Akwaeke Emezi

To be singled out and locked into the blurred consciousness of a little mind? We refused. It would be madness.

We were not conscious but we were alive—in fact, the main problem was that we were a distinct we instead of being fully and just her.

Humans often pray and forget what their mouths can do, forget that every ear is listening, that when you direct your longing to the gods, they can take that personally.

The name meant, in its truest form, the egg of a python.

The first madness was that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin.

They meant to punish her: they took her children, they filled her mouth with sand.

Since the corrupters broke her shrines and converted her children, how many of them were calling her name anymore?

And so we were strengthened, because belief, for beings like us, is the colostrum of existence.

At twenty, when she was in veterinary school, after spending long hours separating skin from cadaver muscle and lifting delicate sheets of fascia, she would return to her room and use a fresh scalpel on her scarred left arm.

Very well, we will do you this one thing, because it was always you and us together, and you named us the shadow that eats things and the smoke that hides the mother color from our teeth, and you have granted us dominion over this marble room that you call your mind, so here is the place where you miss that man and the girls and the road you used to run down, it is soft and fleshy, a bulb of feeling, and here we are like a useful edge and here is the cut, here is the fall, here is the empty that follows it all.