The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

The Day Their Bodies Knew Form

Eric-Anderson Momou

Mami Wata had only death on her mind. 

As she walked to the necromancer’s house, it amused her to think that of all the times she’d visited Papa Legba’s medium, she needed a Voodoun doll, or a potion on behalf of another person.

Now it was her turn.

Long ago, Mami Wata had made the decision to die. Not to die a simple, mortal death. She’d kept her resolve silent. She hadn’t uttered the thought to any one of her past suitors: husbands, or wives. Neither had she spoken of it to any of her Alusi children. She had simply waited until she could feel Time no longer. She felt as if she had outstayed life’s welcome; as if she had feigned or faked her way through it like a cheat. Brazen, yet estranged from her own divinity.

When she arrived at the necromancer’s door, she composed herself. She tamed her wild countenance to one of calm. The necromancer, wearing a cloak of sackcloth, ushered her in. He brought her to a large wicker table, ridden with bones, and seeing stones. 

“Do you have a spell that can kill a god?” said Mami Wata.

The necromancer shook his head. “My power came from them, and sharing these things, to one lesser than me is forbidden. I cannot speak of such things, even to you Mami Wata.”

“Oh?” She said, “And why not?”

“Because if I do wrong by any of them, they will demand payment. And that price of blood is on my head.”

“Let me handle that.”

“There are Greater Gods than you, Mami Wata. Remember this.”

“And there are Lesser gods.”

The necromancer sighed. 

“Which God do you mean to kill?” asked the Necromancer tentatively. He sat across the wicker table clutching his divination bones. His nails, grew long and woody like —

“Myself,” said Mami Wata. 

This took the necromancer by such surprise, he nearly fell from his stool.

“Oh Mami! You can’t surely—« 

But she cut him off.

“Yes, I have.” She looked outside the brick and the window, towards the edifices on Shawny Square. Tranquil, they seemed, as if phasing in and out of existence through the harrowing mist. 

“I’ve decided long ago,” she said. “When last autumn fell, and drought came, and when the children forgot the names of their forefathers. Then I knew, that was my time. That was the time, in which I have outstayed my welcome.” 

“I cannot offer you death, as a cure,” said the Necromancer, “Because I do not know of any poison that could kill the Great Mami Wata.” 

“Not a poison,” said Mami Wata, “But something of libation and lamentation.”

The necromancer sat so still, that Mami Wata wondered if he’d heard her. He threw the divination bones upon the wicker table, and drew from his pipe.

“Papa Legba knows that which the dead know,” said the Necromancer.

Taking his lyre, he played a song of lamentation. When he had whispered the words into the bottle, he gave her the potion. He bottled the song in a black vial, and spat twice over her left shoulder. Then, he poured wine on the ground as libation. 

“Here is the vial of song to give life to the dying goddess.”

She paid him for his time, with a strand of her gray hair, and left the house.

Normally, at her first sense of distress Mami Wata would make it rain. She would cloud out the sun with her discontent, and loathing. But she decided-and this was unusual- to spare the elements for today. She would unsheath her anger, and let it run its course.

Then, the idea came.

She would wade out into the lake, and drink the Necromancer’s vial. Then, she would drown herself.

She was beset with a sprightliness, and self reverence that only independent women enjoyed in later years possessed. Mami Wata’s magical powers had not manifested until after her first divorce. No spell, or magic could save her marriages. No sage or potion could either, and by the time she’d learned it, the realization was a moot one.
Her first husband had been a businessman, not at all of her ilk–but of good lineage, tall stature, and fine features. It wasn’t her astute demeanor she’d fallen in love with, but how he could intrigue her during their travels with intense knowledge of culture. This level of joint exploration waned after her many children were born. When her many exploits came to a halt, with a catastrophic embezzling lawsuit she supported him in request for other employment. It wasn’t until after he began his penchant for drinking, she left. Once the habit affected her at the expense of her children she left.

She had spent many years alone during that time in a season of transfiguration. She would change as a whippoorwill, or as a siren, sometimes as a snake along the beach — or as a mother bear and hibernate when the winter came. 

She’d flown off to sea, catching the gale of the Atlantic under her pinions and smelling of the salt and the brine of the ocean. When it’d become time for the seasonal migration and thaw, she’d venture back more inland from the coast, and would resume her dwelling upon land. 

It had taken many months, many years to resume a human form again. 

She’d found an open pasture away from the residential city, and amidst the palm and fern fronds she rested from the heat of the sun. The baobab trees would provide her solace, a natural fortress away from the people and the shackled storms.
It was in this place that resided. Taking on the form of a formidable man, she’d built herself a house.She contented herself with cultivating her garden, drinking hibiscus tea, and reading. She ran as often as she could to set her mind at ease.
She preferred running than flying, acting to transfiguring, and laughter to drunkenness. She preferred the pot cooker over the cauldron. The scent of Rosemary, over frankincense.

It was no secret that Mami Wata had decided long ago to retire from magic. Though it did provide her a means to an end, the exhaustive power it took to employ had taken a toll on her. Summoning astral familiars, and casting out spirits, was no easy feat. It sapped her of any strength she could muster at the end of this millennium.

Magic was like technology, she had long deduced. It got in the way and distanced souls.

Mami walked to the oceanside. Passing the villager’s houses, she walked into the countryside. 

She sat with her orange tabby, her familiar for twenty years on her lap.
You’ve been looking grayer, and grayer, said her cat. There’s a hex for that, you know.
“Timeless consignment,” she said, “I know. It’s only a momentary fix.”
“By the look of you,” said Aesop, “You’re going to need it.”
“Thank you for your concern, Aesop.” Said Mami Wata curtly, “but I have no need of a spell, hex, or miracle right now. Not now, and not ever again. Only death.”
and the cat shut up. He knew better than to pry.
So he contented himself with his toy, and brought it up with him in the rafters of the house.
Mami sat uncomfortably in her chair. There was no need for such things any longer. In fact she hated to call such things to mind. As wonderful as magic could be, it only concealed decrepit things, masked the ugliness with a fragrance of beautification . No, she preferred the truth of things.
She heard a whistle from outside her window, and sprung résistent from her seat.
It was the mailman. He arrived with a package, which he promptly left on the threshold. He knocked.
She winced at the sound.
“Papa Legbas coming,” he said, then he disappeared. She opened up the package.

“We were given new bodies,” he said, “So that we might continue Damballah’s vision.”

“Damballah, is dead to me,” Mami Wata said. 

“Of course”, the postman said. He grinned. “You have yet to choose yours.”

She recognized the smile, the familiar front gap in the teeth.

“You are no postman,” Mama Wata seethed. 

“No, in fact I am not,” said the Post man. 

“Papa Legba!” Her breath whisked out of her like a balloon.

Papa Legba laughed. In an instant his clothes changed. He wore a black button down suit, with a white collared shirt. Black pants, and black boots. He wore a fur cape about his neck of a serval cat, and sported a black top hat. He wore beads and necklaces around his neck and wrists. 

“Now you know,” said Papa Legba. He curtsied, and tipped his black top hat. 

“You snake,” Mami Wata said. 

“Snake I was, and snake I can become,” Papa Legba said. “But today I am only a messenger.”

“A messenger for what?” Mami Wata asked. 

“For Demballah.”

Mami Wata was quiet. She couldn’t believe that her second husband was standing before her. 

“I bring bad news I am afraid,” Papa Legba said. “It is in regards to the Alusi.” 

“The Alusi?”

“What do the Alusi have to do with this? I have not heard about them for centuries.”

“Demballah has been summoned. The Alusi, and our children.” Papa Legba clicked his tongue. 

“Demballah is about to bring a one hundred year rain.” He cleared his throat. “He is taking all our children with him. You better find shelter quickly. Of course, I thought about imploring the Goddess of Water directly. Perhaps, you can reason with him?”

He placed his hat back on his head. 

“I know you two were together once.”

The package was wrapped in blue Ankara fabric, and about it was a yarn thread wrapped up neatly in a bow. 

She unwrapped the package, and inside was a black wooden Iroko box. She shuttered to open it. An age before, Papa Legba had proposed to her upon this very hill when the sun and the moon were in alignment. He had flown to her, before she knew of his nature, and they had wedded under the sunset sky of a baobab. 

Mami Wata’s hands trembled. She breathed in long and deep, then she opened it.

She saw a necklace. Inside was a blue crystal. A blue like the waters of the ocean. A blue like the sea in the sky. Mami Wata gasped. 

Then came a low voice, and the ground beneath her quaked. It trembled under her feet. She saw her house fall. Decades of work, decades of labor.

The wild was calling.
There was no ground or sky, but simply an expanse like the maw of some beast.

Where was her body?

“You have no body,” said Papa Legba telepathically. “You must make one.”

“For now it is non-corporeal. You’ll get used to it,”  Papa Legbas said.

Yes I’m a Thought reader as well.
he said,her lips unwavering.
She looked at the myriads of bridges, the shifting crossroads. Yet she bore no corporeal body, she felt everything as if her being were wrought with insipid, yet conscious tendrils.

A taste here, through the plasm – a scent there. 

“It’s overwhelming,” she said. 

Papa Legba grinned.

Stretch out your hand he said. 

This confused her. She had no hands.

“Go on, do it. Make them.”

Make them? What did Papa Legba mean?

Imagine, he spoke without sound, that you are creating them. and the thought coalesced.

She thought of hands: her old cracked widows hands she used to mend quilts; the hands she used to caress her husbands heads as they wept. how deft they were stringing thread through a needle’s eye, the hands she’d burned timelessly when she cooked for her family. The hands that had fed, and dressed her children before she had sent them off into the world.

all of this she recalled with utmost clarity. Then the hands- her hands materialized.

She hadn’t seen it a second before, how the spider had congealed from thin air into her view. It descended from the void on  a thin strand of its webbing, frolicking as delicate as gossamer.

It had seen her before she had seen it.

It was like one of those paintings with eyes that followed you.

You are guilty of the sin of complacency, said the World Weaver. He said, mandibles flaring.

They clenched and relaxed.

“The thread I spin winds the world. It keeps it together.”

Erzunule thought of this, each stitch – each seam constructing the fabric of her universe: what she had been brought up to know, and what she had been brought up to see.

She gazed at it again, this time observing its many colors, how the thread seemed to be of no width or breadth. Maybe she could reach out and touch one.

Don’t touch. Said Papa Legba. 

“The thread,” said Papa Legba, “Weaves multiple time streams, including your own. The living do not touch the Weaver’s thread.

Then, Papa Legba took a knife, and cut out an eye from Anansi, the World Weaver. 

“It’s quite alright,” said Papa Legba, “We are only seeing what he sees.”

He brought her the eye, and spun it so that in its revolution she saw its many facets. 

“Look here,” said Papa Legba. He pointed to a grainy congealing form inside the eye. In it, she saw her many lives through the cloudy murk. She saw herself, in her many iterations: mother, daughter, father, son, lover. At each stage the memory stilled like a grainy lithograph. 

“How many times,” said Papa Legba, “Have you turned away from your destiny?”

Mami Wata shuttered.

“The World Weaver knows.”

She saw the many fake deaths she had imposed, the skins she’d shorn- the ones she’d feigned for the sake of living a new life. When she coveted or when she’d become bored, and wanted to shed away her complacency. Then her new incarnations would take on new forms – only to affect new lives, and break old hearts.

Then taking his knife, Papa legba cut the eye, and inside was light. He took some, and gave it to her.

“Mix it in your flask,” he said. “My medium knows what is to become of it, and what has passed.”

Papa Legba placed the eye upon the head of Anansi. Then, the spider began to eat him, mandibles lashing like scimitars until Papa Legba’s body was no more. 

Your destiny is then this: You seek to break the shackles for our release.

And then Mami Wata was alone. Papa Legba had gone. Anansi, The World Weaver was no more – and neither was the world of the Lilting. 

She appeared on a road; no longer in the world of Lilting, but back amongst the Alusi.

Then spirit men took her off the road. Her captors brought her to barracks with other souls to captivity. 

She recalled her departure from her body. A wan corporal form, near death with gray tensile hairs crowning her head. Spider-thin fingers beset with arthritis. Wrinkled flesh on the brink of corruption. 

She remembered the family about her, each one of her children – six in all – huddled around her in a hospice care facility. 

Then with a breath something from out of her departed, and she could see the world from above like a quilt. Only, she could not interact with it. Something had pulled her away, like a dog on a chain far from all that she knew.

The force was instantaneous, and she could not discern a here and now. She could only discern this ether; this isolated town, like an Isle of Silence. 

When her soul appeared in the open air market, Mami Watafelt naked and exposed. He stood upon a dais, overlooking a great crowd of gray men in gray suits with sullen faces. 

Chains bound her wrists and ankles. 

Then the appraiser came, and she knew he was being sold. 

The appraiser was an auctioneer of sorts. He spoke in a language Mami Wata did not understand. 

There were other bodies beside her. They lingered, on the brink of hope and of destitution like cloudy phantasms who knew not their bodies or forms. Always swaying to a tintinnabulation of singing and rumination, with chains about their necks. Several lame or sick ones slept on the ground before the stage. 

The imprisoned were both nowhere, and someplace – at the eve and dawn of their surreal imaginings. 

These Alusi souls, though, seemed smudged and hazy. The harder she tried to look at them, the more smudged they appeared: like half-men left to rove in the mist. 

Though she felt a connection, as if she had come from these ancestors. Before her they had come, and after her they would go. 

She sought to clothe them, so that she might give them a form they could know. She sought to bring them away from their sultry malaise, and to clear the mist to see their fickle forms. But shackled to the dais, she felt hopeless.

Yet, here they were: left to the keeper of time, to the annals of some great beyond.

Then she had a memory of existence.

She’d been born to human parents in a place with a yellow sun. 

Discontent had set in; she’d wanted an out, but she could not find one. 

Now she wandered these concrete town streets without the slightest bit of knowledge. She could not remember when she had been enslaved. She could not remember being appraised –and sent to this town–whatever it was. 

The beings spoke a different language that she could not discern.

The appraiser had sold her to her Master. A brooding figure borne of mist with no face.

She walked upon the street. Grim faces swept past through the mist. Several translucent forms passed through one another.

It’s a ghost land, Mami Wata thought. A town full of Alusi, without any remembrance of anything. 

She saw the myriad faces. They hummed in a lamentation of discontent. Each one with a miser’s face, some children with gray faces loping about in careful play. 

They possessed no body form or flesh. Wandering sentient minds who walked in the annals of consciousness. There was a humming and a buzzing, the like of a lyrical interlude by which the vibrato of thought reached. None could hear the lamentation, but her. 

There was silence, and Mami Wata had the feeling that if she did speak her voice could not carry further than her throat. That it would stay lodged there.

Then the bell rang, and the Spirit men and the Spirit children turned their faces toward the heart of the city. They stood for a while, then slowly the myriad trudged like an army toward the epicenter of the sound.

As she trudged through the gray dust, she saw the township, and the city. She saw the people: half-dead forms, lacking faces and clothes. 

She joined in their walk, toward the city called Day. 

Her master, a darkened man without a face, had set her to work with the rest of her caravan.Shehad ordered her, and she went to the other formless bodies who toiled in the fields. 

With a scythe, she reaped her thoughts from the field of Knowledge. 

In the world of Lilting there was no day, or night. All was gray, except for light – and even that waned. 

She found the thicket on the edge of the field. It was a small one, unlike the rest of the world. The leaves gleamed silver, and green. Gold lined its branches. She knelt beside it, and at once her vial fell. Its contents dipped onto the roots, and the thicket lighted. The result was a flickering effulgence that burned, bright and red. 

The fire colored the field, and they strived to light it out. But it would not burn out, and so she stayed near it. Even when the bodies went to their dwellings, she stayed with the flicker.

The tongue of flame danced, but it did not burn what it touched.

From it, she gathered a bundle of twigs, and lit them to the fire. They burned like the thicket-fire had.

Like clay in a kiln their forms hardened…

They passed through the light.
The Alusi roved through the kiln.
“Gather sticks,” she said. “And dry things.”

Several Alusi wafted along the footpath to gather what they could. They came back with mistwood, and the things which decayed.

“That will not do,” said Mami Wata.

She gazed upon the wasteland, but saw nothing. Then, with great pain Mami Wata drew out her bones from her own flesh. She poured her vial on the bones. This lit the bones aflame, which heated the kiln. 

The kiln lit, as a mass of earthenware before them. The furnace burnt bright on that city called Day, and the light of it was as seven suns. All lighting from Dawn, and tapering into Night. 

“Go,” she told the Alusi, and they wandered through the expanse.

She saw the Alusi change. Their bodies shifted into matter, as their spirits hardened. New flesh cultivated on a scaffold of bone. Muscles flowered over vertebrae and scapula; white, graying heads changed to the down hair of infants. She saw them through the expanse. All awoken from the clay of the earth. A freshly tilled field with gardeners, and farmers alongside it. She saw births, and deaths– as readily as the moon waxed and waned. And her children – six in all – rose too. Shedding their elderly bodies like moulting spiders. They sprouted from the foliage, and from the trees. Bodies eviscerated from out of time and space. Unshackled by latent desire, unburdened by the sovereignty of greed to live again.

Then, the expanse changed to one of open sea. She saw the dead, and the ocean that bore their bones. She saw the Alusi transfigure into men and women. They boarded a great ship.

As the kiln’s fire died, the light flickered. She walked through the fire, and felt her form harden into a body. It was not a human body. No, it was tapered and thinned, long and sharp: fit for the sea. 

Instinctually, she felt it. 

Fresh scales grew over her legs. Fins sprouted from her shoulders, like wings. Gills lined her neck. Then, she jumped into the murk of it all, renouncing her fate. She swam through the froth, and the brine until her body could no longer carry the vessel of her spirit. 

She swam and she swam, and when the waves calmed she decided to rest. 

An aged fisherman caught her in his net. When he brought her upon the deck, she flipped about, gasping. She needed to breathe.  

The old man picked her up. When he smiled, she recognized him. It was Papa Legba. He hummed a familiar song; the like of which Mami Wata remembered in another place and time. 

“How is the body?” whispered Papa Legba.

Mami Wata flipped her tail. How had he known that it was her? She remembered the necklace he had given her, and remembered that she’d placed it in her mouth as she transfigured. She eyed the sea, wishing to tumble back over the deck. The light was dimming now, and the sailors were reeling in their catch by the thousands. 

“Here,” said Papa Legba. He placed her into a bucket filled with water. She could breathe again.

“It is time to retire,” said Papa Legba. 

He carried Mami Wata in the bucket, away from the other sailors. He carried her until the storm had passed, and the water had quieted. And then he began to sing. She heard his song as the light waned.

“Here is the vial of song to give life to the dying goddess,” sang Papa Legba. “For today is the day, the body knows its form.”

Then, when he had sung the song, Papa Legba tossed Mami Wata back into the sea. 

Instinctively, she plunged headlong into the waves. She swam amid the reef and the emeralds. She dove amidst schools of fish, amidst sharks, and crabs, and fishermen’s nets. She swam hard and fast, her tuna fins sweeping up the sand of the ocean floor. 

And then she found them. The Alusi, the souls of the half-dead, and the half-living. 

The necklace about her neck shined. The lapis lazuli emanated, and she saw their ghastly spirits return — hesitant at first, and then swiftly each one like churning milk in water brought to its source. 

There was a brief cyclone about her, in which her body spun. 

Swimming upwards in her mermaid form, she struggled against the tide. The necklace felt like an anchor around her neck.

She could feel the weight about her neck. She bore the weight of their souls. 

Then, when she’d pushed beyond the murk of the blue deep, she rose. 

She rose up to the surface of the sea, and breathed in deep. Her gills slowly disappeared around her neck. There was a sort of time in which the light gleamed faintly on the horizon. 

Papa Legba’s ship was nowhere to be seen. There was a sort of panoramic view on the surface of the ocean, a stillness. And she looked down at the necklace that kept the spirits. 

The weight of it felt heavy around her neck. She took a deep breath. She saw the last vestiges of the one-hundred year rain. She saw the pinstripe slit of sun coming through the cumulonimbus. The virgas. The remnant rain, she deduced, had caused the flood.

She heard the song, and the song heard her. But at last, her children were free. 

Just then a wide open mouth opened in the sky. A darkness, like the darkest black she had ever seen. A great white serpent weaved throughout the sky, amidst the clouds. This was Damballah. 

The rain ceased. And she knew her form.