Page 63 of Tangled at the Root
“All that training,” I begin. My voice is ghastly. Inhuman. The scrape of metal on a chalkboard. Of high-pitched wails layered on top of each other. The low growl of a beast. “Was just to teach me how to live with it? To somehow overcome this monstrous side of me?”
The head on the left nods.
“But Mama didn’t want that,” I add. Mama gurgles, one of the arms jerking, trying weakly to pull my own arm off. “She knew the training wouldn’t work.” My mother’s head flinches, ducks with shame. “That the only way to stay human, safe from ourselves and everyone else safe from us, was to continue using the … sacrifice.”
She nods again.
I growl at how blind they’d both been. Ironically, they’d both secretly longed for the same thing. Mama thought using the oerhwu—performing that ritual was proof that she’d “accepted” who she was, when it was precisely the opposite. She’d wanted to cling onto her stolen humanity at all costs; why change tradition when tradition is working perfectly fine?
Mummy had thought she could somehow teach me to be human—she kept repeating that, I think with a bitter laugh, how a “normal” person wouldn’t do this, a “normal” person wouldn’t do that, and all I could hear was that Iwasn’tfucking normal.
“You werebothwrong.” I look up, meeting their wild, pained eyes square on. “Maybe once, we were nothing but cold, unfeeling monsters trying to hide in plain sight, using this ritual as a cover. But somewhere along the way, we evolved.Ievolved.
“I’m not entirely a legbaju. But I’m not completely human, either. I’m something entirely new, and I’m done pretending to be anything else.”
I don’t wait for an acknowledgment or a response.
I race out of the room, up the seemingly endless steps. The twisted shannde of my maternal figures wails and follows after me. Their moans sound eerie in the rainfall, echoing like I’m surrounded entirely by ghosts.
My legbaju form is shockingly fast.
The hole the house had made abruptly slams closed before I can get through, the concrete breaking apart at the force of theimpact. It immediately tries to open again as both my mother’s and grandmother’s eshés and wills clash.
I ignore it, clambering up the side of the building like a spider. The concrete groans as it shifts, blocks flinging themselves at my head and my body. I manage to dodge most and ignore the others, regaining my grip when the brick flattens, trying to dislodge me. I ignore the raindrops slashing against my skin like tiny knives, like the eshé of the shannde behind me is morphing everything around it, turning it vicious and cruel.
I punch my way into the roof, directly into my grandmother’s secret room.
Her body is there, a dried-up husk in the middle of a chalk circle.
I lunge for it as my jaw unhinges, impossibly wide. My chest swells with grief as I do what she’d done to my mother, except properly this time, the way it’s meant to be done.
It had felt so disgustingly wrong, watching my grandmother eat my mother, though I hadn’t been able to articulate why. I realise now it’s not because I’d thought the act monstrous, barbaric—but because a part of me knows it’s supposed to be the other way around.
A legbaju mother should never be the one to devour her child.
Mama had caused this. What she’d done had birthed some kind of curse. When she’d died, her spirit’s and my mother’s had formed this creature, a twisted remnant of who they’d once been.
The room is shrinking around me, threatening to crush me, but my mother isn’t letting it. The result is the concrete’s mad dance, blocks extending and retreating back into the wall, the entire house shaking on its foundations.
The house goes immediately still the moment my grandmother’s body is completely gone. The rain, which hadsounded so overbearing, threatening to crush my eardrums, abruptly calms, the downpour now a soothing hum.
I turn, sensing something.
My mother’s spirit, in the form she’d been when she’d been alive, though it’s fading fast.
“I’m sorry,” she mouths. Her head fades away first, making my chest hitch, my eyes burn, then she’s gone.
I heave in a shaky breath, quickly shifting back into my human form. My shift hadn’t affected my clothes too badly, thank goodness. I race back to the gazebo.
Rosemary is back on the surface, waiting beside it. Fuck, she looks like an angel. The heaviest part of the rainfall seems to have passed, the water spilling down in a gentle tide. Her soaked nightie clings to every curve of her glistening form, the moonlight, peeking from behind thick clouds, bathing her dark skin in a gorgeous glow. She’s squinting slightly, which makes me want to laugh. Her eyesight had been perfect back in school. There’s a part of me that feels privileged to have witnessed her change. Grow.
She quickly peruses my form once I’m standing in front of her. I do the same just as desperately. She’s okay; all the flowers that had dug into her arms are gone, her skin smoothed over like the wounds had never been.
“Are they—?” She starts in a whisper, her eyes darting toward the house.
“Gone,” I answer. “It’s over.”
She looks at me, but she doesn’t ask.
