Page 60 of Tangled at the Root
It’s a scene straight out of one of those infamous Nigerian dramas. Glass jars line the edges of the walls, filled with unidentifiable things, both living and not; dried herbs hang from the ceiling; melting candles sit haphazardly in every corner; and white and red cloth are tied to every other beam holding the roof up from the ceiling below.
It’s the literal home of a babalawo; a native doctor. I hadn’t known legbajus could connect to the eshé; we aren’t human, after all. Then again, if feeding on the heart of a living thing allows us to take its form, it makes sense that feeding on an oerhwu’s heart—for decades—would allow us to steal her connection to the eshé, too.
My grandmother lays me down on my back on strange symbols drawn in white and orange chalk, then sits at the top of my head, looking down at my outstretched body. She chants for a long time, waving her hands over my skull, then fishes out a small jar filled with thick, viscous white liquid.
She eases open my mouth to plop the jelly-like substance in, then clenches my jaw shut when my body instinctively heaves, trying to expel the invader. I jerk when the maggot crawls out from my right nostril, taking with it my memory of that weekend and everything leading up to it. She captures it before it can get away and viciously crushes it in her fist, its pale yellow guts seeping between her fingers like pus.
The next thing I remember, I’m back in uni—though as far as I’d been aware, I’d never left—getting a call about my mother’s “heart attack”. I’m refusing to see the body, like my very bones still hold the memory of her smashed skull, recoiling at the echo of it I feel in my marrow.
Had that even been her I’d buried? The body had been wrapped entirely in white—at my request, my refusal to lay eyes on her lifeless form. Had my grandmother manipulated theentire thing? From the news to the burial? Something tells me yes.
The visions speed up, and I know these definitely aren’t my memories anymore.
They’re my mother’s as a shannko, her spirit trapped in my grandmother’s house after what Mama had done.
I watch through her eyes, the house slowly coming awake as the years pass. I watch my grandmother ignore it, searching frantically for a replacement of the oerhwu she’d lost—one with that same, unique gift of being impenetrable. Unkillable. She’s so focused on her search she doesn’t notice the rot, the eshé of both the comatose oerhwu and my mother’s shannko slowly twisting its way through the house’s, poisoning it with their combined anger and bitterness. My grandmother’s eshé is just as twisted, her staunch denial of what she’d done—her desire to continue her beloved tradition letting the poison catch, then spread.
By the time she realises the danger, it’s too late.
I don’t recognise the plant when it bursts from the ground inside the study, right next to the desk. The roots—dark green, with inky black veins—crawl up the legs of the desk chair, winding around it and making its way up and onto the table.
It wriggles like an earthworm as it grows, the tip of a twisting stem dipping into my grandmother’s evening tea. A single, powdery puff of a strange, neon orange flower blooms to life, dissolving into the tea’s dark depths in a blink. The roots rapidly shrink afterward, disappearing back into the hole they’d come from.
The house, obeying my mother’s shannko’s wishes, smooths the hole over like it’d never been.
My grandmother rushing up to the room in the ceiling to try and stop or slow the poison, but failing. Unlike the oerhwu, who can heal from anything, who’s impervious to everything,there’s no healing from this for a legbaju—not with a poison this powerful and unknown.
Writing her last message to me, and using a final burst of eshé to make sure I receive it at the exact moment I’d need it.
The visions end.
It takes me a moment to untangle myself from memory, to root myself back into reality.
I’m the only one in bed. Rosemary’s gone. The rain is whipping at the windows and walls of the house, howling like an angry beast.
Am I still dreaming? It doesn’t feel like it.
I stand and look around at the empty house. The silence feels heavy.
“Let me go to her,” I say, though I don’t really expect a response.
Concrete rumbles. The wall of the sitting room facing the back of the house splits unevenly apart, the wall jerking back and forth almost as though it’s fighting itself, until it forms a doorway leading a path straight to the gazebo.
I remember to yank on my tank top, then I’m running, barefooted, out of the house.
I’m drenched immediately. Lightning flashes, but I don’t need it to light my path. The bellow of answering thunder seems to match the rapid pounding of my heart at what Rosemary is going to find. What it might lead her to believe.
My grandmother’s shannko had lured her here. Mama had known precisely what her gift was, and had probably killed her to confirm it. Killed herin frontof me, like she’d wanted me to know, too. I loathe that she’d taken the choice from Rosemary.
I grit my jaw against the images trying to superimpose themselves on me as I make it to the steps by the gazebo, and find them already pushed aside.
Ten-year-old me, gripping my mother’s hand. Twenty-year-old me, obediently following her down into the depths.
Now thirty-year-old me, chasing after the love of my life, terribly afraid of what I’ll find.
The slab is covered entirely in the neon green spores coated in that light layer of black, some of the plants spilling onto the bare, concrete floor.
Rosemary stands in front of it, her netted nightgown clinging deliciously to her form, her skin glistening with the kiss of the rainfall.
