RED CROWS

Innocent Chizaram Ilo

 

 

     On cold, starless nights, when the full moon is shaded with red clouds and blue ice crystals, all the crones in Selemku sit around the Great Baobab and weave stories of a time long before women knew smoke, men knew fire, and children knew dust. They stay awake, twitching their lidless eyes, waiting for the moon to shed it’s warm, luminous flakes before they go into the streets to press their boneless noses against windows, drum their scaly fingers on doors and sing the slumbering townsfolk awake:

     Pain comes when the warm, red ball of feathers dies

     Subtle at first,

     Before it stings like pregnant bees

     The moon is so full anything can be

     Listen to our song

     It’s a dirge soaked in brine

     Don’t dance to it…

     It’s on a night like this that a woman, Odera, scratched her fingers on the door of an old cottage in the woods, a baby sleeping softly in the crook of her right arm, a bird croaking in the rusty cage clutched in her left fist. Three more scratches, two raps, a foot tap, and Nwilo, the Agaba Nwanyi, opened the door. She dangled an oil lamp before Odera’s face. They exchanged knowing gestures.

A sneer– “I thought you wouldn’t come.”

A wink– “But here I am.”

A squint– “You came alone, right?”

A sigh– “Of course…”

An eye roll– “Did you bring it?”

A nod– “Yes, here’s the bird.”

Another sigh– “Get in here fast.”

Odera hunched through the tiny doorway. Nwilo bolted it behind them.

 

     Nwilo slouched against the wall. A grey spider scuttled across her shoulder. She jolted and the wooden club, lightly clasped in her right palm, slipped and clattered to the floor. The red crow at her feet, a thin line of blood around its right eye, flapped its wings. Feathers scattered. The cowrie shells tied to its legs clattered as it moved, like a plea. Each faint jingle sapped the bird’s strength.

     Odera swatted at the moths shrouding the oil-lamp. “Is the bird in pain?”

    “No. I am draining its spirit.” The Agaba Nwanyi lifted the red crow and powdered its beak with ash.

     The bird went limp, jerked, and went limp again.

     Nwilo grinned.

     Odera clutched her baby.

     Outside the crones sang:

     Be silent and hear the spirit-children

   Speak through the muffled cries

   Escaping the lifeless throats of red crows

   Even that which is dead can sing the song of freedom…

     The Agaba Nwanyi laid the feathered body in the fireplace. She muttered streams of arcane incantations as she fed the fire with cow-dung, and wiped bloodied hands on an old rag.

     “You can sit down Odera. Sit down, the night is still long.”

     Teardrops slid out the corners of Odera’s eyes. She had never meant it to end this way. She had grown to feel a tie to the red crow in all those days it perched at the window, next to her baby’s cot. She would leave crumbs of wheat bread, parboiled rice and rain-water on the windowsill. At first, the bird was wary. It mashed the bits of food into the bowl of rain-water and winged off the instant Odera edged towards the window. Finally she asked her husband, Arinze, who had studied birds all his life, how to gain the crow’s trust.

     “Sing.” Arinze told her.

     And Odera did sing. She ran the scale of notes up and down in the morning, hummed odd folksongs in the afternoon, and wailed out dirges in the evenings. In time, the bird joined in. Then it was eating out of her hand. Earlier that day, as the bird slept hanging upside down on a clothesline, Odera put her in a cage.

       She looked at the Agaba Nwanyi. “My husband can’t know about this. He’s working to protect the red crows. They’re rare, disappearing.”

      “Hm. I don’t disclose the mothers who come here to anyone,” Nwilo whispers.

     The thick air of the room, sated with the smoke of the red crow’s burning flesh and bones, trammeled Odera’s breathing. She sucked at her teeth and stared at the ceiling while her mind wove a tableau of Arinze’s reaction if he ever heard.

       “Let your baby breath the smoke. It’s from her other half, the part that doesn’t want to stay, burning.” Nwilo adjusted the wooly shawl draped across her bony neck. “This way, she will stay because she won’t want the same fate to befall her.”

       Odera cradled the soft pile of life and laid her beside the fireplace. The baby cooed. Her soft fingers fumbled with the yarn of the blanket. When the crackle from the fireplace began to die down, Nwilo invited Odera to the kitchen for tea.

     As the two women sat by the whistling-kettle waiting for the water to boil, they eased into a conversation about the upcoming Bazaar and how the baker’s wife, armed with a rolling pin, chased the tax collectors out of her husband shop. Beneath Odera’s laughter that sailed across the hollow ceiling of the cottage, past the crow cages and off into the backyard, was the embedded awkwardness of things she really wanted to ask. Why were there Ogbanjes like her daughter — children who flitted over the earth, children who knocked on your door and soar your hopes after you  usher them into the world, children who have bouts of fever and die. To be born again to another.  Children who the only way to make them stay is by severing their bond with the spirit world — the red crow. She wanted to talk about how her heart crawled to the other side of her chest the day she saw the scar, a tiny silvery arch, around her daughter’s nipple —

       “She’s an Ogbanje,” she had told her husband.

       Arinze had laughed, “You really believe in spirit-children?”

      “Cream or sugar?” Nwilo asked as she poured the boiling water over the teabags.

       “Sugar.”

       The Agaba Nwanyi placed the teacup and a plate of gingerbread before Odera.

      “I had a daughter.  Udoka.  An Ogbanje. We were cracking palm nuts in the backyard and she died. She was five. I slashed my wrists and waited for death to find me. But my husband found me first. He saved me. Then he left me. Didn’t want to stay with a mad woman –“

       A loud screech from the next room cut Nwilo short. They ran to the fireplace. Odera’s child still lay beside it but in the smoldering cinders the red crow’s body was gone.

     “What’s happened?”

       “She’s escaped. Your daughter’s other half will go on to be born to another woman. They will haunt each other’s dreams. Now, you must leave and never come back.”

         As Odera left, Nwilo knew she could not trust her to keep the secret of what had transpired in her tiny cottage deep in the woods. She could not risk Odera running her mouth to the other mothers in Selemku. The Agaba Nwanyi went into the backyard, yanked a red crow from a metal cage.

     “You cannot tell what you cannot remember. Every time you try…” Nwilo cut a thin line along the red crow’s neck with the same rusty blade she’d used to slash her own wrists. “…you’ll knit yourself a maze of forgetfulness.”

       Odera’s heartbeat ricocheted against her chest as she ran home. Soon she wondered why she was frightened. Why was she running? She’d go home and… perhaps knit.

   …and we will all die

   But we won’t die enough

   The song dies on the crones’ lips as purple rays of dawn seep out of the sky.

 

     Ten years since the night Odera knocked on the door of the cottage in the woods. People no longer bought Nkrikonta’s agidi, having found out she didn’t sift her corn, the baker’s wife died during childbirth, the Town Council increased taxes, and Odera’s child was ten. Her name was Añulika: a sing-song of luscious happiness.    

       Añulika longed for nights when the full moon glistened on the grey-blue puddle beside the woodshed. She counted the days as they passed and stashed the memories they came with in the time-jar under her pillow.

     This day, as other days when Añulika counted twenty-eight, she walked around the house and whistled the day into darkness. Before she blew out the bedside lamp, she flipped to the page in her diary where she wrote:

   Some days

   you do not want to die

   because of all the days you have lived

   She repeated the words to herself until they calcified into salt crystals beneath her tongue. Then she slept, waiting for midnight when the Other-half visited her dreams.

 

   The Other-half pulled her spirit out of bed and laughed. “Hasten up, the Flame Forest waits for no one.”

     “Did you bring a light?”

     “Of course.” The Other-half brought out a bottle filled with glow-worms

     Outside, the two flew silently into the woods. They passed a stare of owls clustered around a pepper-fruit tree, a pony-tail vulture burying the entrails of its prey, two golden cobras slung across a mango tree, a cave dripping glass. At the Flame Forest Añulika and the Other-half stood close to the blazing tongues of fire.  She took the same form as Añulika when she visited. Except for the scar looped around her right eye, they are mirror images. Same skin, the color of wet loam, shallow dimples on both cheeks, thick locks of brown hair.

     “What have you been up to?” Añulika asked.

     “I died and left Bisola and Tunde.”

     “What should I call you now?”

     “Tafia.”

     “But that’s your spirit name.”

     “And what am I?”

     “Half-spirit, half-child.”

     “I will be born to an Indian couple in New Delhi, tomorrow.  Let’s play in the fire!”  She danced before the fiery yellow fangs then lept in.  “Join me,” she called. “The fire is cold without you.”

     “I’m fine here.”

     “Don’t be scared, you know this can’t hurt us.” Añulika reached out, took Tafia’s hand, and pulled her into the fire.  

     The flames caressed them. They scooped up the dazzling heat, shaped it into fireballs, and tossed them into the sky. They burst and showered down sparks as they hit the clouds.

      After a while, they sat beside the flames. Añulika told Tafia about the ephemeral wish for love that bubbled up in her belly and the verbal clanging between her parents. “It’s always —

        —   “Why must you always knit?”

         “I knit to forget.”

         “Forget what?”

         Then Mother gets puzzled and says, “Why must you worry about the crows?” —

         but I still love them. I thought you loved Bisola.”

       “I did. And her husband Tunde too. He locked himself in the wardrobe and cried when I died. He didn’t want the world to see his grief. But if I stayed, they would have found out what I was. Tunde’s mother saw my scar and told them to take me to an Ifa priest.”

      Tafia tossed stones into the fire and watched them glow in the heat. She talked about the families she has been born into and the mothers’ expressions of grief. Some dug their crooked nails into their arms. One threatened to be buried along with the baby.

      “I’m sorry for them, but, I get bored.”

      “Bored? You’ve been across the continents in these ten years. We are two halves of the same spirit, why can’t you stay, like me?”

      “I like to escape.”   Tafia looked into Añulika’s eyes. “Like I escaped Nwilo’s fireplace.” 

      The air stilled for a moment. 

      “Tafia, choose a mother in Selemku. That way, we can be together in waking life.”

      “I wouldn’t dare. This scar Nwilo gave me –” Tafia waved at her right eye. “She’d kill me if she recognized it. She’s still trapping our kind.”

     “When I use the shortcut behind her cottage, I hear the spirit voices calling and see spirit hands reaching out,” Añulika said.

     “She’s still trying to get her daughter back. Selfish woman should let Udoka go to our real mother. We belong to the great goddess, Idoto.”

     They unfurled their wings as the fire died down and flew above the houses of Selemku, their crow bodies skirring through the air currents. Añulika knew she would be dizzy in class the next morning if she flew for too long; still, she reveled in the freedom.  She envied Tafia’s freedom — how she entered new homes, gathered love, and flew out the door. When Tafia was born in South Africa, her name was Zukis, They would tread on the thin electric wires over the streets of Johannesburg and throw tiny stones at the boys who sold sausages from metal kiosks. Zukis died two months after her birth. When Tafia was born as Aisha in Sudan, she had complained about the ground that baked under her feet.

     “It’s too hot in Sudan. Air hot. Ground hot. People hot. War hot. I think God too. I can’t handle that much hotness.” Tafia-as-Aisha had told Añulika.

     They flew to Tafia’s former home, on a sequined street in Lagos, and watched Bisola cry into an empty cot.

     “The cot is soaking with tears.” Añulika said.

     “Of course. She just lost a beautiful daughter.” Tafia whispered. “And tomorrow I will be born to an Indian couple in New Delhi.”

 

    Morning. Añulika flung the sleeping-blanket aside. It was already 6 o’clock. She showered, got dressed for school, and went to the study where her father was snoring at the desk, his reading glasses still on. She removed them and kissed his head.

   “Good morning, Papa.”

   He started awake. “Añulika. You’re off to school?”

   “Yes. How is the Red Crow Rescue going?”

     “I’m afraid someone is poaching them.”

     Añulika wanted to tell him that the red crows were not only birds, they were sister spirits trapped in Nwilo’s nest. But she just tapped his shoulder and headed for her mother’s room.

     Odera was beside the window, knitting. It was the same lemon cardigan she had been working on for months. Today, she was embroidering a crow’s face, halved into a black and white crescent, on the cardigan.

     “Good morning Mama.”

     Odera nodded, smiled, and sped up her knitting, head bent over the cardigan long after Añulika left.

 

     Añulika felt nauseous in class. Ms. Adichie sent her to sickbay. Her mouth was sour, as if a thousand needles were piercing it, and her vision was bleary with blood. These things happened each time Tafia was reborn. Lying on the thin mattress, struggling to filter air from the acrid odour of drugs and antiseptic in the cramped sickbay, Añulika slipped into a trance. She saw a tiny, yellow-brown baby coming into the world and wondered what the Indian couple would name her. If she stayed would she some day have jet black ponytails like those Oyinbo women who sold natural hair extensions at Ogige Market?

       When the birth was over, Añulika rinsed her mouth with cold water and went back to class. She would stay after school to read up on India in the library. She would tie her fingers at night and remind herself of the Goddess Idoto’s warning against spinning time forward. She would draw twenty-eight lines in her diary and strike out one as each day before the full moon dropped off.

 

     Nwilo cast a furtive look through a crack in her fence before opening the cage. She knew no one passed that way except for children risking the twisty woods path when late for school or mothers bringing their Ogbanje daughters in the dark of night, but she checked to be sure.

    She rattled the cage, raising raucous cries and squawks from the red crows.

     “Which one of you should I use?” The birds fell silent. “Ah, you are all afraid. No one wants to die. Udoka didn’t want to!”

     Over the twenty years since her daughter died, Nwilo had amassed many red crows. Each bird bore the memory of the night the Agaba Nwanyi severed the bond between a spirit-child and the spirit-world. She has learnt all there was to know about red crow rituals that made Ogbanjes stay. She sprinkled the ashes of burnt red crows in the woods at midnight to attract other red crows. She learned to tell which were spirit-children and which were ordinary birds, casting and undoing an array of spells using the birds’ blood and feathers.

       “Now, I’ll have to pick.” Nwilo bared her teeth at the birds, making them shrink back further. She opened the cage, snatched one up.

     “Open up little Birdie.” The bird struggled as she prised open its beak. She nodded and simpered as she found a sapphire ring around the bird’s tongue. She pulled the ring off. The crow cried out and died in her arms.

     Nwilo studied the blue ring in the warm evening light. She sat beside a pile of palm nuts and spoke in the tongues of running rivers:

Leko leko

Abu, fimzi lotu

Leko, roombu

Leko leko

Abu, fimzi…

until she melted away, completely, into space.

 

     Añulika sang evening into the night of the full moon. She dreamed of wandering the woods. She whispered Tafia’s name and asked the owls, the pony-tailed vulture, the golden cobras, and the cave dripping glass but none had seen her. She went on, parting thorn bushes, going deeper into the woods. Red feathers were scattered along the path. When it was almost dawn, she broke their tradition and visited Tafia’s dreamworld: it was an empty room, save for a cot wedged against a wall. A baby was crying.  Añulika moved towards the cot but the floor began to cave in. There was blood. There was dust. The baby’s cry grew.

     Her spirit flashed back home. She floated still and woke, trying to quiet her breathing. Crickets chirped and bugs thumped against the window netting. She headed downstairs to the study. Her father was sleeping, his glasses on. She removed them, careful not to wake him, and turned out the light, before going to her mother’s room. Odera was sleeping in a tangle of wool. Añulika moved the knitting, propped a pillow behind her mother’s neck, then went back to her room to lie in loneliness until sleep closed her eyes.

She was back in Tafia’s dreamworld. Tafia was tearing through a foggy thicket. Spines and thorns snagged at her. Creepers and vines curled around her ankles, whooshing cackles and meandering footsteps followed her. A hand reached out, on one finger a ring luminous and blue, and like all beautiful things, it shimmered in the moonlight. Tafia slammed into a tree and tumbled over. Hands grabbed her. Pulled her. Pulled her into Nwilo’s cottage,

       “Udoka, it’s me. Your mother! Stop running. You’re back, you’re with me, back home again.” The Agaba Nwanyi planted a kiss on Tafia’s forehead and rubbed her tear-wet cheeks against Tafia’s. “What do you want to eat? You must be famished jolting from realm to realm.”

       “I’m not your daughter! Idoto made Udoka a rescue crow. She picked up ashes of crows you burnt.”

      “You’re raving.”

      “You captured her. You used your own daughter, you killed a chosen of Idoto’s, for a Dream Drifting spell! That’s Udoka’s ring you’re wearing! You killed her!”

      Like an explosion in her head, Nwilo realized what she’d done. She screeched. She grabbed Tafia and slammed her against the wall. Tafia crawled painfully toward the door.

      Nwilo took the rusty knife she’d slit her own wrists with, pulled open the red crows’ cage and slashed. A dark thundering stream of crows flooded out, swooping at her. Screaming, Nwilo threw the oil lamp at them. It shattered against the wall and the old cottage snapped into flame, the heat consuming everything. Nwilo stumbled out screaming. The birds rushed after her.

 

      “Añulika.” Odera shook her daughter awake. “You were screaming in your sleep.” She put her hand on Añulika’s forehead. “Arinze, she’s burning hot.”  

      Arinze stood at the foot of the bed, his reading glasses in the breast pocket of his pajamas. “I’ll bring cold water and a towel.”

      “Kedu ka-osi emegi?” Odera asked.

       Añulika groaned. “It’s as if someone is walloping my head with a club.”

       Odera grabbed bucket and towel from Arinze. She dipped the towel in the cold water and bathed Añulika’s face. Añulika groaned again. Odera wrapped her daughter’s head with the wet towel and went into the kitchen to boil Dongayaro leaves. When the leaves began spurting watery-green bubbles, she strained the liquid into a cup.

       “Drink it all. It’s for the fever.” Odera coaxed Añulika into drinking the decoction while Arinze held her hand. As Añulika fell asleep she smiled. It was long since her parents stayed in the same room, fussing over her.

     By the time her mother woke her for breakfast, her cheeks had stopped burning like the grounds in Sudan. She sat on the bed, eating utara and ofe onugbo.

     In the street there was an uproar. A woman running in circles, attacked by a roaring cloud of red crows. The street emptied, doors and window shut. Eyes stared out from behind drawn curtains.

         “I killed my daughter. I killed my daughter. Help!” The woman screamed and collapsed in the dust. Writhing on the ground, the birds descended on her, scratching her skin, pecking her eyes, pulling her hair, screeching in her ears.

         “It’s Nwilo. She’s lost her mind,” Arinze said. “Maybe she’s the poacher and they’re having their revenge.”

         The next morning, the townsfolk brewed rumors, tried to patch a story from snippets of morning-warmed gossip between those clustered around the baker’s shop. The crows ate her! No, they chased her down into the Bambu river and made her drown. No, she disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Someone said they went to the cottage in the wood and it was a heap of ashes.

 

      Odera rarely knits now. She spends time with Añulika. Arinze has stopped sleeping in the study.

       For Añulika all would be better than ever except — was Tafia safe? Anxiously waiting for the next full moon, Añulika opened the time-jar, picked out one moon-shaped stone each night and relived time with Tafia. She scoured through picture books of India. She tried to enter Tafia’s dreamworld but a wall blocked her way. She worried she might never see her again.

      But Tafia visited Añulika’s dream on the next full moon. She looked up at Añulika from the foot of the staircase.

      “Tafia! I’ve been so worried. I had a terrible dream about you.”

      “The Agaba Nwanyi broke into my dreamworld the night I was reborn in New Delhi. She thought I was her daughter. She was crazy, but her pain… that’s what I do to all the mothers and fathers when I die. Now I understand.  So…”

       “So now you’re going to stay this time?!”

       She nodded. “…They call me Shanaya. This mother.’s name”

       They went hand-in-hand to the Flame Forest, then flew to Tafia’s new home in New Delhi, gliding through narrow streets to a small house. They gazed through the window at a man watching over a sleeping baby.

      “That’s Atharv. My father. But we can’t stare at him all night. Let’s have some fun.”

      They flew east to Angra and took a fresh batch of roti from a restaurant. They perched on the dome of the Taj Mahal.

      Añulika rested her head on Tafia’s shoulder. “What is the meaning of Shanaya?”

      “The sun’s first ray.”

       Wind rippled their feathers.  They wrapped themselves in each other’s wings, promising never to forget their bond or to die until death came naturally. They would grow, marry, raise and love children. One day, they would meet in a crowd, somewhere in Lagos perhaps, and say; “I think I know you from somewhere.” They would exchange smiles only they could understand.

 

      Tonight is cold and starless and the full moon is shaded with red clouds and blue ice crystals, but the crones do not sing. They are gathering the story of a devoted sisterhood in their memory bags because stories like this do not happen too often and sometimes the singing can wait.

 

“Red Crows”,  © Innocent Chizaram Ilo; first published  here in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores on Feb. 18, 2019
Innocent Chizaram Ilo: In between receiving tonnes of rejections from cat adoption agencies, Innocent finds time to read, write, tweet, and nurse his fragile ego. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Fireside, Strange Horizons, Litro Magazine, Reckoning 2 , A Beautiful Resistance, Brittle Paper, SSDA, and elsewhere. He lives in Nigeria.  (Twitter: @ethereal_ilo).

 

Illustration by Fran Eisemann.  Stock from Pixabay, Pixhere, deviantArt, and creative commons sources used:
“Girl from Fulani Tribe” by Irene, Greece
“STOCK Raven Flying (with alpha layer)”  by Chris D’Agorne, UK
“crow flying stk 2”  by LubelleCreativeSpark, UK
“Crow 2”   by  SalsolaStock
flying crow pixhere.jpg   NAR
flying crow Clipart Library.png   NAR

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