When Natelo was 14 years old, she died.
Her mother, Amy, was special; she could see and hear things that no one else could. Sometimes, she could even see into the future — as if her eyes were a God-given telescope. She had been blessed with this gift when Natelo was 11 years old, and since then, had shared her great knowledge with her daughter. Natelo worshipped her mother, hanging on to every word she spoke as desperately as drowning men held on to their rescuers at sea.
Amy had taught Natelo that human beings were too scared to accept the things they did not understand, as this meant they could not possess them. This made her a paranoid woman, finding danger where others saw none. Owing to this, her daughter was the only person she trusted, and her mother’s trust made Natelo proud to no end.
This gift, however, came with a price. Amy would often complain of harsh whispers from the walls even when Natelo heard none, spend hours on end cleaning the house, herself, and her daughter to get rid of a stench she insisted permeated the house, and often complained about a sharp abdominal pain that would not go away no matter how many herbal concoctions and remedies she consumed. She would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night screaming in agony and insisting that there was something in her belly that was restless and wanted out.
They took several precautions in their home to avoid being spied on — something Amy insisted dangerous people would try to do. They didn’t have any electronic devices in their home as these were all tools that could be used to find information on them in case anyone ever found out about this gift. Natelo was homeschooled by Amy, who had also quit her job as a banker and was dependent on Natelo’s child support from her estranged husband, and they only ate food that they had raised and grown to avoid poisoning.
One day, Amy received a revelation through a dream: the world would come to an end in eight days; big balls of fire would rain down from the sky, consuming everything in their wake. She was devastated. This was not the first time she had received a vision, and the last time it had happened, she’d shared this information with her loved ones only to be cast away. She had sent countless alarming text messages and emails to her close acquaintances and family warning them of impending doom, and after, her mother, Ma Masika, had invited both her and Natelo over to discuss the details of the bizarre warnings.
Upon arrival, they found Ma waiting for them with a few teenage boys and the local priest. They took hold of Amy, locking her in Ma’s bedroom, and Natelo was instructed to stay in the living room so as not to disturb the prayer session her grandmother had organised. Ma believed that a familial curse had fallen on her daughter and had to be prayed away.
From the living room, Natelo could hear her mother’s screams merged with the raised voices of the small congregation that had gathered to cast away the evil they believed had taken room in her mother’s body. She felt a fear so visceral it numbed her – the inhumane sounds her mother made, freezing her heart over until it was a shrivelled-up organ that seemed to stop. Feeling helpless, she’d knelt for so long that her legs felt like wooden extensions of her and prayed, long, drawn-out sighs of “pleasepleaseplease” because what else could she say? She was 12.
Owing to this, when Amy received this damning information, she only shared it with her daughter. She explained her vision to her, explained how the fire would annihilate everything in its path with rage. Naturally, Natelo was petrified, but her mother assured her that she would protect her, as she always had.
That night, after supper, Amy made Natello a cup of hot chocolate—her favourite drink—before bed. This was out of character for her as she insisted on no drinks for the child after 6 p.m. However, Natelo knew better than to question her mother’s wisdom, so she took the drink and went to sleep in her mother’s arms, as she always did.
The next time she woke up, she was in a hospital bed in pain, groggy, and exhausted, agony only made worse by a blinding sharp white light that seemed to cut through her eyes, the only consolation being Ma and her father by her side.
Later, it would be explained that her mother had poisoned her and taken the poison as well, but Natelo had survived and had been in a coma for two weeks, while her mother had not been that fortunate. Startled, Natelo asked for the date and was surprised to find out that it was 24th November, three days after the apocalypse her mother had prophesied.
Remembering Amy’s vision and believing it with a conviction so heavy it could not be shaken, she knew that she had died, and perhaps everyone else in the world had as well. Perhaps this reality was some sort of in-between space their souls occupied after the destruction of the universe, and everyone was either clueless or too afraid to face the truth.
Shortly after, Natelo developed motion sickness. To her, this was undeniable proof. To be uncomfortable whenever she was in motion had to be a sign.
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
2
Masika was a child of death.
She had been cut from her mother’s belly only minutes after her death, and as a result, her eyelids remained shut for the first three weeks of her life. Later, she would jest about how those had been the best weeks of her entire life.
She knew very little about her birth mother and the circumstances surrounding her death, and, as she grew older, even less about herself. All she knew was that she had been lonely for as long as she could remember, perhaps even while still in her mother’s womb. She felt like a floating tree, rooted in nothing. Unsustainable. How well could you know your heart when you had no sense of your mother’s?
She lacked the words to articulate it, but sometimes Masika felt like a figment of someone else’s imagination, possibly a hologram of her mother made out of the remnants of her father’s memory of his first love. He had taken a second wife only months after Masika’s birth, but it was evident that he was a fading man — an image in a Polaroid picture left too long under the sun — in the absence of his first wife.
To Masika, the details of her history were inconsequential. She had been born in a small rural village that was so colourful and animated that she couldn’t imagine anything, or anyone, beyond it. The men tilled their farms and herded their cattle with the help of their sons, while the women wove kamakhendu baskets that they would later sell during market days with the help of their daughters.
She had scattered memories of her family: her father had been a farmer who loved his fields almost as much as he loved his children — with Masika being his first child and only daughter, and five sons from his second marriage. He was a large man who once had a larger heart, but as he grew older, he started to shrink into himself and develop a hunch, as if he could will himself not to exist if he made himself small enough. Her stepmother had been a slim stump of a woman with a personality so big it seemed to fill every empty hole and crevice in every room she occupied, while her half-brothers had been annoying rodents scurrying around the home causing chaos — each of whom she had babysat enough to harbour contempt for.
To her neighbours, Masika was an oddity — partly because of her mother’s tragic fate but mostly because she isolated herself. She spent most of her time alone by the river and would often be heard mumbling incessantly to herself. She loved the water — appreciated it for its basic nourishment and revered it for how majestic it was — and she knew that it could cleanse spirits just as effectively as it cleansed bodies.
Masika couldn’t remember where she had heard the tale of her mother’s curse —her father never spoke of his late wife, and her stepmother knew as much as the household cat. Perhaps she had found it lying under the rocks by the river, or maybe she had tripped on it while scurrying to the market. Either way, it didn’t matter how, just what. The story was of a young girl, her mother, who had been hexed by a revered omulogi before she had even gotten her first blood. The malediction? Death would trudge beside her and be her only companion until her very last breath, only to be transferred to her offspring. No one knew why, but the cause never mattered in the face of the consequence.
At the time, a 16-year-old Masika knew very few things with conviction. She did not understand the workings of Nyasae ,or the Christian God, did not know why fingers were longer than toes or where the sun disappeared to every evening, but she understood that oaths and curses were just as hereditary as names and pieces of land. She knew with a certainty in her bones that the story of her mother’s curse was true.
Just two years before she had known of her mother’s misfortune, she had started hearing and seeing things that no one else could. She would see long shadows waiting at the foot of her bed at night; attempting to grab and gnaw at her feet, experience a sharp pain in her abdomen every few weeks that the village healers would fail to identify the root of or find a cure to, hear voices calling to her from inanimate objects, feel the presence of other beings whenever she was in a room alone – her stomach churning and the air turning cold and dry even on the hottest most humid days which led her to believe that their nature was malevolent, and even smell a rancid odour from herself despite hours of scrubbing away at her skin until it was raw. It was the stench of death.
Her mother’s past was an invisible noose around Masika’s neck that got tighter with each breath. She had never told anyone any of this for fear of becoming even more of a recluse than she already was; her people were superstitious, and this would only make things worse. So instead, to save herself and those who came after her, she hatched a plan.
Once, when she was 9 years old, she had witnessed the baptism of a few villagers who had chosen to convert to Christianity being performed by a priest. The priest, dressed in garments so white they made him appear celestial, had submerged each of the 7 villagers in the water while holding them and saying, “I cleanse you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You are now reborn.”
She knew very little about Christianity, but she had heard that you did not require animal sacrifices or money to be cleansed and accepted as you did with Nyasae. Their God just wanted you as you were. Masika became convinced that she needed to be baptised to be free of her inherited hex. Although her father did not seem interested in matters of faith (a contrast to his, who was faithful to the God she had known her entire life), he still made the required sacrifices to Nyasae, remaining faithful to the ways of those who’d come before him. The Christian God was a stranger in their home, so she understood that she had to keep the baptism private.
It was a simple plan. She would wait until everyone had gone to sleep, sneak out and take the 10-minute walk to the river. There, she would baptise herself and be reborn. She was not afraid of the dark; she understood that the scariest monsters a person could ever encounter were those that invaded the spirit. As the only girl, she had a separate dung hut from her brothers right next to her parents, so it would not be a hard task. She only had to be careful and avoid being caught by one of their neighbours.
The chosen night landed on a full moon that lit her path more than the kerosene lamp she had taken with her; perhaps this was a sign from the heavens that she was making the right decision. Everything was going according to the plan. Masika got to the river without any interruptions and was certain no one had spotted her. She wore the only white dress she owned, as everyone she had seen getting baptised had been in white. Stepping into the water, she walked further until it covered her stomach. She was ready. She looked up at the sky, hoping-
“Mathika, what are you doing?” a small voice called to Masika in the night.
She turned toward the river bank, her heart tripping over itself as she faced the direction the familiar voice with the heavy lisp came from. It was her youngest sibling, Nyanjala.
“No..nothing. What are you doing here? You should be asleep.”
“I went out to uthe the toilet and thaw you coming here, tho I followed.”
Nyanjala, at 5 years old, had a heavy lisp.
Masika was undecided, torn between proceeding with her ritual or rescheduling. She couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with the chaos in her head for another day. Besides, her brother had already seen her. Sighing, she made her decision. It was better to deal with the consequences of something she’d already done.
“Sit there, away from the water. I need to do something, and then we can walk home together.” She called to Nyanjala.
Turning her back to him, she looked up to the moon again, silently praying to whoever would listen for this to work.
Suddenly, she heard a splash. She turned around to see what had caused it, only to find Nyanjala was not in the spot she had left him. She froze.
“Nyanjala?” she called. Nothing. “Nyanjala, this is not funny! Where are you?”
She heard a commotion, then rapid splashing and wheezing. Nyanjala was drowning. Panicking, she rushed towards him, but one of her legs got caught in a tangle of weeds under the water. She struggled to get free, falling over in the process and swallowing mouthfuls of water herself. Masika could hear her little brother’s gargled screams in the dark, which fueled her desperation to get to him. She started crying and screaming for help, hoping someone would hear them and come to their aid.
“Nyanjala, I’m coming!”
By the time she freed herself, she couldn’t hear him anymore. She screamed out to him, nothing. She swam to the area where he had been calling from and, after a few minutes, came across his floating, lifeless body.
***
After Nyanjala’s death, life seemed to pass Masika by in blinks.
She blinked and was kneeling at her father’s feet, begging him to forgive her, begging him to see that she was trying to end her suffering and not cause any more to her family. Blinked, and she was on an uncomfortable bus ride to the big city she had heard so much about. It took her 10 hours to get there, with so much to see, but the guilt anchored at the pit of her stomach made her too dizzy and nauseous to enjoy the ride. Blinked, and she was a housewife to a secondary school teacher her father had found to marry her – one who wasn’t from their village; one who didn’t know her history or knew but didn’t care.
His name was Jacob, and he knew more than anyone she had ever met. He was lanky, much shorter than her father and most men she had grown up around, but still tall. A mild man who never lost his temper or raised his voice, he reminded her so much of her father.
Masika understood what was expected of her: she was to be a good wife who listened to her husband and gave him many children – a task that was easy enough as it was what she had been groomed for. Her predicament was her biggest worry. She still saw the shadows, still heard the voices, and still reeked of death. And after Nyanjala’s death, there was no denying it. Death followed her wherever she went.
She fell in love with Jacob quickly, it was easy to. She was a Transantarctic Mountain covered in snow, frozen over, and he was the sun warming her up. He had the way of geniuses; he thought too fast and talked even faster — sometimes tripping over his own words. He taught Masika how to be a woman, serving her body as he showed her how to serve him, and they fit seamlessly into each other. He even taught her how to communicate in English, the foreign language first a weighty stone on her tongue, but eventually gliding so smoothly from her lips that he would often joke that she was better than him.
When she was with Jacob, nothing else existed. There was no past or future, only now. Her ardour for him overshadowed everything else she had ever felt. Finally, she wasn’t just a floating tree, she was rooted in something: him. There was no voice in her head but his; the shadows by her bed kept away by his embrace, the odour of death now overpowered by his scent.
Three years after their marriage, so late that she had started to believe she was barren, Masika got pregnant. She knew it before she missed her period and before she started showing. She felt it as it happened, felt that she was carrying a new life in her body, and she hated it.
She had never realised it before, but Masika did not want to become a mother. She understood the weight of what she would be passing on to her children and what they would pass on to theirs. Besides, and she would never admit this to anyone but herself, she did not want to share her husband. She had never had anyone she could call her own, never felt as connected to anyone as she did to Jacob, and she couldn’t imagine not having the full effect of his gaze on her and only her.
But the baby was on its way, there was nothing that could be done now. She would have to make it work and protect her family against whatever she could. So, one evening, before she told Jacob she was carrying his first child, she asked him if they could get baptised.
“Why? Where did you get that idea?” was her husband’s response.
They had recently started going to the neighbourhood church, but they were both not religious. Jacob worshipped his books, and Masika worshipped him.
“I just think it would be good for us. We can do it together.”
Jacob shook his head as if the idea was ludicrous.
“You know those ceremonies essentially mean nothing, right?”
Masika was quiet. Jacob had always been vocal about his disbelief in the supernatural. Whenever anything happened around the house that she attributed to anything but science, he called her hysterical. She had never told him about what she had done, what she had experienced for so long, never mentioned the most significant thing she had inherited from her late mother, but sometimes she suspected that Jacob knew. Sometimes he would look at her with so much pity, as he was doing now, it felt like she could shatter from the force of his gaze.
He sighed. “Alright, I’ll think about it.”
***
Masika had never seen Jacob as happy as he had been in the 7 months after she had told him about her pregnancy. He seemed lighter on his feet, was always home earlier than he had been before, and even got a nanny to help around the house; no matter how much Masika expressed that she was capable of handling everything on her own.
Already, he loved his unborn child with a ferociousness that rivalled even Daedalus’ love for Icarus. And as his love grew stronger, Masika’s hate grew more potent. Now, all everyone ever seemed to notice when they saw her was the child residing in her belly. She was constantly sweaty and tired,constantly nauseous, and the voices were back.
“Soon, he will despise you for what you’re about to pass on to his child.” they would hiss. “He loves it more than he will ever love you, and now he is about to see what you truly are.”
She was 8 months along and dreaded every second that brought her closer to her due date. They had still not gotten baptised, and every time she breached the subject, she would be met with hesitation from her husband.
One night, right before bed, Masika felt an indomitable force push its way from the pit of her stomach to her throat. The abdominal pain from her teenage years was back. She started choking, tears running down her face as she called out to Jacob. There was something in her that needed to get out. She could feel its claws digging into the walls of her insides.
“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked, rushing to his wife, who was hunched over and grasping at her throat.
“It wants out.” she wheezed.
Thinking she meant the baby, Jacob directed the nanny to help Masika out of the house as he fetched the car to rush her to the hospital. The 20-minute ride there felt like eternity for both of them: Masika certain that her intestines were being ripped to shreds and Jacob silently begging any deity that could hear him to keep his wife and child safe.
When they got there, Masika was rushed to the Emergency Room. She wasn’t due for another month, but some babies grew impatient and wanted to join the world sooner. However, after multiple tests and scans, it was confirmed that Masika had not gone into labour. By this time, the worst had passed. Now, she could only feel a dull ache in place of the excruciating pain she had felt minutes before.
“Are you sure?” she asked the doctors when informed that she was perfectly fine.
“Yes. It was probably just acid reflux from stress. Please avoid anything that could make you anxious right now, and you should be fine.”
On the car ride back home, Masika could tell that her husband was angry.
“I swear I could feel something tearing at my flesh, I was in so much pain…”
“Just stop it, Masika!” She’d never heard Jacob raise his voice, and it shocked her so much she remained silent. “I’m tired of this. You’re sick.”
“Yes,” she was ashamed, even more so at this confirmation that he had known all along. “I am. My mother passed on…”
“Enough with that! When I married you, I knew you were raised to believe in legends and myths. I knew you had been led to believe that you had some sort of curse, but this is ridiculous. There is no curse.” he was still shouting, gripping the steering wheel so hard his hands looked like plasters, “You’re sick, Masika. I knew it but couldn’t face it. I didn’t want to believe it, but I’ve entertained this for far too long. You talk to yourself, making up these ridiculous fake scenarios. Remember when you made me confront Charles because you believed he would watch you while I was at work?”
“He would. Sometimes, when spirits can’t get to you, they use a body. They posse…”
“And when you wouldn’t eat bread from Kaveni’s shop because you thought it was poison. Do you not see how ridiculous this all is?”
“I know it’s hard to believe. But it’s true, please trust me.” Masika cried. She felt like she was drowning, suffocating under the water Jacob had melted off her freezing body. “I killed Nyanjala!”
“That was an accident,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. I failed you. I have not been a good husband. I knew better, and I still didn’t get you the help you needed soon enough. But that’s going to change now. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to see a friend of mine who studied psychology. He’ll know what to do.”
Masika sobbed, her whole body convulsing.
“I’m sorry for yelling. It’s going to be alright.” Jacob turned to look at her, one hand wiping her tears and trying to calm her down.
By the time he turned his eyes back to the road, the semi-truck had already rammed into his side of the car.
***
Masika woke up in a hospital bed to the news of her husband’s death and her child’s birth in the same breath. She mourned them both.
The child was a girl who had been born prematurely. She named her Amy, a name Jacob had chosen to honour his mother. By now, her hate for her child was just as physical as she was. Amy was a reminder of her only love and the only inheritance she had ever gotten from her own mother.
Three months after, she went to the local Catholic church and had both of them baptised. It was an understated ceremony, nothing like she had witnessed when she was a child.
Kneeling at the feet of the priest, she felt just as reborn as she claimed to be. She had spent her entire life in service of the men she loved; serving as a physical manifestation of her father’s own love and, later, as her husband’s dutiful wife.
It only seemed fitting that she spend the rest of her life in the service of a new patriarch.
3
The face staring back at Natelo from the bathroom mirror was just as strange as it was familiar. Her body carried trinkets and memories of Amy’s form: the small chest, wide hips, perfect teeth, and long arms. She looked exactly like her mother. She had also inherited the parts of her mind that were haunted, a fraction of her madness, her burning brain.
When Natelo was 14 years old, after surviving her mother’s poisoning, she was convinced that she, and everyone else, had died and was stuck in purgatory. She could see people as they truly were, their flesh still burning while their souls rot in their bodies. She could smell them, smell herself, and no one else could. Too scared to tell anyone for fear of how she might be treated after seeing how her mother was, she kept this information to herself. She had moved in with her father who had a second family that readily loved and accepted her as their own. One day, during a mandatory therapy session for her trauma, she slipped up and revealed everything to her therapist.
After multiple sessions and tests, she was diagnosed with Early Onset Schizophrenia. Clearly, this was what her mother had suffered as well; possibly even her grandmother, who had turned into a paranoid shell of herself and lived close to and helped at a Catholic church. She hadn’t spoken to her in years. She made a mental note to give her a call soon.
Now, five years after her mother’s death, Natelo was on a flight to a university in New York. She had gotten a scholarship at a prestigious institution. Life was better now, her vision clearer. She was under medication coupled with therapy, and even though sometimes she still heard indistinguishable whispers by her ear and saw figures where there were none, it was manageable now. Now she understood that it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t anyone’s. Now she could control it.
Her motion sickness had sent her running to the bathroom as she felt so nauseous she couldn’t hold it. She had been feeling a bit under the weather the entire week leading up to her flight, but she couldn’t miss it. After rinsing her face, she went back to her seat and took another pair of the pills she had been given to fight nausea. They never helped, but she kept trying in the hope that a placebo-effect miracle might occur. She glanced at her clock and saw that she had an hour left. She could make it.
She had carried a book with her, her favourite dystopian novel. Just as she settled down to read it, she felt a visceral pain in the pit of her stomach, as if a dull knife was cutting up chunks of her intestines. She tried to get up, but the pain blinded her and sent her crashing back down to her seat. The two passengers she was seated between noticed her distress.
“Are you alright?” One asked, and after seeing that Natelo could only wheeze in response, beckoned a flight attendant.
“Ma’am? Are you okay?” the attendant inquired.
Natelo’s head was spinning, her eyes watering from the pain, her ears ringing. She felt several hands on her body as she was lifted up from her seat and into the aisle.
“Ma’am, please tell me if you can hear me.”
Something was trying to crawl out of her body. She felt her chest expand uncomfortably with the weight of whatever it was as it forced itself out. Bending at the waist, she clutched her stomach.
“Oh my God, what’s happening?” someone shrieked.
Vaguely, Natelo could hear the commotion around her past the explosion in her own head. She felt the thing crawl up her throat, digging its claws into her oesophagus. She fell to her knees, mouth stretched so wide open by the thing that she was bleeding from the corners. There were screams as the other passengers tried to get away from her. Then, finally, it was over. She fell flat on her face, unable to muster the strength to hold herself up.
She could feel herself losing consciousness, but she managed one last glance at whatever had been crawling out of her. It was a black gooey mass the size of a basketball covered in her blood, with two extensions with sharp claws attached to them, and what she presumed was its chest rising and falling as it breathed.
As she drifted off, she realised that she had no fear left within her, as if this thing that had been inside her finally being expelled had relieved her of all her pain. Bruised and bleeding, she felt lighter than she ever had.
And for the first time since she was 14 years old, Natelo felt alive.
Franscine Machinda
Franscine Machinda is a writer, editor, and painter from Nairobi, Kenya whose literary work includes personal and cultural criticism essays, short stories, and journalistic work focusing on the arts.
They are also the founder and editor-in-chief of WhoWhatWhere KE, an independent online publication and artist collective focused on illuminating and celebrating local artistry. They have been published on Qwani 02 and have a few upcoming pieces on Debunk Media.