Inochinomi cleared her mind.
Mizuko began her incantation. The air shimmered. The louder she chanted, the more the hell-beast solidified. It turned to face them.
From that giant abomination sprouted a hideous version of her uncle’s face. Her mother’s face. Her own face. It bellowed. Charged them. Stampeded peasant defenders and one of its masked, devilish brothers. The earth shook.
There was only her breath. Her enemy. Her arrow. Time stopped.
Inochinomi let the arrow fly. It flew into that tunnel of a mouth. The beast stumbled to a stop. A shriek.
“Mother,” it gurgled. “Father!” Barely words.
A second shot to its left eye. She dropped her bow. Leapt in with her naginata.
“Yog Sothoth,” it shrieked. “Help!”
She butchered the beast. Took her time.
Mizuko called for her. Inochinomi climbed back up the temple steps.
The idol was gone. Her mother wrapped her arms and legs around a statue-shaped nothingness. Deeper and darker than the blackness between the stars.
It called to Inochinomi. Seductive. She took a step forward.
Then Mizuko’s cold hand grasped hers. Firm. Inochinomi closed her eyes, returned the grip.
More fireworks exploded from somewhere behind them. Their world flickered as the Void collapsed in on itself. Her mother lay still. Her face frozen. In extreme pleasure. And pain.
“She had no more life to give,” Mizuko said. She nudged the frozen corpse with her foot. “Just her own.”
Inochinomi turned her back on her mother’s corpse. Still held Mizuko’s hand. Rainbow sparks poured into the courtyard.
Dan no Uchi burned. It had been an ugly village, but it died beautifully.
For Inochinomi, there was only this moment.
St. Baboloki’s Hymn for Lost Girls
L. Lark
The flowers come first, and then the monster.
This is the first thing Naledi is taught, even before her mother’s name. Four days after her birth, Naledi is carried to the mission church beyond the grove of marula trees. Young monkeys watch from low branches, cheeks stuffed with fruit. The church has battered white walls and a stained-glass window above the pulpit. A bare nail juts from the place where a crucifix once hung.
Ona, Naledi’s mother, drips rainwater onto Naledi’s eyes and tongue through a root, singing the hymns of St. Baboloki and the high god Midomi. She uses a cactus barb to prick Naledi’s finger and smear a dollop of blood onto the white altar cloth. It spreads through the fibers in the shape of a moth.
Ona wraps her palm around Naledi’s small foot.
“I hope you never see the flowers,” she says, while Naledi’s laughter bounces against the rafters.
Naledi grows too quickly for her skin. By the time she is thirteen, she can easily pluck hairs from the heads of the men of her village, but her body feels tight and too warm. Even her hair seems to grow in every direction, reaching like the limbs of a skeleton tree. Naledi’s size makes her feel formidable, even when migrating giants appear on the low plains. Once, she swung her knobkerrie at a bull elephant positioned between her and the well.
Naledi does not remember her father. Her mother claims she has none.
“I swallowed the seed of an ebony tree and you grew inside me. I carved your club from its branches. You and the knobkerrie were born together,” Ona says, showing Naledi how to polish the wood with palm oil. Ona teaches her how to fish and weave a basket and interpret the warning huffs of baboons, but Naledi speaks to the insects all on her own.
“Little darling,” Naledi says to a bee, running her index finger over its honey-yellow tuft. Static bounces between them. “Why do you sing so loudly today?”
Naledi is tending to the nets gathering tilapia in the river. The water is thick and filled with plumes of dust, but spiked dorsal fins carve through the current. Bees zigzag between the tall grasses.
“We can finally smell the flowers,” the bee says, and flies from Naledi’s palm.
The desert has spread to the edge of their village. Naledi can see a sharp designation in the ground where the water dries out, green and gold, like a world divided. Naledi does not venture into the desert. Its sky is low and colorless, and the insects are too quiet. There are centipedes beneath the rocks, but they only whisper soon soon soon.
In the orange fog of June, Ona wanders into the dunes and does not return. Naledi waits with her toes cresting the hard line of sand, but her mother does not reappear. Ona’s husband joins Naledi at the village edge, humming the song of St. Anthony, patron of lost things. After four days, Naledi realizes she will be alone forever.
Naledi flees into the forest. Overhead, monkeys toss fruit pits through drying leaves. She has heard the hymns of St. Baboloki sung by white missionaries, smashing mosquitoes against their arms, but Naledi has never spoken their words herself. She finds a quiet space beneath the ebony tree, and uses the knots in its trunk to guide her prayers like rosary beads.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” a butterfly sings above Naledi’s head. “Your mother will be spared.”
The following day, the flowers come.
The flowers are hardly the width of Naledi’s palm. She is learning how to pluck the feathers from a guinea fowl when they arrive. The midday sun has reappeared between low swaths of clouds, and the insects are warming themselves on exposed rockbed.
“What’s that?” Naledi asks, pointing to the red blossom atop her aunt’s thatched roof. Thaney is twenty. She does not have a husband, and seems to mistrust the men who bring her salted meat in leaf wraps. Once, Ona attempted to explain Thaney’s curse, but Naledi had been distracted by flies singing a conquest ballad over Ona’s beer jugs.
Thaney has cropped hair and three fingers on her left hand. Ripped away by a hyena, she claims, but Naledi watches Thaney sloppily sever the head of a bird and thinks otherwise. At times Thaney’s shadow appears as that of an enormous dog.
“You’ve been practicing with your knobkerrie?” Thaney asks, without looking to see what Naledi is indicating. This is normal. Naledi thinks that her gift of speech with insects does not extend to human beings. Words seem to fall from her mouth garbled.
“No,” Naledi says, because it is the truth. She has no idea what Thaney hears instead.
“That’s good, Nal. Finish with this bird and have some figs by the river.”
Naledi does, and takes the knobkerrie with her. It is a slender rod topped by a knob of ebony. Naledi has only ever used it to slaughter her aunt’s birds, but the right strike can fracture a man’s skull.
“Why do you hide your face?” a butterfly asks, landing on a reed by Naledi’s side. Its antennae stretch toward Naledi, as she presses her feet into mud. Flower bulbs are pushing through the soil, but Naledi cannot see the scarlet of their petals yet. Her heart feels like a knob of rotting fruit.
“My mother is gone.”
“We told you, she is safe. The Adze will be with us soon.”
“What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, but the butterfly is captured by a draft and flung into the scrublands.
“Wait,” Naledi calls, but nothing responds. She can smell men returning from the plains with slaughtered springbok on their backs. It is a day like any other day, but her mother is missing, and the earth feels like it is bubbling with pressure, like a vein.
Naledi uses the end of her club to carve an X into the mud. Around her lines, the new plants quiver, but none sink back into the earth.