Akata Witch

Well, your spirit face looked… you looked like the sun!”

Sunny shrank back. “What?”

Chichi just shrugged. “So you felt like a ballerina?”

Sunny blinked and then nodded. “Yeah. All graceful and…” she tapered off. “I’ve always loved ballet but I can’t do it.”

“Okay, well-here.” Chichi reached into her pocket and took out a knife with a jade handle and a bronzed blade. She cut the air in front of Sunny and spoke some words. Sunny didn’t understand, but she recognized them as Efik, the language and ethnic group of Chichi’s mother. Suddenly, classical music began playing. Right above Sunny’s head, to her left, to her right, she couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

Sunny had always felt a strange, sometimes painful, pull whenever she heard classical music. It was part of the reason she liked ballet so much. Now that feeling was stronger than ever.

“Concentrate on the ballet music and cross the bridge,” Chichi said quickly. “Your grace will protect you from falling… I think.”

“You think?” she asked. But something was taking her over. She could feel that tightening sensation on her face. A languidness in her body. She strode onto the bridge, disregarding its narrowness.

She felt so good and confident that she laughed, thinking, Man, this is going to be easy. With her peripheral vision she could see golden points radiating from her face. Her spirit face had sun rays, too! She laughed again, feeling a wave of pleasure as the classical music hit a crescendo. She danced over the narrow bridge on her sandaled toes, once in a while doing leaps that took her dangerously close to the edge. She felt not an ounce of fear.

Beneath, the water swirled, pounded, gushed, and thrashed. She watched it as she danced, glimpsing an enormous dark, round face under the water. Whatever the creature was, the river’s strength was nothing to it. It was watching her. She did a leap for the monster, a chaine turn, and then a pirouette. She looked it in the eye, another laugh in her throat. Only a few feet away, the white mist swirled and gave way to the end of the bridge and whatever lay beyond it.

Suddenly, her confidence wavered.

The wind blew harder and Leopard Knocks opened up before her like the New York skyline. It was nowhere near as big, but it was grand. Huts stacked upon huts like hats at a hat shop. Not a European-style building in sight. All this was African.

She quickly walked to the end of the bridge. When she got there, something possessed her to stretch herself into an arabesque. The music abruptly stopped. She felt her spirit face pull in and she gasped, teetering on the bridge’s slippery wood. Directly below, she saw something undulate. The river creature! She thrust out her arms to keep her balance.

“Ah!” she shouted as she fell. Something tugged hard at her neck. Sasha had her by her gold necklace. He pulled her forward and she stumbled into his arms. As he held her, she looked back, tears in her eyes.

“Here,” Sasha said, helping her to a nearby picnic table under a large iroko tree. “Sit.”

“You okay?” Orlu said, running over.

She nodded. “Thanks, Sasha.”

“Thank your necklace,” he said.

“What happened?” Chichi said a minute later, after emerging from the mist.

“What do you think?” Orlu said.

“Oh,” she said. “The juju should have lasted longer than-”

“Come on, the river beast can break that, easy,” Orlu said. “It probably waited until she was close to safety to make the fall to her death more dramatic.”

“One of these days, someone’s going to get rid of that thing,” Chichi said, kneeling before Sunny.

Sasha laughed and said, “Girl, please. Anatov told me that monster is older than time. It’ll be here messing with shit long after we’re all gone.”

Sunny shivered, knowing they’d have to go back over the bridge to get home. It was already noon. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, she thought drily.

As her heartbeat slowed, she took in her surroundings.

So this was Leopard Knocks. The entrance was flanked by two tall iroko trees. They were slowly shedding a constant shower of leaves, though their tops remained healthy and bushy. At the foot of each tree were small piles of leaves. Beyond was the strangest place Sunny had ever seen.

She’d traveled to Jos in Northern Nigeria to visit relatives. She’d been to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, too. She’d been to Amsterdam, Rome, Brazzaville, Dubai. She, her parents, and her brothers were seasoned travelers. But this place was something else entirely.

The buildings were made of thick gray clay and red mud with thatch roofs. They reminded her of Chichi’s house, but more sophisticated. Almost all of them were quite large. Many had more than one story; several had three or four. How clay and mud could stand up to this kind of use was beyond her. Every building was full of windows of various shapes and sizes. Large squares, circles, triangles-one building had a window shaped like a giant heart. All were decorated with white intricate drawings-snakes, squiggles, steer, stars, circles, people, faces, fish. The list of things was infinite. Pink smoke billowed from the center of a large one-story hut.

The buildings were crowded tightly together. Still, tall palm trees and bushes managed to grow between them, and a dirt road packed with people wound among the buildings. From somewhere nearby, up-tempo highlife music played. She turned around and saw more people emerging from the mist. She stepped closer to Chichi, feeling like an intruder. “Maybe I should just go home,” she whispered. She thought about the monster again and cursed.

“Huh? Why?” Chichi said, looking surprised.

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

Chichi laughed. “You’ve got over a hundred chittim in your purse! Trust me, you’re very welcome here!”

She took Sunny’s hand and they followed Orlu and Sasha. There were a few people ahead of them. She stopped. Iroko leaves were falling around her, and as she watched, one of the leaf piles took a humanoid shape. It sloppily cartwheeled over to a man and fell apart, burying the man in its green leaves. As the leaves covered him, the man looked more annoyed than afraid. When the leaf thing took a humanoid shape again, a gun was disappearing into its chest.

“Biko, please!” the man begged, holding his hands up and smiling, embarrassed. “I forgot I was carrying that.”

The leaf person cartwheeled back to its place in front of the tree and was motionless again. Orlu and Chichi were snickering.

“Idiot,” Sasha said in a low voice. “What’s he packing for? I’ve got more powerful juju in one finger. Grown man probably didn’t even make Mbawkwa.”

Sunny looked closely at the leaf person on her left as she passed it. Even up close it was just a bunch of leaves.

“This is the forefront,” Chichi told her. She waved at a boy passing by and slapped hands with him. He wore baggy jeans and sneakers like Sasha, but she could tell he was Nigerian. Something about the way he wore his American-style clothes, but he looked Nigerian, too. Probably Yoruba.

“Friend of mine,” Chichi said.

“Yeah, Chichi’s got a lot of friends,” Orlu said.

“Shut up,” Chichi said coyly. “Anyway, so most of these places are shops. That’s Sweet Plumes, it’s a juju powder shop.”

Sweet Plumes was one of the first buildings, a double one-story red mud hut decorated with thousands of tiny white circles that gave it an almost reptilian look. The front door was round and covered with a silver cloth that moved in and out as if the building itself was breathing. As they passed it, she smelled a sulfuric odor, like rotten eggs.

“They sell good product except when you get to the really, really advanced juju. But that’s to be expected,” Chichi added. “By then, it’s best to grind your own.”

They passed more shops. Many of them sold normal stuff like clothes, jewelry, computer software, and cell phone accessories. Sunny and Orlu waited outside while Chichi and Sasha went into a tobacco shop to buy Banga