those who speak in dreams | #ONC2020

With A Sound In A Quiet Place

THERE IS A MAN at the entrance of the village, all iron and teeth, and he is coming for her.

Beyond him, Death follows closely at his heels like a dog with its master. They are twins, in a way; a poet might say that Death has chosen to reveal himself in the whisper of this man's feet against the dust, in the way that he walks, the shifting of his weight from one foot to the other. A skeptic would say that Death has chosen this man as his weapon, nothing more. He will bring what is always brought, and there will be no escaping it.

This is all that Nkechi, She-Who-Swallows-Memories knows, knee-deep in the rivermud behind the village and beaded in sweat, but it is enough.

In truth, she had expected as much. There have been those like him before--power-hungry, greedy-eyed, wanting what they did not have in the first place--and they have come for many things because she has offered them.

That does not always mean they have received. Truly, a gift that is given cannot be refused, but that means nothing. It can be given, but it does not have to be appreciated.

A song can be sung, but you do not have to listen.

She is surprised, however, that he has not come before today. The way that his Soul tattoos a rhythm a hundred paces into the ground says that he has been waiting for a long, long time. He has wanted to speak to her, She-Who-Swallows-Memories, and he has been holding all the words in the underside of his tongue. There is a pulse hidden in those words.

There is a pulse hidden in everything, as well. On the inside of the ivory beads that are woven in her hair Nkechi's name is carved with a steady hand, and the pulse of the man who did the work has settled itself into the relief. In the threads of her dress, the pulse of the women who dyed it a brilliant white hides in the seams. The leather of her shoes holds the pulse of the tanner that finished it.

Perhaps Nkechi is not doing herself justice when she refers to these things as a pulse. A pulse can stop, after all. Whenever any of these people die, their pulse will go with them. The things that cling to what she has are not a pulse.

They are Memories, crisp and clean, and they will not fade. Not in their lifetime, and not in hers, either. Not in a thousand thousand years.

Nkechi lets the tips of her fingers skim across the mud's surface and traces a line of Memories from there to the water's edge. Fifteen years ago, a woman washed her clothes here while her son played in the river. Twenty years ago, two lovers lay skin to skin underneath a starlit sky. Thirty-five years ago, the son of the village chief killed his father with nothing but his bare hands.

The man at the entrance of the village has stopped to talk to the chief. That chief is the man that killed his father, and She-Who-Swallows-Memories can sense his fear in the way that he murmurs the traditional Greetings to this stranger, palms up instead of at his side. He thinks him a threat, and she does not blame him.

A fortnight ago, the chief was not in his own hut but in his lover's, a warrior long retired from the field. The week before that, he slept with a woman barely grown and forced a child on her. She will find out in another week or so, but two days from now the chief will press one of the cooks up against the wall and take her in a spasm of passion. Nkechi knows because Memories are past, present and future. They are things gone and things to come, and this is how it will be.

That is, if Death does not take him first.

She studies her hands, rivermud thick under her nails, and she squints. If she tries hard enough, she can see the knife wounds in the chief's father like a map to a watering hole--trace them from where they ended to where they began and you will know what killed him first.