But when he looked into the wet blackness of her eyes, he – surprisingly for a blind man, a modern man – did not make that mistake. People were known to return in renovated bodies it happens all the time. Saul did not name her after his mother, though, as perhaps another man would have.

They said she followed her father’s side, the grandmother who was dead, for her dark skin and her thick hair. She was chubby and beautiful and insane if anyone had known enough to see it.

We stayed asleep, but with our eyes open, still latched on to her body and her voice as she grew, in those first slow years when nothing and everything happens. Not that this mattered – it was clear that she (the baby) was going to go mad. We, on the other hand – their children, the hatchlings, godlings, ọgbanje – can endure so much more horror. Perhaps even less so, because your children are just weak bags of flesh with a timed soul. They are unknowable – anyone with sense realizes that – and they are about as gentle with their own children as they are with yours. But what we think barely matters, even being who we are to them: their child. We’ve always wanted to think that it was a careless thing the gods did, rather than a deliberate neglect. And there we were, infants in this world, blind and hungry, partly clinging to her flesh and the rest of us trailing behind in streams, through the open gates.

So there she was: a fat baby with thick, wet black hair. 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.

But since the gates were open, not closed against remembrance, we became confused. We should have been anchored in her by then, asleep inside her membranes and synched with her mind. They don’t pay much attention to it, except when it is collected, organized and souled.īy the time she (our body) struggled out into the world, slick and louder than a village of storms, the gates were left open. But these are gods, after all, and they don’t care about what happens to flesh, mostly because it is so slow and boring, unfamiliar and coarse. Perhaps the gods forgot they can be absentminded like that. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed. We came from somewhere – everything does.

Akwaeke emezi freshwater