My bed was made from autumn leaves. It squirmed at night.
But, when morning came I climbed—headed for the old stone house on the mountain’s peak.
On the beach below, breakers crashed and people I knew clung shoreside, hugging boulders like sea stars. Their shoulders wept like heavy branches, fires burned in their cores. Before my eyes, they calcified and crumbled into ashes. Rumbling clouds dimmed the sky and I left their mounded graves behind, my shins needled by brambles, my feet slipping on stones.
The stone house wavered like a mirage. Inside, a woman mumbled in the corner, her face obscured by a beaded curtain. “Come back to me,” she said. She clawed at a picture frame in her quivering hand.
She twisted her neck to take me in.
“People are dying,” I said.
I heard her panting as she crept closer, intrigued. “I’m looking for my husband,” I said.
She stroked the picture frame and laughed.
“Perhaps he has fled!”
The woman leapt from her corner and stood close to her side of the hung door. Her face brushed the faceted stones. I noticed a bone-white jaw shifting in the shadows behind her, a whimpering from a stitched-tight grin.
“Who is that man?” I asked.
She smiled, her lashes dancing. She lifted a smooth hand and parted the beads. The man sat slumped in his seat.
It wasn’t Nehemiah. My husband was still lost to me.
“Never mind about him,” the woman said. “If it is Nehemiah you are looking for then you must follow me.”
“How do you know his name?”
“Come now,” the woman said. I hesitated then slid beyond the beads. She lifted a door in the floor and I followed her down to a hidden room beneath. The smell of straw and leather mingled in the dank air. Mud-splattered walls gleamed under candlelight.
The witch’s eyes were empty. “This is white magic,” she said. “There is nothing to fear.”
Her voice smoked sage into the room. She pointed at a large calabash filled with water. I peered into its clear surface it rippled like a gusted pond. I felt a powerful pull between my temples, a loud belling in my ears; pinned inside a dream like a trapped butterfly. I saw my husband laid before me on a blazing pyre—flesh blackened as it curled, his skull steaming and swelling then explosion— hurling me into blackness.
I woke up on the sand and there was nobody there. A fishing line cast unattended, no hands to reel it in. An abandoned book fluttering its pages. Scattered shoes on the boardwalk, no people in sight. I ran as the ground trembled and rain slapped at my face. Palm trees tilted and shook out their roots.
Bolting through our rusted gate and the yard, I stumbled up my steps to an open door. A man sat with his back to me. I recognized his build and dark curls of hair.
“Nehemiah,” I said.
He turned in his chair, with a head sculpted from clay, two shallow dents where his eyes should lay. His body stretched like a stuffed doll.
About the author
Khalilah Okeke is a Nigerian, Indian, European, who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She now resides in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Her work has been published in Crack the Spine, CafeLit, The Drabble, The Plum Tree Tavern, Down in the Dirt, The Red Eft Review, The Orissa Society of the Americas Journal, 50 - Word Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow. She has upcoming work in Palooka magazine.