those who speak in dreams | #ONC2020

With A Sound In A Quiet Place

It was not the knife. But she will not speak of it in her wakings. She gave the first shards of those things to an elder who asked about the truth the year after the chief announced his successor.

Two things happened: for the elder, the sliver of it was enough to drive him mad. He hung himself from the branch of the baobab tree outside his hut. For Nkechi, she learned to keep the Memories she found to herself. They do no good to those who can not hold them, after all.

Nkechi knows when the man has asked for her. First, he uses a strange, ancient phrase, and the weight of it travels through the packed dirt of the village and into the mud underneath her feet. Beside her, the Memory of a ill-fated birth stirs to life, the dying mother praying to the gods for safe travel for her son, a voice sent from the gods that will take her soul and his and let them live a hundred years from now, in the next rebirth. The thing that binds the two together is that this man has asked for She-Who-Speaks-In-Dreams. The mother did the same.

It has been a long time since someone has called for those of her kind like this. The common folk have forgotten that before her ancestors swallowed Memories, they spoke in Dreams, and that forgetfulness is evident by the way that they act when she enters a room.

Just because she may hold your Memories does not mean that you are free to kill a man in your Dreams. She will take your dream and make it a Memory and release it as a curse upon your house, and you will do what you Dreamed.

But you will not get away with it.

The chief does not seem to understand who he asks for. Nkechi, She-Who-Swallows-Memories and She-Who-Speaks-in-Dreams, is tempted to open her mouth and call the chief by his name. In her mind's eye, she can see him stiffen, clutch for his chest. In her mind's eye, the way she says his name is the way that the weight of his sins press in on his Soul in the middle of the night. In her mind's eye, she will finish the breath that it took to speak it and he will already be dead from the sheer power of her words. The man at the entrance of the village will know who she is, then, and he will come.

Still, she does not. She knows that a week from now, the woman he slept with will pull him aside and show him the growing mound underneath her tunic. He will startle, for a moment, and then he will smile. Kiss her, deeply, on her mouth, and promise that it will be a son. In his mind, however, he will be planning murder. He does not want a son. In the woman's mind, she will be planning murder as well. She has always wanted a son. She just does not want his.

A week from now, blood will be shed under the old baobab tree, the same one that heard the dying gasps of a man that could not live with the Memories of another. A week from now, the soil under that tree will drink it up like a man who does not know what water is. A week from now, in the morning, someone will find the body.

It will not be the woman's.

She-Who-Swallows-Memories brings her mind back to the present. The man asks for her again, and this time he uses the name that she is used to.

The chief's eyes brighten. There is a smile, there, growing on his lips, not unlike the smile he will give the woman that he considers a passing fling. Nkechi holds still, for a moment, and every bone in her body protests when she drags one foot out of the mud and onto solid ground, listening as he gives the man directions.

You will find her by the river, he says. He did not say You will find her in the mud.