THE LOTUS WOMAN
There was once a lotus woman
wrapped and wrapped in layers of sea the colour of half formed sky
so beautiful a man thought he must unravel her to find the truest colour inside
that no man had ever before seen
so he thought he would make a claim for himself,
stake a claim in her skin
so that years after, as much as she tried, she could never get rid of scars from him,
the man
who pulled and pulled at her layers on some kind of quest t o find himself
as these are the ways of men who only know how to see their full skins in the dismantling of others
as he
watched her leaves fall to the ground one
after the other
after the other
until she was exposed, naked, bare for claws to rip into the colour of half formed sky retained
in her pores,
the moment he realised that he was complete
(without her)
the man left the pieces as offering to the ground
And ran jumping in self-exaltation at discovering himself.
He thanked the gods for providing him a tool to unravel on his quest
***
Shingai Njeri Kagunda is an Afrosurreal/futurist storyteller from Nairobi, Kenya with a Literary Arts MFA from Brown. Shingai’s work has been featured in the Best American Sci-fi and Fantasy 2020, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2020. She has work in or upcoming in Omenana, FANTASY magazine, FracturedLit, Khoreo, Africa Risen, and Baffling Magazine. Her debut novella & This is How to Stay Alive was published by Neon Hemlock Press in October 2021. She is the co-editor of Podcastle Magazine and the co-founder of Voodoonauts. Shingai is a creative writing teacher, an eternal student, and a lover of all things soft and Black.