only one alive among the five bodies. Najeeba sat down hard beside her. She rubbed her aching scalp where her assailant had pulled her hair so brutally. She looked at Teka. Her cornrows were encrusted with sand and her face grimaced with each breath. Slowly Najeeba stood and tried to pull Teka up.
“Leave me,” Teka repeated, looking at her angrily. And so Najeeba did.
She trudged back to the village, only going in that direction out of habit. She begged Ani to send something along to kill her, like a lion or more Nurus. But it was not Ani’s will.
Her village was burning. Homes smoldered, gardens were destroyed, scooters were aflame. There were bodies in the street. Many were burned, unrecognizable. During these kinds of raids, the Nuru soldiers took the strongest Okeke men, tied them up, doused them with kerosene, and set them afire.
Najeeba saw no Nuru men or women dead or alive. The village had been an easy conquest, off guard, vulnerable, unaware, in denial. Stupid, she thought. Women moaned in the street. Men wept before their homes. Children walked about confused. The heat was stifling, radiating from the sun and the burning houses and scooters and people. By sundown, there would be a fresh exodus east.
Najeeba softly said her husband’s name when she got to their house. Then she wet herself. The urine burned and ran down her bruised legs. Half of the house was on fire. Their garden was destroyed. Their scooter was on fire. But there was Idris, her husband, sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.
“Idris,” Najeeba softly said again. I’m seeing a ghost, she thought. The wind will blow and he will blow away with it. There was no blood running down his face. And though the knees of his blue pants were crusted with sand and the armpits of his blue caftan were dark with sweat, he was intact. This was him, not his ghost. Najeeba wanted to say “Ani is merciful,” but the goddess wasn’t. Not at all. For, though her husband was spared, Ani had killed Najeeba and left her still alive.
When he saw her, Idris shouted with joy. They ran into each other’s arms and held each other for several minutes. Idris smelled of sweat, anxiety, fear, and doom. She dared not wonder what she smelled like.
“I’m a man, but all I could do was hide like a child,” he said into her ear. He kissed her neck. She closed her eyes, wishing Ani would strike her dead right there.
“It was what was best,” Najeeba whispered.
Then he held her back and Najeeba knew. “Wife,” he said, looking down at her open garments. Her pubic hair was exposed, her bruised thighs, her belly. “Cover yourself!” he said pulling the bottom part of her dress closed. His eyes grew moist. “C-c-cover yourself, O!” The look on his face grew more pained and he held his side. He stepped back. He looked at Najeeba again, squinting, and then he shook his head as if trying to ward something off. “No.”
Najeeba just stood there as her husband stepped away, his hands held before him. “No,” he repeated. His eyes spilled tears but his face hardened.
His face was blank as he watched Najeeba go into the burning house. Inside, Najeeba ignored the heat and the sounds of the house cracking, popping, and dying. She methodically gathered a few things, some money she’d hidden away, a pot, their capture station, a hand game her sister had given her years ago, a photo of her husband smiling, and a cloth sack of salt. Salt was good to have when going into the desert. The only picture she had of her deceased parents was burning.
Najeeba wasn’t going to live for much longer. To herself, she became the Alusi that her father said had always lived in her; the desert spirit who loved to wander off to distant places. Once in her village, she had hoped her husband was alive. When she found him, she hoped he would be different. But she was an Okeke. What business did she have being hopeful?
She could survive in the desert. Her yearly retreats with the women and her Salt Road journeys with her father and brothers had taught her how. She knew how to use her capture station to pull condensation from the sky for drinking water. She knew how to trap foxes and hares. She knew where to find tortoise, lizard, and snake eggs. She knew which cacti were edible. And because she was already dead, she wasn’t afraid.
Najeeba walked and walked, searching for a place to let her body die. A week from now, she thought, as she set up camp. Tomorrow, she thought as she trudged along. When she first realized she was pregnant, death was no longer an option. But in her mind, she remained an Alusi, controlling and maintaining her body as one controls a computer. She traveled east, away from the Nuru cities, toward the wastelands where the Okeke lived in exile. At night when she lay down in her tent, she’d hear Nuru women’s voices laughing and singing outside. She’d voicelessly scream back at them to come in and finish her off if they could. “I’ll tear off your breasts!” she said. “I’ll drink your blood and it’ll nourish the one who grows inside me!”
When she slept, she often saw her husband Idris standing there, disturbed and sad. Idris had loved her dearly for two years. She would wake up and have to look at his picture to remember him as he was before. After a while, this didn’t help.
For months, Najeeba dwelled in limbo as her belly grew and the day of birth approached. When she had nothing else to do, she sat and stared into space. Sometimes she played her Dark Shadows hand game, winning it over and over, a higher score each time. Sometimes she talked to the child inside her. “The human world is harsh,” Najeeba said. “But the desert is lovely. Alusi, mmuo, all spirits can live here in peace. When you come, you will love it here, too.”
She was a nomad, traveling during the cool parts of the day, avoiding towns and villages. When she was about four months along, a scorpion stung the heel of her foot while she was walking. Her foot painfully swelled up and she had to lie down for two days. But she eventually got up and moved on.
When she finally went into labor, she was forced to admit that what she’d been telling herself all these months was wrong. She wasn’t an Alusi about to give birth to an Alusi child. She was a woman in the desert all alone. Terrified, she lay in her tent on her thin mat in her desert beaten nightshirt, the only item she had that fit her swelling body.
The body that she had finally admitted to being hers was conspiring against her. Violently pushing and pulling, it was like battling an invisible monster. She cursed and screamed and strained. If I die out here, the child will die alone, she desperately thought. No child deserves to die alone. She held on. She focused.
After an hour of terrible contractions, her Alusi moved forward. She relaxed, retreated, and watched, letting her body do what it was made to do. Hours later, the child emerged. Najeeba could have sworn the child was shrieking even before it came out. So angry. From the moment the child was born, Najeeba understood that it would dislike surprises and have little patience. She cut the cord, tied the belly button, and pressed the child to her breast. A girl.
Najeeba cradled her and watched in horror as she, herself, bled and bled. Images of lying in the sand with semen seeping out of her kept trying to creep into her mind. Now that she was human again, she was no longer immune to these memories. She forced the memories away and focused on the angry child in her arms.
An hour later, as she sat weakly wondering if she would bleed to death, the blood slowed and then stopped. Holding the child, she slept. When she woke, she could stand. She felt as if her insides would fall out from between her legs but standing wasn’t impossible. She took a close look at her child. She had Najeeba’s thick lips and high cheekbones but she had the narrow straight nose of someone Najeeba didn’t know.
And her eyes, oh, her eyes. They were that gold brown, his eyes. It was as if he were peering at her through the child.
