Death Lines
Welcome to this final free edition of Nuzo’s Nightmare Pit, and I hope you enjoyed last month’s short story, The Time Master. The story I’ll be sharing with you this month, first featured in a 2018 anthology of horror stories by black female writers. I hope you enjoy it, and remember to share it with your pals 😊
This month’s story is titled, Death Lines. Happy Reading!
I
The taxi driver swore at the traffic gridlock, sticking his head out of his open window to hurl abuses at the other drivers blocking his exit from the service station. The midday sun was intense and sweat poured from his face, as if he had doused his head in a hot tub. His palm was hard on his horn, while his foot on the accelerator revved up the engine, adding to the total air of impatient rage in the cab.
Behind him in the passenger seats, the pretty woman glanced wryly at her two young sons. She was used to their taxi driver’s vile temperament. Ever since they got into the man’s cab, she’d been forced to rebuke the driver for his excessive speeding. Each time, he apologised, slowed down a tad and then hit the accelerator again. She was getting tired of nagging him and wished she hadn’t paid him upfront for the long trip to Abuja, Nigeria’s affluent capital city. Otherwise, she would have abandoned his taxi and found other means to get herself and her sons to their destination in one piece.
‘Idiot bush animal! Move your yeye rubbish car out of my way before I turn it into a proper wreck for you,’ yelled the taxi driver through his open window. There was mania in both his eyes, including his crossed left eye, which twitched with his fury. He flexed his bulging muscles, as if desperate to punch somebody.
‘Driver, just calm down, you hear?’ The young mother’s voice was tinged with irritation as she leaned forward to tap the driver on his shoulder. ‘I’ve told you we’re not in a hurry as long as we get to Abuja in one piece. Just be patient and let the traffic wardens do their job.’
‘Sorry madam,’ the man quickly glanced at her via the rear mirror and immediately poked his head out of the window again. ‘Where’s that idiot warden by the way?’ He shouted at no one and everyone. ‘If it’s bribery they want, you’ll see them loitering around like idiot flies. But tell them to do their jobs and the idiots just disappear,’ he made a hissing sound of disgust, kissing his teeth with his tongue.
The woman passenger sunk back wearily to her seat. The man was clearly deaf to reason. She glanced at her watch. Almost 2pm; less than an hour to the end of their journey in the lunatic’s taxi. She smiled at her sons fondly and the twins returned her smile, their identical faces filled with mischief.
‘Don’t!’ she said, her twinkling eyes belying the sternness of her voice. She saw the toothpicks in their hands and knew her sons were up to some mischief and she didn’t want their driver more riled than he already was, though he deserved whatever the five-year-old twins had in store for him. ‘Here, have some buns and if you’re good, I’ll let you play some games on my mobile phone.’
Soon, they were on their way again with their taxi driver eating up the miles to make up for the delay at the service station. Again, the woman admonished him for over-speeding and yet again he apologised and re-offended within minutes. Once again, she glanced at her watch; just 15minutes to go before the end of their journey.
At that instance, she heard a shout from their taxi driver, a scream that sent sudden chills to her heart. She glanced up and saw a great truck hurtling towards them, bearing down at them at an incredible speed as their driver fought to complete his rash overtaking at the bend. Even as their car swerved violently to avoid the truck, everyone in the taxi knew it was over for them.
A blind rage filled the mother’s heart, a swift red fury at the reckless taxi driver that had deprived her sons of their future by his hot-headed folly. She felt hate as she’d never known it, a dark, blinding hate that was the last emotion she felt in her final seconds of life. The woman barely had time to wrap her screaming sons in her arms before the shattering impact and screeching sounds of crushed metal brought an abrupt end to the blind terror in the taxi and everything went black.
II
Ada lifted her hands and stared at her open palms. In the small classroom filled with empty desks and poster-littered walls, she studied the pink planes of her palms. Yet again, as always, her heart sunk to her stomach, bringing a painful knot to its core. Her right thumb traced the rigid curves of her left palm, imagining dark lines that stretched from finger to wrist, dark life-lines that were the gift of every living person, save for the few cursed by fate. Like herself.
She was four years old the first time she discovered that she did not exist, that she was an aberration of nature whose existence was an impossibility. Her grandfather, Nna-ochie (Old Father), had told her to wash her hands before receiving a piece of goat meat from his soup dish. She had done a thorough job of it before rushing back to get her treat. She didn’t want Nna-ochie to deny her the delicacy because of her filthy hands.
‘Show me your hands let’s see if you washed them well,’ ordered Nna-ochie with an indulgent smile. Ada obeyed, proudly showing off her clean, pink palms. A sudden frown replaced Nna-ochie’s smile. He grabbed her hands and peered intently into her palms. ‘What is this?’ His voice was low, filled with shocked wonder.
Ada smiled, a wide proud smile. She had shocked Nna-ochie with her clean hands, shown him she could wash them as clean as if an adult had washed them. Bet Nna-ochie hadn’t expected her to be that clever.
‘I washed them all by myself,’ she said with a proud smile, waiting for the praise from her grandfather and her reward. Nna-ochie made a quick sign of the cross and looked into Ada’s face. Something in his eyes made her shrink back, confusion sending the tears of disappointment to her eyes. Nna-ochie wasn’t happy with her. She wasn’t going to get her goat meat after all. She started sobbing, at first softly, and then into a full-blown howl when Nna-ochie’s grip on her wrists tightened, hurting.
‘It is well that you cry, child,’ said Nna-ochie with a voice filled with pity. The same pity was reflected in his deep, dark eyes, shielded by bushy, grey brows. Her mother had rushed into the veranda at the sound of her cries, her brows creased with worry. Nna-ochie had looked up at Mama. ‘Woman, did you never notice that your daughter’s palms are totally devoid of Akala-Aka, life-lines?’
Her mother had looked down at her, grabbing her hands from Nna-ochie and staring into them. A furtive look of exposed shame replaced the earlier worry-lines on her face. Her mother’s face killed Ada’s wails, sending a different type of panic to her heart. Mama was security, love, everything good. If Mama wasn’t happy about something, then something was very wrong, badly wrong.
‘Mama….?’ Her voice was hesitant, almost a whisper.
‘Sshh… it’s alright child; you’ll be just fine. Everything is alright,’ Mama hugged her close, wiping her tears with the edge of her cotton wrapper.
‘Are you stupid, woman?’ roared Nna-ochie, rising from his wooden chair, towering over Mama as he towered over everybody in the compound. ‘How can you tell the child that everything is alright when you can clearly see that she has no future? Here, look at my palms,’ Nna-ochie opened his hands wide.
Ada stared goggle-eyed at the exposed palms which weren’t as pink as her own. She’d never noticed how ugly Nna-ochie’s palms were with all those horrible black lines running across them. She looked down at her own smooth, pink palms, clear of lines, clean and nice.
‘Show me your palms, woman,’ Nna-ochie’s voice brought Ada’s attention back to her mother. Mama raised her palms, her actions slow, reluctant, as if she were being asked to part with her Naira banknotes. ‘What do you see in your palms, eh?’ Nna-ochie questioned. ‘What will you see in the palms of every member in this family and in fact, every member of humanity if you look? Akala-Aka, that’s what. Akala-Aka, palm-lines, the life-lines of humanity which determines our destiny, whether we shall live long or die young, whether we shall be rich or poor, whether we shall live a healthy or sickly life. Each line has its own message, its own destiny for us.”
Nna-ochie’s voice was stentorian, like a teacher teaching an obtuse child a lesson. When next he spoke, his voice was harsh, even angry.
‘Yet, this poor child has no lines, not a single life-line on her palms. She has no destiny, no future. We do not know where she has come from or where she will go…when she will go. Her life, as it is, hangs on a thread, a very thin thread that can snap at any second because she shouldn’t be here in the first place. May the gods help her, for only the gods can help that which they have cursed.’
Ada had stared in horror at her palms, palms which until then she had thought were beautiful and nice; palms which she now knew were cursed. Mama was weeping, a mixture of sadness and helpless fury. Unable to swear at the fearsome patriarch for the pain he had wrought in her little daughter, Mama had done the best she could.
‘There is nothing wrong with your palms, my child,’ Mama had repeated that mantra to Ada throughout her childhood, right up to the time she died from a virulent strain of malaria three years ago, when Ada turned twenty-six years. But the damage had been done; the dark prophecy pronounced by Nna-ochie into her child’s ears had left its mark in her soul, just like the invisible death-lines running underneath her smooth palms. She felt the shadow of death hovering over her at every corner, waiting for the slightest error on her part, a slack in watchfulness, a weak chink in her amour to pounce on her and drag her into the unknown realms of her unknown ancestors—But she had been careful, very careful.
When her eyesight began to go and everything developed a distinct fuzziness in her teens, she had quickly obtained a pair of prescription glasses. She would not tumble into her death because she did not see it coming. When her mates all rushed into marriage in their late teens, she had spurned the advances of her suitors with ease. She dared not risk marriage and the attendant childbirth that accompanied it—Did any day go by without hearing of yet another young mother that had died in childbirth? So, she’d chosen a career working within the safety of the classroom with the very children she detested as much as she’d detested her late grandfather, children who had made her life a misery in the playground because of her cursed palms.
Ada sighed, deeply, and got up from her teacher’s table, picking her satchel before heading out of the classroom. Her head throbbed, and her eyes squinted in the intense afternoon sun as she waited at the main road for the bus to take her back to her bedsit at the other end of the city. Just then, a black Mercedes Benz cruised to a stop in front of her. The windows rolled down and the driver smiled at her.
‘Would you like a lift?’ He asked, his voice deep and quiet. Ada looked at him, prepared to tell him to get lost, when her eyes met his and something jolted her chest, drying up her mouth. She stared at his thick grey hair, the deep grooves by his jawline, the sad depths of his dark eyes, and something inside her opened up to him in a way it had never done with anybody since Mama.
‘Thank you,’ Ada said, her voice rusty, like one with a cough. ‘I’m going to Emene. It’s a bit out of the way.’
‘No problems. Hop in,’ smiled the man, leaning over to open the front passenger door for her. Ada got in and sank into the luxurious coolness of the air-conditioned car. ‘My name is Obi,’ the man stretched his arm for a handshake.
Ada took his hand, careful to hide her palms as she had always done, so he wouldn’t see the absence of Akala-Aka. His hand was cool, hard, just like his face. When she looked into his eyes though, they seemed to hold the sorrows of the entire universe in their dark depth. Ada placed him in his sixties, old enough to be her father. She found him strangely attractive, yet, she didn’t feel towards him like a woman should feel towards a man she desired. She struggled to define what she felt for him and failed. Still, the conversation flowed easily between them inside the cool luxury of his Merc and by the time he dropped her off at her street, she knew she had made a new and lasting friend.
III
Over the months, their friendship blossomed as if they had known each other for years, despite the thirty-five years difference between them. And when he asked her to marry him almost a year to their first meeting, Ada did not hesitate to accept his proposal. Her friends and family thought she was crazy.
‘The man is a widower who had lost his wife and two young sons in a terrible car crash over thirty years gone, even before you were born,’ they said.
They told her that Obi had mourned their loss with an intensity that bordered on insanity. As an only son himself, the deaths of his twin sons meant that their family bloodline would be wiped out of existence should Obi die without children. Since the tragedy, he had married three times and each time, his wives had left him as they could not get pregnant by him. It was as if his sperm had died with his family, since all his ex-wives were now re-married with kids of their own.
‘Why would you want to yoke yourself to such an old man who can’t give you kids of your own?’ they asked with baffled incredulity.
‘For that precise reason,’ Ada wanted to tell them but kept her peace. With Obi, she would fulfill society’s expectation of marriage with all the respectability that it conferred on a woman. She would equally escape the community’s scorn for being childless in her marriage, since it was common knowledge that Obi was a man with soured seeds that could never impregnate a woman. In fact, some people began to wonder if his dead sons had truly been his or if his late wife, Stella, a famous beauty, had played false by him.
In the end, people decided Ada was nothing more than a heartless gold-digger, marrying Obi purely for his wealth. She left them to their thoughts, secure in her knowledge that her marriage to Obi would save her from the mortal dangers of childbirth and the curse of her Akala-aka.
IV
She found out she was pregnant six months into her marriage. The shock of the pregnancy almost ruined both her sanity and her marriage. Obi’s initial shock had turned into incredulous ecstasy when he found out that she was expecting twins. His unbridled bliss sent her resentment soaring, harvesting bitter thoughts in her mind—How could he be happy when he knew her story, when he knew how terrified she was of dying in childbirth, how petrified she was of the doomed message of her Akala-Aka?
When the dreams started in her seventh month of pregnancy, she kept them to herself—How could she tell Obi that she dreamt of his dead twin sons every night, boys she only knew by their smiling photos on the walls of his house, yet, were now an intimate part of her dream-life? How could she tell him that she was seeing endless streams of blood everywhere she looked, her blood, his dead sons’ blood, the blood of her unborn twins, who in all likelihood would not survive the birthing ritual with her?
Ada knew her time was up. The dreams were the dark omens whose arrival she’d dreaded all her life; the secret message from the gods that her extended holiday amongst humanity was finally at an end. She didn’t bother shopping for the babies in her womb. What was the use when they were following her to her doom?
Her water broke two weeks before her due date. Obi rushed her into the best hospital in the city. The twins were in breach position. She would die without an immediate Caesarean. As they wheeled her into the theatre, she took her final look at Obi, her pain-glazed eyes refuting the reassurance in his kind eyes. Within minutes, the anaesthetist placed the mask over her mouth and nose and asked her to take a deep breath. She didn’t want to obey. Now that death had finally come, she was desperate to cling to life, even a life she had no business living, a life she had stumbled into by some weird trick of fate. She shook her head, holding her breath till she could hold it no longer. With dark despair, she raised her palms for one final look at her accursed palms, opened her mouth, and inhaled the gas. And everything went black.
V
He’s in a white car, his special taxi he got with the large pay-out he received from that vile little girl’s rich parents after she falsely accused him of molesting her and effectively ended his teaching career. Even though he’d been found innocent, the stigma is still there and he has constant nightmares of being tried all over again in a special court run by toys and children with the words, “Guilty! Guilty!” shrilled into his ears by the gleeful little bastards. Thankfully, he now works for himself, driving passengers across the country when not working out at the gym, bulking up his muscles. Best of all, he rarely has any contact with idiot kids, which suits him just fine.
He smiles in happiness as he struts his way to the taxi booking office, flexing the bulging muscles of his arms with pride. They tell him a woman has paid to be transported to Abuja, Nigeria’s affluent capital city, as a private passenger. Big money! It means he can make a double trip in one day and earn more money. He pockets the fee and heads out to his white taxi to await his fare.
His fare turns up, together with two miserable kids. His heart sinks—Shit! No one said anything about idiot kids, just a private passenger. He wants to return the money but knows it would consign him to the back of the booking queue. He’ll just have to deal with the idiot kids, stomach their high-pitched screeching—Whiney little beasts. He dumps their stuff into the boot and gets behind the wheel. They set off.
The boys start fighting, just as he’s been dreading. Their shrill voices grate his nerves. He turns on the music, loud. The woman complains. He lowers the volume and presses harder on the accelerator. The sooner he gets rid of them the happier they’ll all be. Again, the woman complains about his speeding. He should have known she would be a moaner the minute he saw her pretty face. Pretty women have a natural proclivity to moan and bitch about everything because they think the world owes them a living just for being beautiful. Shit!
A sudden vile smell fouls up his car. One of the disgusting little devils has farted, another thing he’s been dreading. The little idiots just can’t plug their stinking arseholes, dispensing their polluted air with gleeful pride, as if the world is waiting for a chance to inhale their noxious fumes. And see the idiot woman smiling as she pretends to tell them off.
He winds down his window and presses harder on the accelerator once again. His taxi is in desperate need of fresh air. The idiot woman taps him on the shoulders and bitches on again about his speeding. He eases off the pedal, grinding his teeth. Soon, he hears the little shit-machines telling their mother they need the toilet. He prays they don’t do it in his cab.
He hits his pedal. The quicker he gets them to a service station the quicker they can dump their shit and hopefully give him a stink-free ride for the rest of their journey.
But is the woman grateful for his speeding to get her brats to a toilet? Hell no! Instead, she taps him again on the shoulder and whines, “We’re not in any rush you know. Just slow down and take it easy, ok?”
Again, he grinds his teeth and bites his tongue—Fucking passenger is always fucking right. His patience is at an all-time low when they decide to do some last-minute shopping at the service station after shitting, eating, shopping, and then stuffing their faces all over again. At the rate they’re going, he can’t see himself squeezing in two trips as he’s planned. Fuck!
The sun is bearing down on him and the taxi feels like a hot funnel. He curses his bad luck for forgetting to top up his air-conditioning gas. It’d worked perfectly till they got to the service station. The woman hasn’t stopped moaning about the fact that she paid for an air-conditioned taxi and now has to cope with the heat.
He winds down the windows again and picks up speed to bring in more air into the car to cool them all. Yet again, the Moaner-Lisa moans about his speeding and the little brats join in too. What’s new? He mouths another apology and carries on with what he’s doing—It’s his fucking car after all and he’s the fucking driver.
He feels something prick his neck and winces. He glances back and sees a smirk on the faces of the boys. He frowns at them and swears under his breath. Their mother tells them to behave. She doesn’t sound as if she means it. In fact, she’s smiling at them. His blood boils. Fuck them! He’ll drive as he likes and get them off his taxi as quickly as he can.
He honks his horn at the car in front, a slow car that’s labouring under the weight of passenger overload. The car ignores him. He cuts in to overtake. That’s when he sees the lorry hurtling down towards them.
In an instant, everything flashes before his eyes—faces, places, dreams, and despair. They all crowd his mind’s eye in those final fateful seconds. He hears her voice behind him. She’s screaming, cursing him; her voice is full of rage.
‘You’ll pay for what you’ve done to us!’ she shrieks, her eyes wild, dark with fury and hate. ‘Devil man, I’ll make you suffer, I’ll make you weep blood-tears for what you’ve done to us, I swear on my eternal soul!’
He hears her voice drowning out the screech of the tyres and the clash of metals. Suddenly, there’s a searing pain, swift, hot. And then, all is silent.
When next he opens his eyes, he’s floating, looking down at the wreck of what was once his proud white taxi. Four bloodied and mangled bodies are trapped within its twisted metal, four still bodies. Except, one of them is moving, the woman, breaking free from her crushed corpse, elevating, flying, seeking him, finding him. She’s screeching at him as she zooms in his direction. Her shriek is a raging curse that strikes terror in his heart.
‘Devil man, you will give back that which you took; you will give back that which you stole.’
Terror douses him in icy chills. He screams and takes flight.
Then the pursuit begins.
In an instant, he feels arms around him, soft arms, yet strong, steely, relentless. They clasp him around the waist and will not let go. He tries to shrug them off, unclasp the metal bands around his midriff. But all he hears are her wild laughter, her mockery, and worst of all, her fury.
‘Devil man, I’ll make you pay,’ she screams, holding fast to him with vengeful arms. ‘I’ll make you give back my sons you stole.’
She becomes his dark shadow, glued to him in hate and fury. She follows him through countless reincarnations, aborted returns, leaving in their wake a litter of infant corpses and corpsed foetuses. For, what baby can carry the weight of two raging souls, cursed to ride their joint destiny in eternal violent combat?
He asks her forgiveness—countless times; he pleads with her to set him free. Without her forgiveness, he is denied entry into the realm of his ancestors for a rebirth into his own clan.
But her hate is too dark, a black curse on him that rejects the light of mercy. She’s happy to share his torture, his multiple and abortive reincarnations, so long as she’s making him suffer. She does not care about the trail of dead infants they leave in their wake, the pain, and the wrecked lives of countless grieving mothers. Her voice continues to screech her fury inside his ears, giving him no rest, no peace.
Then the incredible happens. One day…one night…he’s not sure; time no longer means anything to him… he finds himself inside the body of a new foetus, who against all odds survives his return in its tiny body. There’s a brief struggle as he fights and subdues its fledgling soul. He nestles inside its chest and waits. He feels no metal arms around him, no screeching voice in his ears. After a while, he shuts his eyes, and for the first time in forever, he sleeps. And sleeps...and sleeps…free from his hunter, her fury, the black magic of her screeching curse.
Till the day she finds him in his warm, soft haven and brings her dead sons with her to complete his destruction. Her voice in his ears is the familiar, dreaded shriek – “Devil Man, you will give back that which you took; you will give back that which you stole!”
VI
Ada stumbled into consciousness to the sound of voices, happy voices, relieved voices. They drowned out the other shrill voice raging inside her head.
‘Congratulations Madam! You’ve given birth to two healthy twins, two strong sons for your husband, praise God!’ the nurses smiled, their teeth as white as their starched uniforms.
Ada’s eyes widened in terror. Remembrance rushed in and her mouth opened in a blood-curdling scream, a soul-killing shriek that went on and on.
Pandemonium hit the room. A grey haired-man rushed up to her, tried to speak to her, to show her two tiny bundles, her twin babies. She saw their eyes, eyes she remembered seeing through the rear-view mirror of her taxi, two twin pairs of knowing gaze, un-baby-like, glittering with malevolence and mischief.
They winked at her. She shuddered, shut her eyes, and screeched even louder, recoiling from the babies as one would a deadly viper. The grey-haired man, the one the nurses called Chief Obi, was crying, shamelessly, uncaring of ruining his man-pride before the goggle-eyed nurses.
‘Ada…Ada…’ his voice was a mixture of confusion and pain. He reached down to touch her face. She glared at him and punched his face.
‘WHO THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ADA? DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING WOMAN, YOU IDIOT MAN? STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!’ she screamed at him, her voice a deep, masculine rage that stunned everyone in the room.
The nurses tried to calm her with soft admonitions. They told the grey-haired man she was reacting to the anaesthesia. She fought them, her arms flailing, pushing. Her eyes caught the pink flash of nail polish on her fingers, the smooth line-free curves of her palms.
Suddenly, she went still. Icy fingers crawled behind her neck—Something was wrong, badly wrong. A distant memory pushed its way through the dark fog of her mind, through the violent thoughts of another mind much stronger than her own—Mama! Mama had tried to tell her it didn’t matter, that her Akala-Aka wasn’t cursed, that the absence of life-lines on her palms wouldn’t make a difference to her life.
Ada moaned softly as more thoughts, forgotten knowledge, flooded her mind’s-eye—Lord help her! All this while, she’d thought Mama was wrong. But Mama had been right after all. Now she knew the terrible truth. The absence of her Akala-Aka didn’t matter because it meant she didn’t exist and that was the secret of life; not to exist. That way, you tricked death— After all, Death can’t take what doesn’t exist.
Ada began to giggle, softly, secretly. The giggle grew into a full-blown laugh, hurricane laughter. She threw off the sheet and stumbled out of the bed. The nurses and doctors tried to restrain her. She bit and kicked them, cursed them, demanded they let her go. They held tight.
In a blink, she felt her strength return, felt all her manly power surge in her blood. She flexed the bulging muscles of her arms and punched the idiots that tried to hold her back. There were screams everywhere.
‘Shut up, you idiots!’ she shouted at them, feeling the blood rush to her crossed left eye which twitched in her fury. She thundered past the crowd in the room, dashing towards the stairs. She was burning, slowly being devoured by the two warring minds inside her head fighting for possession of her soul. Ada pulled off her cotton nightgown as she stumbled her way out of the crowded hospital, bumping into doors, into people, her vision, soft cotton wool, fuzzy and blurred.
People stared at the naked woman with the wild eyes. Some cursed her, others pointed and laughed at her. Ada laughed with them, at them. Ha! Ha! Look, people; look at my palms. See my Akala-Aka, see how it makes me special, invisible, invincible. Bet you can’t see me, bet I can just walk right into your faces and you still won’t see me. I’m invisible and invincible. I can never die! Death can’t take what it can’t see. Death can never take me because guess what? I DON’T EXIST! I DO NOT EXIST!
(Epilogue)
There’s a mad woman that haunts the streets of Enugu City when the days are bright and the nights are cool. She is a permanent fixture in the streets, known to all, including the police, who have long stopped arresting her for her foul language and nudity. Nobody knows where she came from or who she is. She appeared unexpectedly one sunny day in a filthy pair of men’s trousers and a bright scarf, her exposed soft breasts jiggling against her chest.
On good days, she smiles at children as they come out of school and asks them if they have seen her twins, her beautiful sons. Her voice is sweet and sad. On other days, she hurls abuses at the kids, calling them idiot vermin and cockroaches. At those times, she sounds eerily like a man, her voice a deep manly baritone that defies logic. Nobody really minds when she’s either a bad-tempered man or a kind-hearted motherly lunatic. People simply laugh at her and toss her bits of food and blame lady moon for creating lunar craziness amongst the citizens in her infinite mischief.
The only time that people shrink away from the city’s mad-woman with unease is when she becomes the other one, the one that claims to be invisible, the one that doesn’t really exist. For then, she raises her palms to prove her point and that’s when they all see the clear, smooth planes of her palms, palms that should have the life-lines of all humans, Akala-Aka lines that define human existence and destiny, lines that are missing in the pink palms of the city’s mad woman! For, then they wonder who…what… she really is.
End
Little Note
I hope you enjoyed this slightly longer piece of terror and mystery. As I mentioned, the story was first featured in the Black Magic Women Anthology (2018). The anthology is a “Afrocentric and multicultural horror” by seventeen of the scary sisters profiled in Sumiko Saulson’s reference guide, “100 Black Women in Horror.” It features “flesh-eating plants to flesh-eating bees; zombies to vampires to vampire-eating vampire hunters; ghosts, revenants, witches and werewolves … cursed drums, cursed dolls, cursed palms, ancient spirits and goddesses..” Go on and grab your copy of the book for more terrifying tales by Black sisters😊
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