Full Moon

The leaves on the trees rustled as I walked past them. It was too dark to see what made them do that but I felt the cool night breeze wrap itself around me then float past ahead. The lamp I held in front of me created an eerie yellowish halo that hovered around the narrow bush path which wound its way, twisting like a long headless snake through the forest. For a moment, I thought I heard footsteps coming behind me. I stopped and turned. I saw no one. Fear settled like a heavy cargo in the pit of my stomach and caused my heart to beat erratically – the sounds like the feverish climax of an atilogu dance. Yet I pressed on. There was no turning back now.

The path gave way suddenly into a large open clearing with a desolate looking hut standing forlorn in the middle. She was sitting so still on the floor, her legs folded beneath her, in front of the run down hut. There was a terrible smell in the air like decaying animal and rotten fruits.

Her gaze was fixed somewhere in the distance, at a point far beyond the wild swaying of the tall, lean grasses and the solid shadows of trees whose branches cast long finger-like shadows on the ground whenever the moon came out of its hiding place. As she stared, I felt a prickly sensation at the back of my neck. My body felt so sensitive that I could feel mosquitoes dancing around my neck. It was the look that made me shiver with fear sometimes; the look that made me almost believe the villagers when they said that her guilt had made her run mad; the look she had on her face when she talked of her dead husband and child as though they were still alive and she still lived with them.

“Afoma,” I called.

She swung her gaze to me lazily as if I was an annoying intruder in her perfect world.  In a way, I was but I also knew that if I did not come, she would starve to death.

“Why do you keep coming? You shouldn’t. It is an abomination, alu!!! If the villagers find out, you will pay for your foolishness.” She sounded angry.

“I come because I want to,” I replied. It was true. I defied the verdict of the villagers. No one in the village was supposed to speak with her, buy or sell to her. She had been labelled a witch after the inferno that had claimed the lives of her husband and son and had been excommunicated from the village. The envious villagers accused her of witchcraft because she was gifted in using herbal medicine to cure the different ailments of people far and wide. They had claimed that the long dark mark on her forehead almost touching her nose was an identity of her water spirit people. On the night of the strange inferno, she had been away at a far away village trying to cure the only child of a widowed woman. She had returned to see the charred bodies of the only family she had and even before she came out of her shock, the village women had surrounded her and chased her out of the village with brooms and sticks. She had not even been around to watch them being buried.

“Go, go, go,” she shouted, her voice harsh. Her eyes shone with a life of their own and I took a few steps backward because I was afraid of her now. I was not sure how sane she was after the incident.

“I will not,” I replied stubbornly. She had once saved my life when I was so sick and at the point of death. I had not thought that I would live to see the next day but she had gently brought me back to life with some bitter tasting herbs. For that alone, I was indefinitely grateful to her. She had once been a beautiful woman, the pride of her husband and the envious object of the village women. Her gift of healing had been an additional blessing as if the gods had wanted to make a mockery of their other creations by saddling only one woman with so many virtuous attributes.  Looking at her now, I fought to hold back tears. Her eyes look dilated and sometimes rolled back as if she was possessed of an evil spirit. The corners of her mouth were turned down and there was a continuous twitch in her left eye that belied her usual calm composure.

Gingerly, I stepped towards her and dropped the plate of food on the ground beside her legs. The empty plates I had brought days before were still dirty but empty scattered by the entrance of her hut. When I got up, she was looking ahead again. In the darkness, her eyes glowed brightly. They looked like the eyes of a cat in the darkness. I shivered but the weather was not cold.

“You know,” she suddenly said silently, “they are coming here soon.”

“Who are they?”

She looked at me like I was crazy and snapped, “Dim. My husband and my child. They go through here on their way home from the eke market.”

“Send my greetings to them,” I said just to oblige her.

I became sad, deeply sad to think that such a tragedy had happened to such a young and lovely woman and had affected her life so badly that at times, she did not even recognize me.

She quietly said, “Very soon, I shall go home with them. They have no one to cook their meals.”

Distracted, I hardly listened to her. I picked up the dirty plates lying about.

“Sleep well,” I said as I left. As I entered the bushes again, ominously the moon shone brightly as though it had suddenly remembered what it was there for. The strangeness of its brightness and the sudden gust of wind that slapped my bare arms made me shiver, not with cold but something deeper and more intense.

I became afraid.

I turned around sharply just in time to see her stand up abruptly like one whose buttocks were on fire. I watched her throw her arms open and close them in a hug around nothing at all. Yes, I saw nothing within the circle of her arms yet something inside me sensed that we were no more just two people in the clearing. She began to mutter in low tones. Then just when I thought that was the height of her madness, she threw her head back and laughed. Her laughter was so shrill and piercing that I covered my ears and shut my eyes tightly. She kept on laughing and my mind willed her to stop. As if she heard the screaming of my mind, she stopped. I jumped back in fear when I opened my eyes and she was standing quite close to me. I had not even heard her move at all. There was something dark and foreboding about the way her eyes shone so brightly as she stared into my eyes. I stood transfixed unable to move a muscle knowing that I had just witnessed something I shouldn’t have – something only the gods should have seen. Was she a spirit or just plain mad? The moon was directly behind her so I could not see her face clearly. Yet I felt the heat and burning intensity of her eyes. Suddenly, she grinned and I thought that there was something twisted about the way her teeth flashed in the darkness. I began to shake.

“I shall return,” she said softly, calmly.

That seemed to bring me out of my trance. I turned and fled the forest. I thought I heard laughter in the distance but I was not sure. 

The next morning even before the sun had secured a place for itself, two things happened that changed my life forever. First, my sister, Ekemma gave birth to a baby girl. The beautiful baby had a long thin dark mark running down her forehead almost to her nose. Secondly, Adigwe, the hunter came with the bitter news that Afoma had been found lying dead in the village square. She was found naked showing the world that she had had nothing to hide even in death. The hunter told us that her eyes had been wide open staring up at the sky. I needed no more pointers as I sat weakly on the ground. Afoma had kept to her promise.

She had returned.

The baby was named Onwa days later and everyone thought it was a beautiful name. I thought it was coincidental for I kept remembering the night Afoma had died – how full the moon had been mocking the tragedy of the morning after. I watched Onwa grow. She was indeed a beauty. Her flawless skin was fair and reminded me of the back of a ripe juicy mango. Against her fairness, the long dark mark on her forehead stood out starkly. She was a quiet child and an only child. I also got married and had children too. My sister was close to me so our children got close. Onwa, particularly became so close to me that it would have been difficult convincing a stranger that she was not my daughter. There was a bond that drew us closer, a bond I could hardly explain. It started when she started having nightmares. Her mother brought her to me and I asked her gently what she saw in her dreams. She refused to talk about them but one night as she slept in my home, she had a terrible dream. She screamed from her dream and I woke her up. Her little body was drenched in sweat and she was shivering so badly that I held her against my breasts. She was so thin.

“I saw her again,” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“She said her name was my name – Onwa. She said that I had been sent because she did not finish her life.”

That night, I remember feeling goose pimples break out all over my arms. My heart had started to pound in my ears as I realized that the young girl had in deed received word from Afoma. There was no doubt about it.

It was in Onwa’s thirteenth year that I started noticing strange things. The villagers had told me about it earlier but I had been blind to see it. One night, I caught her talking to someone under the Ube tree in front of the house. I approached her quietly.

“Onwa!”

She jumped and turned around. Her eyes shone guiltily and she bowed her head like a child that had been caught with his hand in the pot of soup.

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one, aunty.”

“What do you mean no one? I heard you talking with someone very clearly.”

“I wasn’t talking with anybody,” she insisted.

“Go inside. Your mother has been calling you.”

She ran past me and I had the distinct feeling that there had been someone there but I saw no one after looking around.

That night, I had a dream. She was in my dream walking by the bank of the river with a woman whose back was turned to me but I felt that I recognized her by the way she walked. Suddenly, I was transported back to the clearing where I had met Afoma before her death. This time, Onwa was there in front of the hut, her back to the full moon just like that night. Her face was twisted in anger. She pointed her finger towards my direction but I had feeling that she was pointing to someone behind me. I turned and saw Mgboli, one of the market women whose stall was close to my own. As if in a trance, Mgboli was moving towards Onwa slowly. I remembered that Mgboli had been the leader of the women who had chased Afoma out of the village that night. I suddenly knew what Onwa was doing and I screamed for Mgboli not to go in that direction but she did not move as if she heard me. I screamed and screamed until my voice got hoarse. She was still walking when I woke up from my dream. It was already morning. I heard a cock crow in the distance. Beside me, my husband was lying on his side, his back to me, snoring heavily. My children were at the other side of the room sleeping. I got up and slowly opened the door so as not to wake them. The morning was still young. I felt the soft, cold and tiny drops of dew cover me like a feather. I walked like I knew where I was going. It was not until I got there that I realized where my legs had carried me to. I was in the village square. There was no one around. The huge kolanut tree that stood in the middle was my only companion. I sat down under it, folded my legs under me and waited. I waited for what I did not know but I knew inside me that I had to be there. Occasionally, a hunter or a palm wine tapper would pass me and I would greet quietly. I waited so long that soon, the hands of sleep played with my head. I had not slept long when I heard something. My eyes snapped open and I swung my gaze to the left and the right like a trapped animal seeking for a way of escape. I sprang to my feet and moved in the direction of where I thought the sounds were coming from. It did not take me long to catch up with the noise. There was a mob of villagers mostly women shouting in frenzy, holding up brooms and sticks. I stopped abruptly. The scene was too familiar. I had witnessed the same scene thirteen years ago. They were heading in the direction of my sister’s house, I realized and felt something heavy drop to my chest. A lump I found difficult to swallow formed in my throat. With my heart in my mouth, I ran in the opposite direction. The road I was taking led to the same place and was longer but I was a woman possessed. Something inside me knew that history was about to repeat itself again and I knew that I could never let that happen no matter how wrong anybody was. I ran like I had never in my life done before through the bush until I burst out on the other side. I could hear the voices of the women, so close. I burst into their compound and stopped, looking about wildly. There was a young boy sweeping with a long dried bunch of palm branches but he stopped when I charged in and straightened. He stared at me with his mouth hanging open.

“Nne, good morning,” he stammered taking in my unusually dishevelled appearance. I brushed past him without replying and went into the house.