Page 20 of Tangled at the Root
“Why did you—whywouldyou—?” I hate that I sound so fucking betrayed. I barely know this house. I’ve barely accepted that it’s even alive.
My clothes go unceremoniously into the trash. They disappear the moment they make contact with the plastic bag in the netted basket, and I spare only a brief thought for where the house has taken them before I’m back to trying to simply breathe.
Underneath the hot spray of the shower, I don’t taste the salt of my tears. I cup both hands behind my neck, squeezing hard like Rosemary used to do the rare times I’d lost control. It doesn’t help. I’ve brushed and rinsed with mouthwash, but I can still taste blood, can still feel the gore lodged between my teeth, pushed up against my gums.
I bend over, heaving. Gagging. My arms shake where I’ve pressed them weakly against the tiled shower wall. I stare at them like like they aren’t a part of me.
What had I done? Where had I gone?
And why had the houseletme?
Fuck, I wish my mum were here. My grief morphs into fury.
Why hadn’t she told me? Why had shelied?
It’s a type of madness, she’d said; a disgusting understatement.A curse placed on our family, specifically the women. You must never let your emotions get the best of you,Genevieve. You must remain in control at all times, or the hunger will take control of you.
She’d spentyearsteaching me that control. Years training away my body’s natural reaction to stimuli, like she’d been afraid even a stray sneeze would have the “madness” taking hold.
Then, during the funeral, like a harbinger of truth, my grandmother had come. Despite the fact that I’d been ten years old the last time I’d seen her, I’d recognised her immediately.
She looked almost exactly like my mother.
Almost exactly like me.
The Lagos sun had been unforgiving. It had just been us, two solitary figures standing under a large, dark umbrella behind the house I’d grown up in, along with the gravediggers I’d hired, and the grief of losing the only other constant in my life. I’d refused to think about Rosemary, how I’d left her back at the bus terminal in Benin literally less than a week ago.
How she’d so easily let me go.
The tears had burned like acid, and I’d lied to myself that I wasn’t grieving her, too.
“I’m sure your mother has told you all sorts of things about me,” my grandmother had said, her voice raspy with age.
She’d been dressed to the nines, her lips painted red and lined with brown, her eyelids lined simply in black. Her head had been covered in a bright pink gele shaped like a rose, her blouse made of white silk and lace. Her dark blue velvet wrappers were pristine and smelled faintly of camphor, probably fresh from a precious silver trunk filled with other expensive clothing, like my mother’d had. Despite the unquestionable authority radiating off her form, something about her had seemed injured. Vulnerable.
When I hadn’t responded, she’d whispered, “How did she die?” her voice thick with anguish and something else I hadn’t recognised.
At the question, I tasted blood. Heard that damning scream, brutally cut off. Perhaps the beast had gotten confused, because it plunged me into one of my clearest earliest memories of my mother.
I think I’d been five or six. It had been late at night, and I’d heard the high-pitched whines of an animal in pain. The sound had drawn me out of the house like the Pied Piper’s flute, except it was the call of prey, small and vulnerable, to an apex predator on silent feet.
My mother had appeared just as silently and abruptly, staring coldly down at me after I’d wrung the poor rat’s neck, putting it out of its misery, and brought its limp, warm, disgusting flesh to my mouth. I’d never forget the look in her eyes, that unique mix of fear and revulsion.
Of course, she’d been the one to put the rat there. Deliberately triggering instincts apparently borne from the “curse”. She’d placed many more “traps” like that over the next few months, and every time I let the “madness” take hold, I was punished.
A normal person would try and help the animal, not kill and attempt to eat it, she’d said, hard and unflinching.A normal person would see a hurt, vulnerable creature in need of assistance, not fresh prey in need of devouring.
A normal person wouldn’t have this hunger at all.
“Heart attack,” I told my grandmother stonily. It still seems so ridiculous. So wasteful. After everything—after all her training, and she’d been taken by a fucking heart attack, a thing she literally couldn’t control. Ha.
My grandmother made a disbelieving snort. I’d been too tired to glare at her.
“I guess that’s what the doctors told you.” She shook her head. “It isn’t true, edémi.”My daughter. “Your mother died because she refused to give the dagbato a sacrifice.”
I’d turned to stare at her. Thewhatawhat? What was she talking about?
“She really didn’t tell you anything.” She hadn’t looked surprised in the least. “Isn’t that just like her? To pretend she knows everything only to come crying to mummy when she’s made a mess.”
