in place as they laid submerged in the stream.

If they were still there in the morning, he'd eat easy. If an animal found them first, then... well, then nothing. Then that was a lucky animal.

Unlike the considerably less lucky fish which he began to eye next.

A Day in the Death, Part 1.

The one called Grandpa Corpse wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist. He dared not touch his hands to his face, for they were caked in dirt and lurid honey. He stood up straight--or at least as straight as he could stand those days--and packed the earth flat with his feet. Then he took up his digging stick and cast it into the trees with a curse. He listened to the crack and clatter of it rebounding through the boughs, and waited until the rustling of leaves and underbrush quieted. The susurrations of the nearby river regained its prominence.

He found a rounded stone at its banks with which to scrub, and he did not stop until his hands were rubbed bright and raw. His feet he stamped in the shallows for some time, until the cold creeping into his joints finally forced him to quit, and to decide that he had done all he could. One last time he surveyed the area for any shards of glass or fragments of pottery. Satisfied that he had left nothing remaining of any jar or bottle, the old man took up his old staff. He apologized to the trees of that place as he left, explaining why he had chosen that spot, and promising them that they would not come to much harm from the toxins.

The sun had begun to rise by then. He could hear the fat red and green rooster crowing at his distant post, and the first villagers rousing themselves in reply. He would not return to the village- there was no need to, after they had agreed to take the young men in. He had seen to each of them personally, and the folk of that place trusted his word when he said that they would convalesce before long. They would work to make the riverbank a safer place.

A lone coffin stood nestled against a split tree. He approached it and ran his hands over its weathered surface, brushing some light debris from it and then kissing its face. There came a gentle tapping from within, and so he held his ear to the old wood. Then it knocked, much harder and louder, and he stepped away from it with a chuckle. He offered it teasing platitudes as he reached down and grasped its trailing rope, which he wrapped around one hand several times before giving it a pull. Once it was eased down onto the broad, flattened expanse of his shoulders, he hefted its weight with a soft grunt.

Cautious, halting steps and hard leaning upon his staff gave way to a slow but relaxed pace as he finally left that river north of the mangrove forests.

The sun was still rising, so he decided that he should rise with it. He turned west, toward the hills, and began to walk. He walked over brush, and along the dirt roads of the people. He walked through fields of taro, and along the narrow bridges woven across flooded terraces of deep-rice. He never walked through the shadow of a fruit tree sapling, and he always walked the long way around a den of animals. The walk turned into a climb, and by mid-morning when he could look out across the canopy below and watch the mist as it rose twisting and evaporating in the sunlight, he decided that he had punished himself enough.

He still needed the strength to settle down, after all.

Crimson Honey (2/2).

Click here for Part 1.



I keep scooping.

The crying recedes into the distance. The mists begin to close in around the riverbank once more, choking the sounds around us except for our own groaning. Most of us stop shaking, and the river reeds take our place.

I keep scooping.

I see myself, and my mother. I am young, and she is not dead yet. She hugs me, and I fling myself from the side of a cliff. The skin on my back peels away--more than it already is--and I sprout wings. I claw out the eyes of the village boys, and then I fly to where the rivers pour out of the sky. The water smells like dog.

There is a hard crack, and this time the pain throbs inside of me. I lean over and cough. Fragments of tooth litter my lap. The molar finally finished crumbling. I rub some honey against the hole. It bleeds, but the blood mingles with the honey and I stop noticing.

The crying stops, but something else takes its place. The sound of wind, and churning water. The branches weeping over the river flail and bend, making way for the mist as it flees back down the current. I turn my head, and I can see the boat over my shoulder, naked and still in the waters. The pale man is speaking now, and the laughing man is arguing with him over something. They thrust their poles into the riverbed, but the boat doesn't budge. They strain and push. The aft end rises up and the prow dips, but they go nowhere. I see clutching, scrabbling little things clinging to the bottom of the boat. They look like waterlogged hands, and overgrown fingernails.

I hesitate, and keep scooping.

The wing blows harder, howls louder, and we hunker down and cry, or shout and leap up into it to be bowled over. The trees bend and rattle, and people are screaming in the village up the bank. My hands squeeze tightly around the jar, and I hold it to my heart.

Then everything is still. The wind dies. People lift their heads again.

There is someone else out on the river. He is looking at the men in the boat. But he is not in a boat. The surface of the water is breaking beneath his bare old feet, and gnarled bones are clutching at them, propping him up. He is wearing faded old green and blue that blinds me to look at, and his staff is as black as a yawning pit in the earth that I could fall into. He lifts the staff up, and the men in the boat start to shout or move. They do not finish whatever they are doing before the thunder cracks.

His staff hits the water, and it splits open.

The boat splits open, and the chest splits open.

All of the jars come crashing down into the hole in the river, and we hear the shattering of glass beneath the splintering of wood. We hold out our hands and cry in anguish. Some of us that can still walk leap down into the shallows and try to wade out toward the red-dinged water. More grabbing little things reach up out of the silt and stop them, hold them, and keep them from thrashing.

The laughing one and the pale one are clinging to the sinking halves of the boat. They are shouting out and cursing at the man now. I do not see the man that they were taking away any longer.

He breaks his silence, and the boom of his voice makes my ears throb. He speaks like us, but he is not like us. He looks like the old grandfathers in the village, but he is not bent by time.

His eyes are so bright.

They hurt the most to look at.

I stop scooping.

One of them swings a pole at him, and he raises his hand to meet it. The wood cracks in half and splits down the middle, and the laughing man falls down into the water with a shout. They are all yelling now, but the wind and the river grow louder. The current swells, and a wave rises up to scatter the last pieces of the boat. The laughing man and the pale one cough and sputter, and climb up onto the bank. They drag themselves into the forest.

The water glints and glimmers with honey and coins until they all wash away.

The old man is looking at us now. He is dragging the honey-drinker by his collar as he walks across the bones in front of him. He is coming toward us, and the hands in the shallows stop grabbing at us.

But they take our jars with them. Bony fingertips and split nails scratch over the glass and clay and pull them into the earth like it was sand, and we bloody our hands trying to dig them back out of the dirt.

I try to pull a root out of the way, but it is too deep, and my knuckles feel like they are going to pop. My face is wet now. I am sobbing into the dirt.

The man is standing over me when I look back up.

He is tutting at me, but he is smiling.

He says he is sorry that he has arrived so late. That he will do what he can.

The swirls start to fade from behind my eyes, leaving only the blur of my tears, and the pain comes back. It hurts less than it usually does. I can lift my arms when the old man extends his gnarled hand.

I take it.

Crimson Honey (1/2).

We always know they've come when we hear the laughter.

When the fishermen draw their nets in from the river and the village matrons usher the children indoors. When the mist settles so heavily over us that we can barely see our shaking hands in front of us. When the raft people have long since left, for fear of those cursed evenings.

This is the time when they come to us. This is the time when we go out to meet them again.

We come out from many places. Most of us have no homes anymore. No families. We crawl down out of mangroves, or up out of covered ditches. The way toward the river brings us down the path through the village. Candles are snuffed out. Children cry or question.

Families shut their doors and cover their windows before they even see us. They don't like to look at us. They stopped wanting to look long ago.

We walk in a line down toward the bank. We always move slowly. Most of us can no longer walk straight. We do not help the ones who trip and stumble. They will have to crawl after us, and then we will get first pick.

The laughter comes again, louder and closer. It laughs at nothing, and everything. The boat's hull pushes aside the reeds and strikes the side of the dock. Ropes tighten and creak. Bottles clink and rattle, and our ashy mouths water until our cheeks ache.

The mist slowly peels away to reveal them. They stand as they always do. They tower over us, even sitting down in their little boat. They are always taller when we fall to our knees.

Words form out of the laughter, as the one with a face like an elbow rubbed raw looks to us. He folds back the sleeves of his neat robe and slowly opens one basket. We don't need to look inside to know what it is. The smell wafts over us.

Sickening sweetness coats our throats, and we choke.

He asks us how we have been. If we are all still here. Someone lifts their head to tell him that Sibe has died. He feigns sorrow, and then asks how it happened. How much it hurt. Where the body was now.

No one says anything, and no one looks up to see the smile we all know he has.

The boat rocks, and the other stands up with his stick and his tablet. He is so pale, we all thought he was a ghost at first. Now we know that he is something worse. He taps the stick upon a bottle impatiently, and all our hands fumble.

Coins spill out onto the sagging pier beneath us. Stones and cowries clatter together on strings. A grey ring, still with a finger attached, is lifted up in bloodied palms beside me.

The laughing man collects, offering congratulations at bigger piles, and tutting at the small. He does not stop or look at the ones who bury their faces in the wood, weeping and empty-handed. He stops to look down at me for a long time. If the hairs had not fallen out of my skin a long time ago, they would all stand on end beneath his gaze.

I know not what the thing I hold is.

Only that it is made of metal, and glass, and that it has a weight which makes me hope for its value.

He asks me how I came by it. I spare no detail.

The raft man had separated from his fellows to walk through the trees. I tackled him and came down hard on top of him, grabbing for the knife that they all carried with them at their hips. But it was dull, and the point was broken. Twenty-eight times before he stopped moving, and I could take my hand away from his mouth. I took the thing from around his neck. I lie and tell myself that I don't know why I counted the stabs.

I know why.

The man delights. He takes the thing from me and clasps his hand upon my shoulder. I recoil, but I start breathing again at his passing.

When his hands are filled, he turns and walks back to the boat. He empties them into a chest which weighs the aft end down and thrusts the prow upward. The pale man makes more marks in his tablet and nods or shakes his head. Coins and cowries land upon many more of the same.

We are not their first stop today, and we will not be their last.

One by one we stand up and step into line. It is the longest walk to the end of the dock. Tremors run through us. The one in front of me doubles over and vomits. The tight skin of his back stretches and then tears around a sore next to his backbones. It oozes. I walk through his puddle as the line moves.

Golden-red at the edges of the vessel, darkening to a deep, bloody red at its deepest. Murky, and always swirling. Glowing in the dim light. The cork and one side of the neck sticky and slimy, insects landing upon it and then falling off dead.

Before he lets me have it, the pale man grabs my jaw. I open my mouth and he peers in. He counts my teeth, checks my arms and legs. I turn around once for him, raise my fingers up to my nose. He grunts and then lifts the bottle up with a gloved hand.

When the bottle comes into my hands I have to force myself to stop shaking. I can't drop it. I turn and hold it close to my heart as I hurry back onto the dirt. Others are already sprawled out with their own bottles. Some get it thicker, if they've done well. The ones who brought less get the bottles that are cut with water. The ones who brought nothing at all are still crying on the dock.

The stupid ones pull the corks out and tip them right back, drinking it like they would water.

I squat down and use my fingers to spoon it up a bit at a time. That way it will last longer. Last me until the next time they come.

I suck my fingers clean. Something comes off in my mouth. After swallowing the honey, I spit the thing out. I've lost another fingernail. There is no blood this time. The hole underneath it looks like it should hurt. But the honey is working, and I don't feel anything at all.

I keep scooping.

Old Koge falls down in front of me. He can't drink anymore. It makes him sick, and if he vomits he loses all of the honey in it, even if he tries to scoop it back up. So he uncorks his honey and brings the neck up close to his cheekbone. Old Koge leans back and holds the mouth of the bottle over his eye- the one that doesn't see anymore. I can see his eyelid open through the murk. It takes him a few seconds to cry out in pain, but he holds it until enough of it absorbs, and the pain stops. He brings the bottle back down, honey running down his cheek. I don't know if it is honey or blood in his eye.

He across grins at me.

One voice is louder now. I look up, and everything leaves a trail of color behind my eyes when it moves. A man whose name I do not know is raising his palms toward the laughing man. He is begging. He says that he cannot bring enough anymore, not without his leg. I did not notice the festering wound until now.

The laughing man puts a hand on the top of his head and pats him. He tells him that there is a way. He takes his hand and helps him up. The pale man moves things around on the boat, emptying a space. He brings the man down into the boat and sits him there, but he ties his hands together before he can reach for the honey. He will come with them back to where they come from, and where the honey is made. He says that there will be plenty.

We all know what will happen. We will not see him again.

I keep scooping.

The line is gone now. We are all taking our honey. The laughing man holds his hands on his hips and smiles. He smiles when he is disgusted. He always smiles. The pale man finishes his writing. He puts the tablet away under a sheaf of dried leaves. He takes a new one out. He speaks to the laughing man in their tongue. The laughing man barks something back at him.

They argue.

The laughing man grabs the handle of the bullwhip he wears like a belt. The pale man lifts his coat to show all of his gleaming knives.

They both stop, and start to laugh together.

The boat pushes away from the dock. The crying man is crying harder now.

The laughing man waves his hand and begins to bid us all farewell.

His hand blurs into a smear of fuzzy light, and his voice is like the sound of bullfrogs in the swamp.

My toes tingle, and I start to taste orange.

The color. Not the fruit.

The mist begins to cloak them again.

I keep scooping.



Click here for Part 2.

Ekundayo (3/3).

Click here for Ekundayo 2/3.



The pale blue lights cast long, wavering shadows across the cemetery grounds. The grass was shortened but not removed from the earth, and many graves farther back in the lopsided rows were slowly, gently being overtaken by nature. Most mounds did not possess a significant marker beyond an erected piece of wood or stone, but several off to the left were highly conspicuous in this regard.

Four oblong rises of soil in the earth were quite fresh, as were the offerings arranged around them as a group. Several sticks of resin incense still smoked, and the melted , slowly solidifying wax rivers of a few candles stood out against the dark earth. Bundles of fruit, spices, and salt were wrapped in scraps of decorated cloth, each marked by a piece of bark carved with some personal identifier of giver or goodwill, in place of an entire written message. The visual arts of the village were more robust than their textual.

Abeni looked upon these mounds with quiet, somewhat confused respect. Why was she being brought to see the dead first? Once more seeking the old man's odd-hued eyes, she looked up toward him.

Grandfather Corpse was already looking back down at her, his smile lessened somewhat. But it did not vanish.

"They been missin' you terrible since the fiah. Ya maam, pah, little Dayo too." He spoke of the girl's baby brother, no older than four years by now.

The confusion intensified, and then turned to worry, as she looked back and forth between the mounds and the old man. The corpses backed off respectfully, as if they knew that they would be intruding upon a very personal conversation.

Joints creaked and groaned as the old man set his staff down, altering the angles of the shadows again dramatically. He set his flat hands with long, steady fingers upon the girl's shoulders, and he exhaled. Just as it always did, his breath smelled faintly of smoked taba leaves. He seemed to be waiting for the girl to speak first. When she didn't, he nodded his head and glanced aside once more, as if he were seeing and listening to something which she could not detect. He nodded his head upon that thin neck of his.

"Ya gotta go to 'em, Abeni. Me know it be frightenin', we awl do. But it time." With that, his hands reached past her shoulders, and he pulled the girl in lightly. One hand patted against her back as he embraced her, and then in the next moment he was twisting away on his long, scrawny legs and standing back up, staff in hand.

Abeni lingered on the three mounds for a time. She approached them slowly. She looked over the fourth, nestled between the third and the soil heaped up against the base of the fence.

She turned back to the man, tears reflecting the light beneath her eyes.

"Please... tell yuh wife me said hello, one las' time?"

"Course, sweet'aat."

"Tenkya."

Before she went and laid down upon the loamy soil, she snapped a piece of red-colored sugar candy from one of the offering baskets and popped it into her mouth. It clicked against her teeth, and the wind rustled the scorched hem of her dress one last time. It wasn't as soft as her bed, but it was close. She felt tired finally.

The old man sighed, and canted his head at an odd angle to listen again. The smile renewed itself, and he turned away. Knocking his hickory staff upon the nearest hard surface, he brought the still and silent bodies back to attention. They lined up like soldiers at attention, and then shambled forward on his instruction, clamoring through the place of restful death until they found emptied mounds of their own. The old man followed after each, packing the earth down tightly once they had clawed it back over themselves, all to the rhythmic chants of joro, jara, and joro.

Once the last particles of dirt were settled back down, he ambled over toward the gap in the fence once more. The staff extinguished itself with an almost imperceptible sizzle. With his free hand, he lifted up a length of hemp rope which tethered one end of an ancient wooden box, long and narrow, with one end wider than the other. He shouldered it upon one sagging side with a soft grunt, and then he trudged forward, back out into the mist once more.

"Ya 'erd awl dat, lub?"

The coffin knocked once in response.



((Ending this messy little amalgamation of ideas, I hope that the end of the last month and the beginning of the new has left you each with an affirmation of life. You can't have one side without the other. Happy Día de los Difuntos.))

Ekundayo (2/3).

Click here for Ekundayo 1/3.



The girl plummeted into the fog, and into despair. Surprisingly yielding under her weight, the near-skeletal arms which reached upward cushioned the worst of her fall, and brought her down quite close to the muddy forest floor. Hardly scratching her likewise, the chipped and gnarled hands of the dead grasped her only as tightly as they needed to, in order to keep her from struggling free from them once again.

Still, she screamed and fought and kicked her feet, completely unhinging one side of the jaw of one of the dead things after she had begun the work in their last encounter. Her thrashing went on for some time, in anticipation of what was to come.

But nothing came. She gritted her teeth and shut her eyes tight, body going rigid and tense.

Still, nothing.

One hazel-flecked eye cracked open to peer around, and though she found the horrific stares of each dead eye upon her still, their owners had entered an almost placid stupor.

It then occurred to her that beyond the range of her attention, someone else had been shouting as well.

The shadowed figure strode forward in a huff, a hand deftly tossing and then choking down upon the length of a wooden staff, which then rapped admonishingly across the back of one bare skull among the huddled dead. The butt of the staff squelched into the mud again as they each groaned and turned their necks, and then a hand thrust into view. Wrinkled, mahogany-colored skin overlaid with dirt and grey-white patches of ash waved back and forth as a finger was thrust into the faces of the corpses one after another, like a mother scolding her children. A voice halfway between its natural state of measured richness and the quiver of the moment's excitement cut through the dead air.

"Bad cawpse! Bad cawpse, all of ya. Treatin' a chil' like that what you be 'spose to help her. Now ya let the gal down, an' you make ya manners. Open ya hats now, boys."

As if by magic, each dead and vice-like grip on the girl relaxed immediately, and she felt her heels sink into the spongy earth below as she was at last let down. But the urge to flee was superseded by her sheer confusion, and there her bare heels remained for a time. She stared up into the darkness as she reached back into memory, and connected that voice with a name.

"... Gran'puh Cawpse?" She asked.

"Abeni, my sweet'aat. Forgive the old boys their behavior. Ya been so quick an' vexin' to us awl night, they gone an' got bothered... We been lookin' for ya." The sodden grass pressed to the sides around his knees as he knelt down before the girl, who was much shorter than him despite his hunched and somewhat shriveled form.

Just then, a light flared up in the figure's outstretched hand, opposite the staff of twisted hickory. It was a pallid blue light which emanated from little tongues of flame of that selfsame color, each clinging to a fingertip. They illuminated the scene immediately around them, and it cast long shadows upon the trunk of the old tree beside them. Sure enough, the familiar face of the old man with balding head and grey-tinged eyes was revealed, smiling apologetically at her. And flanking them, the old corpses now bowed their heads and groaned in unintelligible apology to the girl for getting so out of hand. She was sure of it now, one of the bodies had belonged to the old butcher's father, died last year.

Abeni had recently turned eight years old, and she'd known the presence of "Grandpa Corpse" in the village for the entirety of her life up to that point. He was the weathered old man who tended to the rites and the burial of the dead, both in her home and elsewhere. But despite his ubiquitousness across the edges of the mangroves, even to the edges of the cypresses, she knew little about him. Even the name by which she knew him was a title ascribed to the man by the observant and uninhibited youths of generations past. Of course he'd never objected. And now suddenly he was in charge of the undead, as well as finding lost children?

"Ya mam an' pah been worried sick about ya, Abeni. They ain't seen ya since the fiah, an' they clingin' to hope that you come back home 'afore sunrise, safe an' sound."

Her heart leaped in her breast as she heard mention of her parents, and she seized the old man's hand in hers despite the flames. They gave off no heat which she could feel, however. His lips split into a smile and he gave a chuckle in response, before nodding his head.

"A'right then boys, she be ready to come on back. Hngh..."

The joints in his knees and hips popped or ground softly, but the man rose back up onto his feet once more. The oxhide sandals he normally wore were gone, and his feet too were bare but for the mud on them now. The little candle flames in his fingers rose up like a group of fireflies briefly, before settling upon the end of his staff and coalescing to light the way forward. Hands held firmly, the old man led the girl forward, followed after by the quiet procession of the dead. One step at a time, they walked slowly, and the swamp gently opened up to them.

The trackless wetlands gradually became more and more recognizable, until at last they were on solid ground again, rising up past the edges of the flood boundaries where it was safe to build homes. The hard-packed road which connected their village to the next stretched out before them, leading them along the gentle serpentine suggestion which accounted for so many drop-offs or thick knots of vegetation.

She saw the whisps of smoke rising above the treeline before she smelled them. It blended into the fog almost perfectly.

At either side of the road, so many buildings had been torched nearly to the ground. Their wood and thatching had been damp the morning of, yet the stubborn spark which had begun the conflagration was persistent. Abeni saw the charred husk of her family's own hut, and the hazy smoke from its smoldering joined the smoke above. She gave a soft gasp and tugged at Grandfather Corpse's arm, and he obliged her a few steps toward that side of the path as they continued forward. Nothing remained recognizable within the hut's walls. All of their possessions were gone. But she didn't feel the pain of it, strangely- at least not yet.

Past that and other hulks they walked, until the fire's limits were surpassed, and the untouched buildings remained. They had been more widely-spaced, closer to one of the wells, and plain luckier. Abeni thought she could hear the snores coming from within them, as families swollen with homeless relatives staying the night tried to catch as much rest as they could manage.

And these too, they walked straight past. Abeni looked up at the old man's face as if to ask, but the old man's eyes remained trained on the space ahead as he gave the same assuring smile. He looked tired.

Finally, he came to a halt, and she did too. A moment later, after bumping into one another, the dead stopped as well.

They stood at the edge of the wattle and daub fence which marked the edge of the village graveyard.



((As you may have noticed, I couldn't hold an eerie note for long. But it was all for a purpose! Following up on Halloween, this post furthers the cultural mish-mashing by honoring the first "half" of contemporary Día de Muertos, so to speak. Happy Día de los Inocentes to all.))



Click here for Ekundayo 3/3.

Ekundayo (1/3).

((In an effort to move away from the scattered parchments piled up high on the desk of Roberick Litte's office-bedroom for once, I've attempted to get into the spirit of Samhain-Saints-Oween Eve. Of course I'm garbage at writing actual horror, so my goal for this piece is closer to instilling a temporary sense of vague discomfort.))



The quick, damp slaps of bare little feet through the mud broke the uncharacteristic silence of the mangrove forest. The fog had killed the stars and moon hours ago, and the frantic patter of feet halted frequently as their owner slipped upon the spongy earth or fell between the overlapping snarls of roots which formed little islands in the swamp.

The girl with the scorched and tattered dress was small and quick, but the sounds she made as she thrashed through the water and trees drew them ever closer. Her shins were scraped by the ground and her cheeks slashed at by passing branches, splashing her brown skin with a raw and bloody red in places. But still, she ran on. She had to.

She had to get away from them.

The ones who reeked of earth and death. Gaunt old things, with lolling heads and a lurching gait. They shambled on two legs or crawled on all fours, but they never seemed to tire, unlike her. Again and again, the swamp turned her around or snagged her, and there they were again- gangling limbs stretched out toward her and gnarled claws groping blindly. There may only have been three, but there may as well have been three dozen. She'd lost track of how many hours it had been already. Shouldn't the sun have already risen?

Did she even remember the last time she had seen the sun?

Skidding to a halt at the edge of a river, the girl craned her neck and twisted it around, looking up and down the length of both banks. The curtain of grey hid the far side from her, but the sounds which touched her ears from that direction were enough to turn her away. Another one had gotten caught in the mangrove roots, she thought, and it was breaking through either wood or bone in order to free itself. One had cornered her minutes or ages ago, only to become trapped amid the slimy old husks, and she had kicked it so hard in her escape that its jaw had unhinged on one side.

Now, as before, the guttural, half-choked groans reminded her of a dog being strangled. It always went on for too long, but this time it was without end.

Revulsion filled her and made a shiver wrack her body as she thought she heard some deeper familiarity in those noises. But the rasp of long-fingered branches behind her wrenched her attention away from it. She'd stayed still too long.

Its distended paunch looked bloated and hard, but the rest of it was loathsomely thin, so that it looked like little more than grey-mottled skin stretched tight over bone. The dull ambient light reflected off of the almost glossy clot of dark, blackish blood which anointed its caved-in temple, and a break somewhere along its spine ensured that this horrific side profile was always tilted and aimed at her. No matter how violent their first deaths may have been, nothing seemed to stop them. One listless, milky eye swiveled in its socket until it settled on the youth, and then its mouth opened wide- unnaturally so.

A dry hiss came first, stopping and starting as it gave a glottal stop to voiceless words. But then the death rattle rose up from its throat and echoed high throughout the dripping canopy, eliciting cries in response from elsewhere in the darkness. They were much closer than even she had feared, and coming from every direction. She hadn't been escaping. She'd only been hedging herself in deeper from the start.

It didn't dawn on her as she stood there, transfixed by the dead thing's gaze, that it had stopped in its tracks as well, so that not even its exposed knee joint clicked and ground as it audibly had before. All she knew was the stab of terrified instinct at the base of her skull, and it screamed at her to move.

So her feet pounded upon the earth, root, and stone again, and in response the thing's screech was cut short with a sound of alarm. She dove into the trees through a space too narrow for them to pass through, but now the cracking and yielding of roots was at the back of her neck. A sob passed her lips as she scrambled forward from the convergence of tattered things blindly.

Up ahead was another tree. It was massive, towering above the mangroves all around it. It was an ancient thing, broad-trunked even before the rivers had swelled and flooded the deltas. Its roots dug deep rather than lacing across the surface. It was also dying, slowly poisoned by the land to which it no longer belonged. But it was still standing, and that was enough for her.

Dress hiked up about her knees, she clamored up against the giant and reached out for a handhold. The rotted bark gave way before her fingertips, but in a moment she'd found purchase elsewhere. She pulled herself up, higher and higher, legs propelling her desperately upward with barely enough time for her hands to hang on. The thump of bodies against the base of the tree came as they reached her, but she only felt the dead air shifting and billowing slightly below her toes as their flailing arms reached in vain.

Inch by inch, she savaged the side of the tree with broken little nails until the light of a hundred glinting stars exploded behind her eyes. To her dismay, they were not the stars in the sky. The torn bits of scalp and curly black hair upon the crown of her head told her that she had struck the underside of a bough. She grabbed a hold of it, and pulled herself upward.

Seated upon the branch, she could see them in the mists down below faintly. But by their motionlessness, she knew that they could see her perfectly. Her eyes tore away from the awful shapes and looked to the edges of the clearing, seeking any way out of this self-made prison. The limbs and roots of trees all melded together to create a twisting latticework of mud and weeping canopies, save for the ugly gash where the shambling things had forced their way in. It existed only for a moment under her view, before it too was filled up by something.

It was bent and narrow, but walked with far more control and purpose than the dead. It had a liveliness that made her breath catch in her throat. Could it be? No, of course not. She didn't even have time to think the words. The glimmer of desperate hope became stillborn as the things of rot down below turned to behold the newcomer, only to regard it with more mindless moaning before returning their gaze to the girl. The figure halted, seeming content to do nothing.

She hid her face away. It might still be a dream. If the sun came out and she opened her eyes, they would be gone, and this would all be over. She clutched at the blackened, ashy patches on the hem of her dress and wished she hadn't gotten lost. She wished for a lot of things. She wished that she didn't hear the groaning of the wood underneath her, or the thunderous crack as the bough suddenly gave way.

The gangling limbs and rattling cries rose up to meet her, as she plunged back down into the fog without a word.



Click here for Ekundayo 2/3.