The seven siblings sit in a place beyond the boundaries of space and time, where everything is made of stories. Even them. Especially them.
People are made of stories too, but only the versions of their stories that they tell themselves. Curated, limited, incomplete. Many of the stories people tell themselves are lies layered on partially-perceived things, to give their lives structure and meaning. The siblings who sit beyond sit true, for they are made of all the stories that were, that are, that are to come. They tell each other these stories, taking them out and examining them in the light like a never-ending self-dissection. They listen to the stories and as they do, they are made whole again. They exist in narrative equilibrium. In constant flux. They tell each other stories of what has happened, is happening, will happen because it is their function. They tell these stories because they must.
Sometimes, they sing the stories too.
Saturday likes to sing. She thinks she has a nice voice, and this is true. It is euphonic, lilting, mellow but strong, and full of emotion, so her siblings let her sing her parts of the stories when she wants to.
“Let us tell another story,” Sunday says, breathing the words out more than speaking them. He is the most knowledgeable of the seven siblings, even though none of them know why. He just is, because that is his story. He rakes the tight curls of his beard with his fingers before continuing. “Saturday, it is your turn to choose a story for us to tell and hear.”
Saturday stops playing with the thick, long braids of her goldspun hair. She is still surprised even though she already knew it was her turn before he told her so. She looks around the table, avoiding her siblings’ stares, and then she closes her eyes and focuses inward, seeking out the story she knows has a good shape, the story that feels right, like she is reading her own bones. When she finds it, the story she knows they need in this moment of non-time, she beams a smile and radiates the choice out to her siblings, passing the story they all know she has chosen for them to hear and tell. None of them react when they receive it, but they know it is a good story.
Monday, who always starts their stories, begins his duty solemnly with clear words, “Saura met Mobola at a financial management conference in . . .”
“Stop!” Saturday cries, holding up a small hand.
The shock of the interruption leaves Monday’s mouth open, like he is a fish removed from water. Sunday’s emerald eyes widen. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday crane their necks toward her, their gazes curious and hard. Only Wednesday does not visibly react because she is bound up in thick clanking chains, punishment for the crime of trying to change a story. The timestone Wednesday used to perform the abomination sits at the center of the mahogany table between two ornate pewter candelabra like an offering, or a temptation. Its emerald edges reflect and refract the candlelight in peculiar ways, making the bright orange light dance with shadows across the table and the walls.
Saturday feels sad for her sister, but knows she needs to be careful. She does not want to be punished too. Interruptions once a story has begun are mostly forbidden, although not as forbidden as attempting to change a story. The rules that govern the seven are both rigid and flexible, to varying degrees, like the rules of storytelling itself. Still, Saturday knows it is important it be done this way. For Wednesday’s sake.
She says, “Forgive me. But I want to begin the story near the middle. Please, can we? We will go back to the beginning but if we start at the middle it makes the story so much better.”
She pulses her story choice again. This time, she radiates not only its substance, but she also gives them its form and structure, the shape of it with all its contours defined. Not just what it is, but also the way she wants them to tell and to hear it.
They receive it as a stream of visions. As a kaleidoscope of images. A swirl of sounds. A spectrum of sensations. A babble of narrator voices. As points of view. As music. As song.
Sunday gives her a look that is both surprised and curious. Tuesday claps her hands with glee. Monday nods with understanding. He looks to Wednesday, the chains wound around her body like perforated metal anacondas. The chains are older than time itself. Saturday wants her shackled sister to tell the part of the story where Saura obtains the chains to bind the Yoruba nightmare god, Shigidi. Resonance. She thinks it gives the middle of the story the reinforcement it needs. Like a good skeleton. Everyone has been allocated their part of the story to undergird it with what is important for the telling and the hearing. The other siblings also nod their approval. This makes Saturday smile. They understand even if they don’t fully know her motives. But they know it is not just important to tell and hear the story, it is important to tell and hear it well.
Monday wipes the thin film of sweat from his narrow mustache, adjusts the collar of his pinstripe suit, and starts again.
This is the part of the story that Monday told:
• • •
Saura never dreamed before she encountered Shigidi.
For as long as she could remember, she’d never recalled a single dream upon waking. For Saura, sleep was and had always been a brief submergence into dappled darkness, her consciousness consumed whole like swallowed fruit. And because of this she never felt completely rested. She always felt lethargic. Unfocused. Persistently exhausted.
When she was eleven, her mother, who was magajiya of the local Bori cult in Ungwar Rimi village near Zaria, summoned Barhaza, the sleep spirit, to possess her. The ritual was performed, and the spirit invited into her body to relieve Saura of her ailment and give her rest. But despite their offering of fresh milk from three white goats, the rolling of her eyes in her head, and the convulsions she experienced when the spirit entered her, the possession was unsuccessful, and she remained dreamless and unrested.
Her mother wept and gritted her teeth.
Saura had the gift of sensitivity and was meant to succeed her mother as magajiya. A refusal of the spirits to grant such a simple request counted against her, even though there were other things that counted against her more which her mother would soon come to know.
“I don’t want to,” Saura protested when her mother announced that they would attempt another possession.
“You must.”
“No!” she’d screamed. It took her father two hours to find and retrieve her from the bush beside the market where she had fled to hide.
When Saura was sixteen, her mother tried again, ambushing her in her sleep and tying her down with thick hemp rope so she could not resist. That time, her mother begged Barhaza to not only give Saura dreams and rest but to adjust her subconscious desires, to make her stop looking at other girls with lust in her eyes, to take away her visible attraction for the curve of other women’s hips, the swell of their lips, the fullness of their breasts. Once again, the spirit entered Saura’s body, rigidifying her limbs, milkening her eyes, and communing with her thoughts, but when it left, there were still no dreams, and her desires were unchanged. That evening, Saura, wounded by her mother’s betrayal, ran away from home with nothing on her back but her jalabiya and the light of a full moon.
She only ever returned home once, to attend her father’s funeral. She refused to speak with her mother and sat with her lover, Mobola, and her father’s family, tears streaming down her cheeks as they lowered his body into the hard red earth.
When she was twenty-five, after struggling her way through university with the help of a local charity, and finally getting a job at the bank, she went to see a doctor in Kaduna City. He was an oddly-shaped man with a big head, a small frame, a protruding belly and a kind smile. On the brick wall of his office hung a yellowing diploma between two hunting knives, like a trophy. His degree was from a university she’d never heard of, in Kansas. He connected a string of electrodes to her head and took measurements on a machine that beeped a steady whine until she fell asleep.
“No REM sleep,” he announced, poring over his notes and charts when she was awake and back in the office chair. She’d never gone into REM sleep. After three more sessions with electrodes and needles and charts and uncomfortable sleep, he concluded that she was incapable of it. He told her she was a highly unusual case, prescribed a series of medications and asked her to sign a release form so he could study her more. None of his medications worked, and so Saura didn’t sign his forms. She simply got used to empty sleep, to never being fully rested, to never dreaming.
That is why, even before waking, she knew something was wrong that night Shigidi entered the master bedroom of the house in the heart of Surulere which she shared with Mobola. She knew something was wrong because she dreamed for the first time.
In her dream, she saw a small dark orb hovering above them as they lay naked in bed, entwined in a post-coital embrace. The orb was dense and powerful, like an evil star. It settled on Mobola’s chest and tugged at her flesh with an inexorable force like gravity. It tugged at Saura’s too. She resisted the pull of it, tossing, and turning and sweating profusely on the bed, caught in a night terror she could not escape. But she saw the dreamy, ethereal version of Mobola in her mind, yielding to the pull of the orb, being fragmented, stripped down to fine gray particles that were absorbed by the thing. When there was nothing of dream-Mobola left, the orb disappeared and Saura sank back into darkness. On Monday morning, when the heat of the sun on her face finally woke Saura up, Mobola was cold to the touch, her skin pale and dry. She’d been dead for three hours.
Saura screamed.
• • •
Monday stops speaking and Saturday gathers into her chest what Monday has said; each word is a bird that she swallows, expanding with it. In-breath. It is important for her song.
Tuesday’s pale face is unusually blushed bright pink, and her lustrous auburn hair seems to gain volume as she prepares to speak. She knows, has known, will know, that she has the best part of the story. The part that begins with lust and ends with something like love. Saturday winks at her sister. She has given it to her by design. Tuesday likes description and dialogue and the cadence of human speech, which is important in conveying emotion. A smile cuts across Tuesday’s freckled face.
This is the part of the story that Tuesday told:
• • •
Saura met Mobola at a financial management conference in Abuja just before the cold harmattan of 2005.
It was break time in between an endless stream of panel discussions, and Saura was standing by the tall windows that overlooked a stone fountain, its water flecked gold with sunlight as it flowed up toward the sky. When she turned around to go back, she caught Mobola staring at her from across the hall. The moment their eyes met, there was a surge of something intangible within her, like an emotional arc discharge. Saura smiled and beckoned her over. For two days they’d been stealing glances at each other, occasionally catching each other’s eyes. It was the seventh time it had happened, and Saura had learned enough of herself to recognize the surge, the feeling, the signs. She was ready. Mobola flashed her a sweet smileful of white teeth and approached. She had bright, inquisitive eyes with an anxious look in them. Her hair was natural and curly, and her wide hips strained against the gray of her skirt. Saura thought she looked stunning.
“Hi. I’m Mobola, I manage the Trust Bank office in Surulere,” she said. Saura told her she was the logistics manager for all the Kaduna offices and that if she had to listen to another discussion on foreign exchange approval procedures, she would go downstairs and drown herself in the fountain. They both laughed at that, carefree, like wind. There was something about the way Mobola laughed, the way she threw her head back, the way she almost hiccupped between breaths, her chest heaving against the cashmere blouse, the way she closed her eyes at the peak of her mirth, that Saura found deeply attractive.
They talked for a few minutes. There was a deliberate softness to everything about Mobola. The curves of her body, the cadence of her words. Saura was lost in Mobola’s eyes, unable to look away. Brown, big, glistening and full of a look which was a strange mix of sadness, grittiness, and hope. The look of someone who had seen the worst of the world had stared into the dark heart of humanity but had survived and resolved to live, love, and laugh freely despite it.
They pulled out their phones and exchanged numbers, laughing when they realized they both used the same model of Blackberry, a bold, and agreed to meet at nine, in the bar of the hotel where they, and all the conference delegates, were staying.
Saura watched Mobola leave, the sway of her hips hypnotizing her like magic. She could barely breathe, the air suddenly seemed thinner, oxygen harder to take in. She knew she had to be careful. If she had read the situation wrongly, she could end up in prison for years. Nigerian law was not kind to sapphic romance.
Saura arrived early at the bar and had two Irish coffees to wake herself up. She knew she wasn’t wrong when Mobola showed up and waved. She wore a blue dress that was so tight in her fuller places it could have been painted on. There was a gap showing between her front teeth, some cleavage, and a bit of a belly. Legs shaved smooth and feet encased in black pumps. Saura thought she was even more stunning than before.
They had three gin and tonics, making fun of the parade of boring panel speakers and the other conference delegates who pretended to be interested in the minutiae of inter-bank financial processes before Saura pulled Mobola up to her feet.
“Do you want to go somewhere more interesting?” she asked, finishing her drink in one gulp.
Mobola smiled at her, lips red and glistening, mouth full of piano key teeth. “Sure.”
Saura took Mobola to a club she’d heard about from one of the online forums she’d joined when she’d first started trying to understand herself. It was called The Cave and was a ten-minute taxi ride away. When they entered, it was into a rainbow chaos. Strobe lights. Colorful décor with bizarre shapes that challenged the very concept of geometry. Sweaty people pressed together at tables, on the dancefloor, on barstools, running over with feeling. They made their way to the bar, ordered shots of something the bartender told them was tequila but didn’t taste like it, and then merged with the mass of flesh on the dancefloor. Mobola turned her back to Saura and began to rock from side to side slowly, sensually, following the beat of the music. Saura wrapped her hands around Mobola’s waist and swayed with her so that they moved to the music together like a single creature.
Saura’s head was a cloud. In that moment, she was sure she knew what it was like to dream.
The next morning, they woke up in each other’s arms fully clothed and in the same position they’d danced in.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Mobola said.
“Good morning.”
“I had so much fun last night.”
“Me too.”
Mobola turned around to face her. “Did we . . . ?”
Her face was close, Saura could see for the first time that she had a solitary dimple on her left cheek. It was faint, but there. Mobola was staring intently, and Saura could not look away, lost in her eyes. Her hair had bunched up and tangled, pressed against the hotel room pillow, loose strands dancing in front of her face. When she smiled, Saura’s heart took flight.
She reached for the question hanging in space between them. “No.”
They were both quiet for what seemed like a long time. An unbearably long time. And then she pulled Mobola closer so that they were chest to chest, inhaling each other’s alcohol-scented breath and asked, “Did you want to?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
There was no hesitation. None.
Saura kissed Mobola and the cloud in her head ascended, rising beyond the ceiling and the roof and the sky, to the place where hearts go when they are buoyed by love.
It stayed there, never coming down. It only ever rose higher. For ten years, that feeling never sank. Not even when they fought and accidentally hurt each other and cried and made up and laughed like all good lovers do. Not when Mobola fell asleep one night and didn’t answer Saura’s calls for help after her car overheated and broke down on Third Mainland bridge. Not even when they argued about Mobola’s not telling her before applying for a residence pass for both of them to leave the country. Not even when Saura’s mother had refused to speak to Mobola at Saura’s father’s funeral or to acknowledge her existence. She tried to convince Saura to come back home, telling her that she was throwing her life away and bringing shame to the family.
No, Saura was always sure of the cloud of them. For ten years, she was sure. Through all the vicissitudes and the accusations and the arguments, she knew with all the certainty of entropy’s irreversibility that she loved Mobola and that nothing would ever change that. Not even death.
• • •
She is standing now. Her thin, pale hands are thrust out in front of her like the bones of a large bird. She’d allowed herself to become swept up in the story, infused with it, become one with it. And because she had, so had all the siblings. There is a solitary tear running down Thursday’s face. And Sunday has a glazed look in his eyes that makes him seem much older than his hair, gray at the temples, would indicate even though time is meaningless to the siblings. Saturday is pleased. They need this for the story. The emotion. She has taken in all of Tuesday’s words, the sensations, the feelings, all of it. Her chest is filling up with power of the story, and the first melodies of her song are beginning to take shape within her lungs. Sunday turns to face Wednesday, whose turn has come. Wednesday must go back to the middle of the story because that is where the chains first appear. Chains not unlike the ones wrapped around Wednesday’s torso, snaking through shackles that bind her hands and feet, tethering her to the stone ground so that the only parts of her that can move are her head and chest and most importantly, her mouth. It’s hard to tell or hear a story without a mouth.
Saturday waits, watching her sister. Wednesday has already received her section of the story. She just needs to accept it. She is hesitating, but it is not like last time when she rejected a story midway through and entered it, trying to change it—the crime for which she is now bound. The middle of the story is where the chains and the refusal to accept fate are waiting like familiar stalking animals.
Wednesday begins to shake and Saturday knows the story is coming. Erupting from the deepest volcano of suppressed emotion.
This is the part of the story that Wednesday told:
• • •
A month after Mobola’s funeral, Saura went to see a babalawo in Badagry, at the mouth of a waterway that kisses two countries. She hadn’t slept in days. Her friend Junia, who was also a colleague at work had recommended him, claiming he’d given her a charm that helped her deal with depression after a miscarriage. Saura took his contact details from Junia but hadn’t planned to use them. If Barhaza of the Bori, a spirit historically linked to her people and family, couldn’t give her rest then there was nothing a Yoruba babalawo unfamiliar with the shape of her spirit, would be able to do. The yellow piece of paper with his number written on it in blue ink remained unused on her table until one afternoon, watching traffic glide past her window, she realized that while he would not be able to give her peace of mind, he might be able to give her information. To help her understand why ten years of love and companionship and joy had ended at the speed of a bad dream.
The babalawo was a thickset man, with a long graying beard and calm eyes, who spoke perfect English. Three white dots were chalked onto his forehead, at the center of the space just above his eyebrows, and the string of beads around his neck rattled as he shook his head when he heard her explain what had happened to Mobola. When she was done, he removed the beads and threw them onto the raffia mat between them, rapidly whispering an incantation.
“This is the work of Shigidi,” he said with his eyes still on the beads as he explained to her that Shigidi was the Yoruba deification of nightmare, able to enter and manipulate the human subconscious, especially during sleep when humans’ grip on their thoughts was loosest. He could induce night terrors and sleep paralysis in his prey as he sat on their chests and pressed the breath out from them. The babalawo explained that Shigidi was an ambivalent Orisha, protecting those who gave him offerings but also often sent by evil people to kill those they perceived as enemies or threats. “You have communed with spirits before?” the babalawo asked, looking up at her curiously. “To have sensed Shigidi the way you described it, to receive a bleed-over dream when you were not the person he came for, that is very unusual.”
Saura’s eyes were wide with shock, but she only shook her head. She didn’t tell him about her mother or her intimate knowledge of the Bori or her adolescent possessions by myriad spirits. She simply paid him his fee and hired a car to take her home. But not the home she’d shared with Mobola. No. Back to Ungwar Rimi where she knew she could obtain the power to take on the nightmare god that had killed Mobola and find out who’d sent him. To fight fire with fire. Saura hadn’t spoken to her mother in more than a decade. But they were bound by blood, and Saura needed her mother’s help, her knowledge, to do what she wanted to do. Human families can be made of chains too.
Saura did not go to the family compound to talk privately with her mother. That would have been too personal, too painful, and would have made it too easy for her mother to refuse. She went instead to the market at night, when the moon and the stars hung low and most of the village had retired to their beds, leaving the wide-open spaces of the market to the members of the Bori cult. This was where the council of Bori magajiya held court and heard requests from the sick, the curious, the desperate.
She arrived at the center of the market in a black headscarf and cotton veil atop a flowing black jalabiya like the one she’d been wearing the night she ran away. They were already in the middle of a possession. An unusually tall man, shirtless, with broad shoulders and long wiry arms like a spider, was crawling on the ground, facing up, with his back arched high to an impossible curve. He was singing in a high-pitched voice even though he was foaming lightly at the mouth. He looked like he was leaking tree sap. Saura recognized the signs. He’d been possessed by Kuturu, the leper spirit, the healer of diseases of the flesh. Two men in white kaftans played soft music on white dotted calabashes. A girl who seemed no more than thirteen played an accompanying lute. Saura used to be that girl, the one playing the lute at possessions, before she was compelled to flee and enter the world.
When they were done and the man was helped to his feet by two others, presumably healed of his ailment, Saura removed her veil and made her request before her mother could completely compose herself.
One of the other magajiya, a plump woman with plaited hair, asked in accented Hausa, “Tell us, why do you want the Sarkin Sarkoki to possess you?” It was her aunt, Turai.
For Mobola, Saura thought but didn’t say. “I have been wronged. And I want justice,” Saura replied.
The third council member, a man with thick white eyebrows whom she had never seen before, asked her why she wanted Sarkin Sarkoki, the lord of the chains, the binding spirit. Why not Kure, he asked, the hyena spirit who could give power and stealth, or Sarkin Rafi, who would give strength to do violence which vengeance often called for.
“Because the one that wronged me is not mortal,” she said. At that, they fell silent.
The three members of the Bori council stared at her appraisingly, sifting and weighing her request. Her mother’s gaze was unrelenting.
“My daughter. I’m glad you have finally come home. Where you belong. But Sarkin Sarkoki demands a great price.” Her mother stood up from the raffia mat to her full height. Saura became acutely aware of just how much they looked alike. The same thin nose and lips. The same ochre skin even though her mother’s was more weathered, beaten to stubborn leather by the Sahara-adjacent sun. The same determined look in the eyes. “The possession is permanent. The lord of the chains will bind himself to you before giving you the power to bind your enemy. You are giving up your body as a vessel forever. What justice could be worth this?”
Beneath the veil, heat rose behind Saura’s neck. She did not want to say what she was thinking. There was too much pain in her heart threatening to spill out. If she let even a drop of the decade’s worth of resentment within her begin to slip between her lips it would become a deluge that drowned them all.
“It doesn’t matter. I am one of you. Heir to a title. I have a right to commune with the spirits. With Sarkin Sarkoki. And I have made my request.”
There was more quiet weighing. More sifting. More appraisal. Finally, her mother turned to face the other two of the council and they communed briefly before announcing their decision.
“We will grant your request,” her mother said, “but on one condition. Once you have had your revenge against whatever spirit has wronged you, you must return home and become a full Bori devotee. We cannot have a vessel of Sarkin Sarkoki roaming free. You will take your place with us, you will marry a good man, and you will bear children and teach them our ways. Do you agree?”
Saura knew this was what her mother had always wanted. To bring her back and bind her to home, even if she had to exploit a tragedy to achieve it. But Saura could not see past her desire to avenge Mobola, to find out why her lover had died, and to make their story make sense again, even if she couldn’t change its ending.
“I agree.”
Her words, like her heart, had taken on the texture of stone.
Her mother nodded and smiled, teeth cutting a curve like the half-moon beaming down on them from the cloudless sky.
Saura closed her eyes as a woman in a yellow jalabiya, cut like her own, took her by the arms and brought her to the center of the clearing where the two main roads that crossed the market met. The woman stood behind her, she would be her nurse if anything went wrong.
Saura breathed steadily as the men in the white kaftans and the girl on the lute began to play their music and the three members of the council, led by her mother, began to chant words she had not heard for years. Words that made the air feel heavy on her skin, in her lungs.
Saura felt something in her chest open like the blooming of a flower. She felt a flush of heat, saw a flash of light. A rush of charged air entered her, and then the world fell away as she was insufflated by the incoming spirit.
In the dark and nebulous place of her mind, Saura saw Sarkin Sarkoki.
He was an impossibly gaunt man, sitting on a stool at the center of the empty space. He had gray skin, and his limbs were like vines. He was bound up in thick, corroded chains that were tethered to something she could not see in the filmy darkness beneath, a few feet away from where he sat. A black cloth was wrapped around his waist and draped over his lower half; it pooled in cascades merging with the nebulous black ground below. His eyes were dark red, like spilled blood, and his stomach was cut open revealing mechanical viscera of chains and gears and roiling iron entrails. All over his skin, scripts were written onto him in chalked scars. He looked like a man that had been tortured and starved. He opened his mouth to reveal rust-colored teeth.
“You offer yourself as a vessel,” he said, already knowing why she’d let him into her mind and what she wanted him to help her do.
“Yes,” Saura managed to reply despite her trembling.
“You surrender your body to the chains.”
“Yes.”
“Then so be it,” Sarkin Sarkoki stated, his chains clanking and rattling as he began to vibrate. “We are one. You will have what you desire.”
The chains around him unfurled themselves and reached out to seize her. They were heavy and rough. Saura felt them wrap around every part of her, flesh and bone, blood and nerves, mind and spirit. The chains squeezed tight around the very essence of her until the world was nothing but chains and darkness. A full and lovely pain consumed her as Sarkin Sarkoki bonded with her, and it wasn’t until the woman in the yellow jalabiya poured water on her face and shook her back into full consciousness that she tasted the sand in her mouth and realized she had been rolling around on the ground, screaming.
• • •
Wednesday goes quiet.
Her siblings wait.
She takes in a deep breath and lets out a scream. It is at once a declaration of defiance and an accusation leveled at her siblings, at the family that put her in chains. Her scream is a knife in their hearts.
Saturday will not look away until her sister stops screaming. Wednesday’s face, once full of grace, is contorted into an ugly shape with lines like regret, but Saturday does not turn from it. She takes it all in, the words and the scream because that too is part of the story.
When the screaming ends, there is a pause as they allow the scream to settle.
And then, the story continues.
Her siblings’ words are air in Saturday’s lungs and her song is half complete. Saturday turns to face Thursday. His mahogany skin is pallid in the candlelight. The sadness hanging from the corners of his mouth and the salt and pepper of his hair, make him look fragile and small in his black fitted suit. He leans forward and places both elbows on the table, settling his jaw on the tip of his fingers, hands pressed together as in prayer.
When Thursday begins to speak, Saturday manages a smile. She likes Thursday’s voice. It is steady and powerful and full of purpose, like waves crashing onto a cliff, like vengeance.
This is the part of the story that Thursday told:
• • •
When Shigidi arrived, just before midnight, Saura was pretending to be asleep on an uncomfortable spring mattress in a spacious hotel room she’d taken for three nights. She was shivering beneath the duvet, because she didn’t know how to adjust the central air conditioning, but she didn’t care. There was a “do not disturb sign” outside.
The nightmare god’s arrival was sudden, and she felt his presence immediately. The dream-sensation of that small dark orb tugging at her subconscious with its evil gravity was one she could never forget.
She waited until he climbed onto the bed and sat on her chest, the weight of him restricting her breath. When she felt his probing at the edges of her mind, noticed a blurring and loosening of her thoughts and memories, she knew he had made the mistake of establishing a connection with her mind, of attempting to slip into her subconscious, as was his way. But she’d set a trap for him. The babalawo in Badagry had given her the number for another, less reputable babalawo who took requests for the nightmare god’s assistance from people with such cruelty in their hearts. She’d told him that she wanted someone killed in their sleep, but she didn’t say that the name she’d given was her own. And that the location she’d provided was the hotel room she’d booked. The trap was sprung.
She sat up suddenly and came face to face with the god that had murdered Mobola.
Saura was taken aback by how small and ugly Shigidi was. He was just over two feet tall. His head was too big for his body, and his dark ashy skin was covered in pockmarks, rashes, scarification lines, and sores. He wore filthy Ankara print trousers, and a plain black cloak that sat on his shoulders and ran down to the back of his ankles, with cowrie shells and lizard skulls sewn into the fabric. Black ash covered his face and made it look so much darker than the rest of him. He looked confused, surprised, a bit stupid and unsure of what to do.
Saura felt a flush of anger that something so hideous had been the one to take Mobola from her.
“Bastard,” she spat out.
“What is happening?” Shigidi asked as he tried to withdraw from the borders of her consciousnesses.
Saura did not answer, she simply grabbed him and pulled him into the darkness of her mind where her inability to dream had left a vacuum where the cadaverous and bound Sarkin Sarkoki now dwelled.
Chains shot out of the darkness and latched onto Shigidi’s small limbs, binding him to the place. He struggled and pulled but he could not free himself. Sarkin Sarkoki sat on his stool, watching and making a sound like laughter.
“What is going on? Who are you people?” the nightmare god shouted.
Angry that Shigidi could not even remember her face, she did not give him the satisfaction of understanding.
“You gods and spirits, you are all the same,” she said instead. “You think you can enter our lives and ruin them at your whim, taking whatever you want and leaving us to pick up the pieces. No. Not this time. This time, here is what will happen. You will suffer, like you have never suffered before. There will be pain. A lot of it. I will take my time. And even when you begin to thirst for death, when the chains have dug into your ugly body so deeply that they have fused with your nerves so that there is nothing except pain, you will not die. I will watch as you are stripped of every fragment of hope you hold in that body, until you feel as black and as bleak as this place, deep inside you. Maybe then you will remember who I am, and you will remember the person you took from me.”
As she spoke, the expression on Shigidi’s face had morphed from confusion to terror to something beyond both.
And when he whispered, “Why?” Saura silently asked Sarkin Sarkoki to tighten the squeeze of the chains around his neck until his head bulged and he began to choke. It did not relent until he blacked out.
• • •
Thursday lifts his head and withdraws his hands from the intricately-patterned mahogany table. Its straight-grained, reddish-brown timber was cut from a tree that once stood at the center of a garden that is not a garden, in the middle of nowhere, everywhere, all at once. He leans back and turns to meet Saturday’s gaze. She smiles at him, grateful for the way he told his part of the story which she has also absorbed. She feels it almost bursting out of her now—the song. She just needs one more part. The revelation.
She turns to face Friday who is raking his hands through his thick afro. He is the most reserved of the siblings and the one who likes the shape that secrets give stories which is why she has arranged it so that he can tell this part, just before her song. Candlelight dances in his large brown eyes and his pitch-black lips are quivering. He is eager to tell and hear.
Saturday nods and Friday opens his mouth, his bass voice booming and bouncing off the walls of the room in powerful waves.
This is the part of the story that Friday told:
• • •
Their bodies lay still and silent on the bed in the hotel, slumped over each other in an awkward embrace, but in the darkness of Saura’s mind, possessed by Sarkin Sarkoki, Shigidi was screaming. Saura watched dispassionately, refusing to allow him even a waking moment of respite, a single fleeting second where he was not intimately acquainted with the pain from the contracting chains. And with every scream, she asked him the same question.
“Do you remember what you took from me?”
He insisted that he did not know, and so the torment continued. Sarkin Sarkoki’s laughter the only other sound in her mind.
Almost twenty hours passed before the screaming stopped. Saura knew that it was not because the pain had ended, she was still commandeering the chains to pull and squeeze, and he was still writhing and whimpering. It was because something in him was breaking. Even a god can only take so much torment.
And yet after all the suffering, when she looked at him, pathetic as he was, she did not feel the satisfaction that she had craved. Underneath her rage was a sense of emptiness and loss and soul-deep weariness. She too was breaking under the weight of vengeance. And she already knew that someone else had sent him to their home that night because the two babalawos had told her it was the only reason Shigidi would kill someone.
“Mobola,” she blurted out, eager for resolution. “Her name was Mobola.”
Shigidi looked up at her, a glimmer of hope in his eyes for the first time since she’d lured him into the place of chains. He looked around at the darkness, as though he were searching her thoughts for something. And then, “Ahh . . . Mobola . . .” he croaked. “Yes. Omobola Adenusi . . . Lotus estate, Surulere. I remember now.”
Saura seethed when her name escaped his mouth.
“I’m sorry.” Shigidi breathed. “It was just a job. A standard nightmare-and-kill job.”
Saura shuddered, she knew how he worked, but she was too angry to care. “Just a job? You took the most precious person in the world from me because it was just a job?”
The chains around his limbs rattled as Shigidi’s tortured body sagged with the effort of keeping his head upright. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. It was just a job. It was only a job.”
“Who sent you? Who was the client?”
And as she asked that, Sarkin Sarkoki’s laughter stopped abruptly.
“I don’t know,” Shigidi said. “I just do what they ask me.”
“Then you must remember,” Saura demanded.
The chains tightened again.
“Please . . .”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” the nightmare god maintained, each word excavated from him was hoarse and desperate. “But . . . but . . . wait . . . it was a woman. Older. Not Yoruba. I remember she was not Yoruba. She had an accent. She was slender. Thin nose. She had eyes like yours.”
Saura clutched at her chest.
“In her prayer, she only said she needed to get rid of the girl to get her daughter back.”
A knot like an iron rope formed in her stomach. Saura fell to her knees as the weight of realization settled upon her. The lack of surprise when her mother saw her at the market. The insistence on returning home as a condition of her possession. The guilt in her aunt Turai’s eyes. It all made terrible sense to her in that moment.
She asked Sarkin Sarkoki to unshackle him from her mind, and Shigidi fell onto the dark filmy ground with a thud. In an instant, they were back on the bed, in the hotel.
Saura shot up and rolled off the mattress onto the carpeted floor. She felt the iron rope tighten in her stomach and everything constricted, like it was being squeezed by invisible hands. She felt like her insides were about to be torn and exposed, like the hollow clockwork belly of Sarkin Sarkoki. She threw up and began to cry.
“Ah. You know who it was, don’t you?” Shigidi whispered.
Her mother’s words tolled in her head like a bell.
My daughter.
I’m glad you have finally come home.
Saura straightened up and settled a long stare at Shigidi who was looking back at her with large yellow eyes full of pity or regret or perhaps both.
“Yes,” she whispered back.
“Family?”
“Yes.”
“I . . . I am sorry. I am truly sorry.”
Saura was surprised by the sincerity in his voice.
“I hate my job sometimes,” Shigidi continued. “But I need the offerings and prayer requests to survive. Please understand. I didn’t mean to cause you pain but I . . . need to survive. I never mean to cause anyone pain. But I . . . I don’t want to wither and die. I just wish there was another way.”
Saura was even more surprised when Shigidi awkwardly clambered down from the bed and lay on the floor in front of her, prostrating in the traditional way, to show respect or profound apology. “I’m sorry.”
She placed her hand on his head, and Saura and Shigidi wept together.
• • •
The story is near its end when Friday stops speaking.
And Saturday’s song is about to begin.
There are no instruments to be played but the air hums electric with a sense of music, in anticipation.
Her siblings watch, enraptured as her ribs expand, her diaphragm moves up, and her belly hollows out like a cave. The pressure of the melody builds up in her chest and there are vibrations in her throat, her mouth, her lips. Saturday feels like she is full of all the words and feelings and air that her siblings have given her with their words. Like she will never run out of breath. Like she will never run out of story. Like she will never run out of song.
Saturday begins to sing in a clear and loud voice full of energy.
This is the song Saturday sang:
• • •
She entered a life
She struck in like lightning
But was taken too soon
Beauty and joy and kindness
Mobola, lost to nightmare’s touch
Breath extinguished by a mercenary god
Oh, a dirge for true love
For an embrace lost
Where Saura’s heart is buried
A sacrifice to the essence of binding
The lord of the chains
Gave her the power
Gave her the strength to catch a murderous god
But gods only serve people.
They are made in the minds of men
In Saura’s mind the nightmare god revealed a secret
That the umbilical cord can be a noose
That family can be a chain
That seeks to bind at any cost.
How could a mother do this?
Oh, how could she not just accept?
How many tears must be shed to pay for this sin?
How much blood must be spilled?
It’s an evil way she has chosen
To show the depth of love.
Oh, a dirge for motherhood
For the poison in the womb
Saura swears that for as long as she lives
She will not let this happen to anyone like her.
The bargain has been struck,
The word-bond is made of iron,
But there are many kinds of homecoming
And sometimes gifts bear teeth.
Saura makes a pact with her lover’s killer
An unwitting instrument in a war that began at birth.
He will give her dreams as restitution,
To make amends for stilling her lover’s heart.
And she will forgive him
For he knew not what he was doing.
But grief and sorrow must be repaid.
There are many kinds of binding,
And even invited guests can come baring teeth,
If death is the price of her presence
Then let there be music and tears
As she goes home to share a living nightmare from which there is now no escape.
Oh, a dirge for childhood
Of innocence lost
She enters the village like a whirlwind
And blows her way home.
Her mother is sitting in the clearing
Where Saura once played Kagada with friends
Trust-falling into each other’s arms and singing
And eating hot tuwo under weekend stars.
Their eyes meet full of determination and knowledge
Tragic corruption of love and affection
Her mother strikes first, possessed by Kure the hyena
No deeper pain than to be struck by the hand that fed you.
Fate is cruel to set blood against blood
She reaches into her mother’s mind and ends it quickly
She gives her mother’s mind permanent shelter
In the dark place with Sarkin Sarkoki
Where she will always be with her
Trapped in the once-empty darkness now filled with hate
Bound together in their pain
Their new umbilical cord made of spirit-chains
Her mother’s body becomes a hollow vessel
Sessile as a tree and just as alive.
She has been given the thing she wanted.
Saura takes her mother’s place,
For a paralyzed woman cannot be magajiya
When her daughter has come home.
They are now always together.
In her every waking moment Saura hears her mother’s voice
Pleading, railing, crying to be let go
But every night when she goes to bed
She closes her eyes, and silence falls
And in the quiet of her mind, she dreams.
• • •
And so, Saturday’s song ends.
The euphonic cavalcade of melodies comes to a halt. Saturday is exhausted and feels empty, like a gourd with all its water poured, but she smiles because she thinks it was a good song and she sang it well.
Her six siblings remain silent, a rapturous look on their faces. They are still lost to the song. Saturday savors the moment. This is why she sings the stories sometimes. To see that look in their eyes that says she has given them something special. And for what she hopes it will evoke within them. She has told, she has heard, she has performed.
She turns to Sunday, whose task it is to complete all their stories, and she sees tears in his sea-green eyes. She smiles and nods.
Sunday sucks in air and lets out his words in a whisper that was loud enough for all of them to hear.
This is all that Sunday said:
“The end.”
• • •
At that, the seven siblings who were, who are and always have been, fall silent again and contemplate the story for a moment that is also an eternity. It is a reading of their own entrails, an examination of the essence of all things from which they are woven, and it is the most important part of the story—what it does to those who receive it. Its interpretation, its impact, its legacy.
“Humans are such tragic things,” Sunday says. “Little grains of consciousness floating atop an ocean of existence vaster than any of them possibly imagine, barely aware of all the other ways of being, of all that exists outside their perception. And yet their stories are heavy in our bones, written upon us with the brightness of stars. The myriad ways they love and hurt each other are fascinating. They weave such tenderness and cruelty with every fiber of their lives.”
He pauses. And then: “This was a good story. We told it well.”
He turns to Saturday, the lines of his face converging, his eyes wide and full of realization, of knowledge. “But why did you choose this story for us to tell and hear, sister? Why did you sing this song?”
“For the same reason we tell and hear all our stories. Because that is what happened and thus must be told.”
The siblings all echoed the mantra in unison. “That is what happened and thus must be told.”
Sunday smiles faintly, maintaining his placid countenance. “Indeed. But there is also another reason, is there not?”
“For Wednesday,” Saturday admits, brushing a loose, blonde braid behind her ear. She knew he would be the first to understand. “We are not human, we are not like Saura or her mother. We should not continue to bind our own blood so, regardless of her crime. Wednesday is our sister. Yes, she tried to change a story, but which of us has not been tempted to do so?” Saturday pointed at the timestone sitting at the center of the table like an emerald fruit. “Her actions were wrong, but they came from a good place. And in the end the story was not changed. The stories cannot be changed. She knows that now. She is certain of it. As are we all. That is the lesson of her story, and it is complete. Let us release her from her chains.”
Saturday sees the gratitude silently forming in the sides of Wednesday’s thin mouth, her soft eyes, her broad nose.
Sunday looks at all his siblings. Their eyes reveal what they want even though they are mostly bound by rules carved in the primordial essence of existence, rules older than time itself. But rules, like gods, are only as powerful as their purpose and the will of those who made them. “Do you all agree with this? Shall we free our sister?”
“Yes,” Monday says.
From Tuesday, “We should.”
There is a hopeful nod from Wednesday herself.
Friday echoes his agreement.
“Yes.” Saturday cannot hide her joy.
“Then so be it,” Sunday says.
Saturday leaps to her feet and lets out a cry as the shackles loosen and fall from Wednesday’s limbs, clattering with a noise like songs of freedom, like a sibling’s laughter, like the forgiveness of family.