Kadi was slicing avocados for dinner when the first thing hit the roof. It was too loud to be a fruit or a branch. I suppose you could say it was too heavy for chance, yet too soft for danger.
She paused, knife hovering mid-air, listening to the echo travel through the zinc sheets and down into the bones of the house. It was loud, as if the house itself was answering back. She figured it was normal; the house was old and had been standing since before maps were accurate, before the roads reached this far inland, and before the hills were stripped and renamed for investors.
She went back to her chopping.
The second thump came later, when all three Camara sisters sat around the table, steam rising from the pepper chicken, palm oil glistening on their fingers. It landed right in the middle of Sia, the oldest sister’s complaint about too much salt in the stew.
They froze, as the house inhaled, answering back again.
“Na wetin dat?” Pepe, the youngest, asked, eyes bright already, half-hoping for trouble.
They laughed the way people laugh when they remember childhood fear as entertainment. Childhood stories returned easily of witches slipping through the sky at night in mayonnaise jars and sardine tins, miscalculating altitude, crashing into roofs and backyards. Naked women found at dawn, ashamed, insisting it was not what it looked like.
“If I fit enter sardine tin,” Pepe said, licking oil from her fingers, “I don lef dis town long time. Abuja. Accra. Abidjan sef.”
“You go need whole carton,” Kadi shot back. “For all dem shoe you get.”
Their routine that evening was unchanged as they ate and teased as they often did. After dinner, they watched their usual half-interesting, half-familiar shows and went to bed early, because even sardine tins crashing on the roof are less urgent when you work online.
Sia slept lightly, as she always did. Time zones made her nocturnal, and teaching correct English language bent her spine. Their mother was a teacher, you see, trained in America and London, in correct English, with no pidgin woven in between. Sia wanted to be just like her, so she taught too, except her students were all behind a computer screen. Most nights, she taught pronunciation to mouths waking up halfway across the world. Helping them pronounce dyslexia, algorithm, resilience; guiding strangers through syllables she herself had learned sitting straight in a classroom.
Just like Sia, that night, the house did not rest. The zinc roof echoed alternating thumps and pauses in rhythmic ways, like the Sunday church choir, back when they used to all go to church. She left a note on the kitchen table before dawn, her handwriting slanted from tiredness: More fell last night, let’s check together in the morning.
They waited until she awoke; she was the eldest after all, and they all listened to her. Besides, they needed the sun to be high enough to feel brave, and hand in hand, it was only at noon that they stepped outside.
The land around the house no longer looked the way it used to. When they were children, the hills were thick with kola nut, mango, and baobab trees towering like elders. During the war, they remember people hid in those trees. And during the Ebola outbreak, the forest around the house went quiet. During COVID, a few years later, the quiet from Ebola learned to linger, and sometimes it felt like it never left.
Then the government sold what was left, small patches at first, then entire slopes, to foreign companies who spoke of clouds, sovereignty, and the future. Trees disappeared, and data centres rose where rivers once ran. Grey buildings without windows replaced the trees; they were always humming, and always thirsty. The foreigners said the water they used was only for cooling, that the heat was manageable for the people, and that the centres would bring them jobs. But no jobs came, and then the water came on certain days only, and the ground cracked earlier in the dry season. From where they stood, they could see the tallest centre in the distance, its metallic skin catching the sun like a false river, glinting off the house’s zinc roof.
It was through that glint that they saw it. It looked like a body, lying across the roof, wrapped in dark cloth. It might have been a trick of the light, but she was shaped like a woman, and wrong in every detail. It seemed like she was assembled from descriptions instead of touch.
One arm was young, smooth, untouched by time. The other was scarred, with thin white lines crisscrossing dark skin like lines on old war maps. Her feet were mismatched, one was broad and calloused from years of walking, and the other had delicate toenails painted a vibrant pink, the kind Pepe liked to wear. Her face was also strange, like a stubborn child refusing agreement; with a jaw that was too sharp, lips that were too full, and mismatched eyes. One was ancient, like the elders before the war that the sisters only saw in photos, and one was newborn, like cousin Grace’s baby, whose photo they received just last week from America. Around the body, lay small dark orbs, rolling gently against one another, glowing in soft pulses, like fireflies, chasing the light in Disney cartoons.
The sisters did not scream. The war and the diseases, and all the death and grief, had made so many things normal, even something as strange as this. They carried her inside, though, afraid of what her body might do to the roof and to the only place they had ever called home. It took all three of them because that body was heavier than bone or metal. It was a strange kind of weight, as if every woman who had ever carried too much had added herself to the mass.
They left the orbs on the roof, though, having sweated just to bring her in. They put her in the spare room, the one filled with unopened boxes and grief. It was fitting that they would put the body there, in that room where their mother had died, lungs filling during the last pandemic. They avoided that room the way you avoid unfinished conversations, anything to just go on with their lives.
Surely someone would come for her soon. If she were from the data centre, then they would notice missing property. No one else was close enough to the house anyway. The orbs were surely trackers or brains, or spirits, or backups or whatever they kept in those tall buildings that guzzled up all the water. Pepe joked they might hold her wardrobe. Kadi wondered if they were satellites. Sia said nothing, hoping they would have an answer soon.
By morning, the spare room was loud. It started with a hum settling into the walls of the old house, as the body synced with the orbs overhead. By the second day, the sisters began hearing music, not through their ears, but behind their eyes. It was like a migraine that is so often present that it becomes a part of life. The music was also strange, like a memory that did not belong to them, but rather to the body and her orbs.
By the third day, the body had learned quickly. At first, she suggested small things like lesson plans for Sia, or better wording for Pepe’s captions online, or spice adjustments in Kadi’s recipes. By the fifth day, she was performing on their behalf, until eventually she became them.
As the days blended into each other, Sia slept while her students praised her clarity. Pepe scrolled endlessly as her likeness sold, smiled, and optimised. Kadi watched herself cook without cooking, hands hovering uselessly while the bot moved with stolen muscle memory. Six months passed like a fog.
When at last the security men arrived from the nearest data centre, the garden was quiet, as if no one lived there anymore. They collected the glowing orbs from the roof, packing them carefully, reverently, as if they were ancestors relocated.
Inside, they did not find the three Camara sisters who featured on their records for the house. Instead, they found only one body, wearing Sia’s glasses, Kadi’s smile, and Pepe’s pink toenails. They were pleased that the pilot experiment was a success, slapping each other’s backs as they began to clean up any trace of the body and her bots. Today it was just a pilot, but in the future, across the country, more centres would rise, more water would quench the centres’ thirst, and more human bodies would be optimised – just like the Camara sisters.
But as they left, they could hear the old house continue to inhale and answer back. The sound reached the data centres, where beneath the hum of servers and the whisper of disappearing rivers, curiosity waited patiently.
It was perhaps the only thing left. Small, stubborn, and human, wondering who would still choose to learn and do with their own hands, and to fail loudly. Wondering who would still choose to remember what it feels like to do a thing imperfectly, and love it anyway.
*****
Image: skylarvision Pixabay remixed