The Evening Of The Morning

014

The next morning, Carlos told the chief priest to tell the people to stop sacrificing before his hut. And the Chief Priest wondered, where else, but he said, with his knees and head pinned to the ground, "Amadioha! The first, the one who lives in water and in sky." He would do as he was told.

After the town crier, accompanied by the chief priest with a rattling staff, had hit his gong round the kindred and conveyed the message, the same woman whose father Alfonso shot, the one who prayed for her husband who suffered injury from elephant hunting, came again. She was bitter, and instead of praying she questioned Amadioha, asking him why he let Akunuche, her husband, die.

Carlos imagined how her life was twenty years ago. From what he sensed, she was not more than eight at that time, probably still playing with sand and cuddling close to her mother. She never expected that twenty years later, she would have married and became a widow. That the god she worshipped as a child would come in human form, and take her father as the first and only sacrifice. Carlos hungered to hear her story. Hungered to know the things she did when her breasts were still sprouting; as tiny as tangerine, wanted to know the things her father, that huge man had told her while growing up.

"Come inside." Carlos' voice sounded, as calm as a stream, in the woman's head. "Come inside."

Her heart momentarily stopped. She stopped praying. She heard a voice. It couldn't get more real than that.

"Come inside." Carlos told her again. That alone straightened her beliefs and wiped every stain of doubt in her mind about her god. Amadioha was talking to her. Amadioha was real. The woman freed the white hen she intended to sacrifice after praying. The knife too; it pinned in the ground. She entered the hut, faced down and laid flat before Carlos. With a moderate voice, intending to be seducing, the woman sang words of praise.

Carlos sat on a bamboo bed. He had a boner. His extra flesh was rock hard under his dirty khaki shorts. He wasn't used to being a god, but he was used to women submitting themselves to him mostly because he paid for them. In his previous lives, of course, he had women who submitted to him wholly because of love. But as Carlos, he knew risk, he knew sailing for months to an unknown island with his crew to kill, dominate and enforce their beliefs on people, he knew drinking late and singing Christian hymns around a lantern in a crowded pub filled with potbellied men and prostitutes.

But this one was different. Unlike the endurance he sensed in the prostitutes that submitted to him, Carlos sensed total submission in the woman lying before him. It was only right for one to submit to a god, Carlos thought.

"Look up." Carlos conveyed to her mind. She looked up at once but didn't see Carlos' face shaded in the dark, but she saw his hairy white legs.

"What is your name?" Carlos asked.

"Tani." The woman said. They spoke the language of the mind.

"You see my friend," Magaga told Agbo "this new year won't erase the memory of me being a god, one who people worship, and gave offering. This new year would erase the face of my sweetheart, Tani; my wife and mother."

Agbo, who was mesmerized, said nothing. Silence hung above them for a while until something clicked. He looked at his amputated leg and adjusted on the tree, lit another cigarette, inhaled and exhaled; the silver smoke disappeared. Then he said,

"So your love, her name was Tani?"

"Yes."

"That is the name of the girl's sister." Agbo pointed to the unconscious girl.

"My friend, what a coincidence."

That was when I woke up. It was the pain that woke me up. Gradually, as though pumping a balloon, my stomach grew.