From the distance, Thaney calls Naledi’s name over the wind. By the time Naledi arrives home, flowers are blooming across their village like a flood.
Thaney sacrifices one of the birds that evening and spreads its blood over the door of their home. Naledi goes hungry, picking at strands of cooked pumpkin. A fly sticks to pulverized vegetable matter on their tabletop, but is too panicked to respond to Naledi’s questions.
“Stop buzzing, girl. I know your mother warned you not to speak to things that can’t answer back. You should be praying.”
“I did pray. When I pray, nothing talks back,” Naledi says, and Thaney stares as if Naledi has spoken a foreign language.
Naledi’s mother warned her of no such thing. Naledi’s mother had been able to tell the week’s weather by the flight pattern of pied crows over the field. Her mother had once transformed into a flock of sparrows to avoid an angry buffalo rooting through their garden.
“What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, scraping a tendril of pumpkin from beneath her thumbnail.
“Did you hear that word from one of the men? I’ve told you not to follow them into the bush anymore. It’s old hunters’ talk. There were other gods, before the saints came. To speak their names now is blasphemy. Eat your food,” Thaney says, although they have no more food.
In the village it is always hot. When Naledi wakes the next morning, her sweat leaves an outline of her body in the sheets. She had been dreaming of a single point of light weaving between trees. Outside, crocodiles belch up the day’s first meal. The breeze smells of stomach acid.
Naledi leaves the latrine to discover flowers are sprouting from cracks in the earth. Petals drop from tree branches. Blossoms are stacked atop other plants like a conquering army. The neighbors are standing in the path leading to their home, knee-deep in red. Their goats seem unfazed.
Thaney emerges from the house, carrying Naledi’s knobkerrie. She is wearing a white dress that ignites in the sun.
“Have you prayed today, Nal?” Thaney says, swinging her eyes back and forth, like a hunter who has heard a snap in the darkness. She holds the knobkerrie toward Naledi, and Naledi’s hand reaches out unbidden. “Go to the church where your mother baptized you. Spill some blood for Baboloki.”
Naledi stumbles onto the trail that connects their home to the mission church. The path is obscured by flowers so bright they seem to exude heat. The people of the village line Naledi’s trail, hands flattened across their brows, squinting into the vast plane of opened blossoms.
The chapel is, for the most part, unused, and blockaded by a sheet of climbing vines. Once, a reliquary containing St. Baboloki’s molars had been tucked into the niche above the altar. The crucifix and the relics are gone now, and Naledi does not know if the ground remains sacred with the source of its power missing.
Naledi pushes in the door with her shoulder, remembering that curses are always transferred through the palm. Inside, a man is seated in the northeastern pew, curved forward piously. He wears a pith helmet like the white men on the coast, but his skin is dark like the sky after lightning.
He does not unfold when Naledi takes a step into the building. The chute of light from the open door halves the interior of the chapel. She moves sideways into the darkness.
“Sir,” Naledi calls, but the man in the pew takes a long moment to turn. In the contrast of the chapel, his eye sockets are filled by yawning gulfs. Two flies knock against the bridge of his nose.
“You can come pray, if you like. Although, I’m afraid once the flowers bloom, it means the Adze is already on her way.”
“The Adze?” Naledi says, watching her bare foot move forward into the dust. The crown of her hair brushes the chapel’s ceiling.
“The Being of Light, the Six-Legged One. What’s that you have, girl?”
Naledi transfers the knobkerrie to her left hand, so she may wipe the sweat from her palm.
“My mother made it. It’s just a trinket.”
The man in the pith helmet stands, and Naledi sees that he matches her in height, with arms that seem to swing unhinged against his sides. She does not recognize his face, but his suit reminds Naledi of the European generals who pass through on their climb to mines in the foothills.
“No one has ever told you about the Adze? Insects love to gossip.”
“I’m just here to pray, sir. You should leave out that window.” Naledi says, thinking of the way Thaney flinches at the sound of shouts in the night. Naledi wonders if the flowers are blooming inside them too, like a bundle of poison in their bellies.
“But you’re here to pray to me, aren’t you?”
“Don’t play,” Naledi says. “Out the window, please.”
“Your choice, little seed,” says the man in the pith helmet. He disappears a moment later, but it is as a swarm of flies that hum radiantly in the pink light of the stained-glass window.
“Wait,” she calls, watching the pith helmet drop between the pews and roll full circle. The flies briefly hold the shape of a man before being swept away. The knobkerrie feels heavy. It drags Naledi sideways as she moves toward the altar, shoulder pressed against the chapel wall.
Naledi retrieves the pith helmet. Two flies have been flattened against the rim. She scratches her forearm, unsure of whether or not she feels the swelling lump of a bite beneath her nails. Outside, a herd of springbok grunts in alarm, and flowers tumble in through the open window.
Naledi puts the helmet on, so she can use her hands to pray.
The Adze arrives before Naledi can finish her affirmations. Naledi knows this because the calls of the springboks are briefly silenced, and then the roof of the chapel breaks open.
Or rather, it is knocked away by a hooked claw at the end of an enormous leg. Naledi glances up to see a phosphorescent blue underbelly, protected on three sides by a thick carapace. She ducks beneath a pew and watches the segmented body slowly pass, as splinters of the chapel tumble down. A support beam grazes the edge of her helmet.
Naledi waits for the chapel to stop trembling before pulling herself toward the knobkerrie, which has rolled to a stop against a leg of the altar. Naledi’s limbs feel poorly constructed, as if their connective tissues have snapped. Her breath sounds like a rock tumbling down a well.
“She’s here, She’s here,” two wasps sing, as Naledi climbs over the ruined chapel wall. The great thing has started downhill, and Naledi can no longer see its arched back over the summit.
“What was that thing?” Naledi says, surprised by the sound of her own voice.
“The Being of Light. The Great Pollinator. Eater of Flowers.”
One of the wasps settles upon Naledi’s shoulder, but she swats it away before it can sting.
“Why did it come here?”
The wasps move around each other counterclockwise.
“You should have let Baboloki tell you,” they say in unison.
In the valley below, there is screaming.
“You can talk to the saints,” Naledi’s mother tells her, four days before she flees to the desert. “They listen, even if they don’t always answer.”
“Why won’t they answer?” Naledi asks. She is hammering goat meat with a mallet while her mother stirs vegetable relish. Earlier, Naledi had been plucking pods of tamarind from their neighbor’s tree. Tomorrow morning she will wake early to soak the lentils for supper. Naledi’s life revolves around food. Her hands smell of earth, always.
“The saints were once human too. They have their own whims. They are distracted easily. One might argue it’s not in one’s favor to attract too much of their attention. But sometimes, if they’re feeling helpful, you might be able to bribe them.”