those who speak in dreams | #ONC2020

And The Whisper

THERE ARE NO WAYS to take Memories from the living, only the dead.

This is what Nkechi, She-Who-Swallows-Memories knows, and yet there is a man in front of her, and he has come for her own.

His name rises up in the back of her throat, and it is on fire. She wants to speak it, and then she wants to make him choke.

So she looks at him, and he looks at her, and the very air stills.

She is the first to break the silence.

"I have five thousand Memories, each one of them different than their fellow," she says. "You have come for those, then, since you cannot mean mine."

"I do not think I hesitated," he answers, a coolness in his voice. She does not like the way it sounds. "I have come for yours, and I intend to have them."

"And I do not think you will." She lifts her chin. "You cannot come into a place that is not your own and expect to be given things that do not belong to you. You will get neither."

He hesitates, this time. "I always have."

Nkechi spits into the dust beneath her feet. "And that," she says, "is because you have either killed everyone who tried to tell you otherwise, or you have had them killed for you."

There is a type of anger, coiled up in the pit of her now, and Nkechi cradles Death underneath her tongue. It is a strange thing, how Death can be hidden in her mouth and standing behind him at the same time, but it is true. Death takes many forms. Even rainfall on the bow of a leaf carries his seal. A plant that has not been watered for a long time will drown from generosity.

Nkechi is not a plant, and she is not drowning.

Neither does she want to be generous.

There is an ant, crawling in the space between her and him, and Nkechi closes her eyes. In a moment, perhaps less, it will be gone. He, however, is not an ant, and he will not leave as easily.

Still, she wants him to. She is willing to do anything to have it happen.

He senses this, perhaps, as when he speaks again he sounds more subdued that anything else.

"I do not want them just because I can," he tells her, in an effort to keep her from leaving, "I only want them because I would like to forget."

She cracks an eyelid open, but just barely. There are a million seconds of Memory in that space, another half a million heartbeats that will split into fragments as she stands.

She closes it back. "What, pray tell, could be so terrible as to warrant a forgetting that is not yours?"

At first, she does not think he will answer. She has asked harder questions than this, and men have balked at less.

And still, he does. He runs a hand over his face. She can tell, because when he does little ripples of his Soul move out to meet her, the kind that spread when a boy-who-is-not-yet-a-man throws a pebble into a pond.

There is no need to open her eyes, not yet. Not when this man is as easy to read as a broken stela in the palm of her hand.

He takes a haggard breath. Two. Then he speaks.

"Too many things," he says, and she is surprised by the rawness in it. "But I am not here to infringe upon your village's hospitality by asking you to take all of them away. Just one. One would be enough."