that didn’t concern her. She was cooking, something she’d loved to do since her mother showed her three years ago. Cooking made her feel in control, it made her feel grown.
She’d cut the onions with care, savored in the soft, firm perfection of the red tomatoes, shaken in a combination of thyme, red pepper, salt, and curry, and marveled at the greenness of the greens. She had brought out and cut up the half chicken that she’d salted, spiced, and baked hard and dry. So now she was humming and stirring slowly so as not to break up the baked chicken she’d added to the stew.
“Ozioma!”
Her eyes, which had been out of focus, lost in visions of yummy food, immediately grew sharp. She blinked, noticing a classmate from school, Afam, standing at the window. Afam was one of the few who didn’t call her “snake kisser.” And once, he’d asked her to show him how to talk to snakes. She’d considered, but then decided against it. Sometimes snakes were tricky. They didn’t always do what you asked them to do. Though they wouldn’t bite her, they might bite Afam. Snakes liked to test the toughness of skin.
She frowned questioningly at Afam, now. She wasn’t in the mood to speak to anyone today. She just wanted to cook.
“Come!” Afam said. He paused. “Hurry!”
It was the pause that got to Ozioma. And a feeling. She let go of the spoon and it sunk into the thick red stew. She ran out the door without bothering to put sandals on. The air was heavy and humid. It pressed at her skin.
She followed Afam up the road. Past Auntie Nwaduba’s house, where Auntie Nwaduba had once slapped her for not greeting her loudly enough. Past Mr. and Mrs. Efere’s house, the old couple that liked to grow flowers during rainy season and hated when Ozioma got too close to them. Mr. Efere sat on his porch in front of his tiger lilies, suspiciously watching her run by. Past her uncle’s home. To the back. Through his yam garden where she’d saved him from the cobra. And finally, up the road to the center of town, the meeting place at the giant kapok tree that reached high in the sky.
Afam stopped, out of breath. “There,” he said, pointing. Then he quickly backed away and ran off, hiding behind the nearest house and peeking around its corner. Ozioma turned back to the tree just as it began to rain.
Shaped like two spiders, a large one perched upside down upon a smaller other, the thick smooth branches and roots were ideal for sitting. On days of rest, the men gathered around it to argue, converse, drink, smoke, and play cards on different branch levels.
Ozioma frowned, as thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. This was the last place anyone wanted to be during a storm. Aside from the threat of being struck, the tree was known to harbor good and evil spirits, depending on the day. Or so it was said. Today, it was clearly harboring something else. As Ozioma stood there taking in the situation, big warm droplets fell like the tears of a manatee.
It was the season where the tree dropped its seedpods. In the rain, fluffy yellow waterproof seeds bounced down like white bubbles along with the drops. Six men stood around the tree, in shorts, pants, T-shirts, and sandals. They were as motionless as the tree. Except for one. This man writhed in the red dirt, which was quickly becoming soupy like the stew she’d left to burn. The man was screaming and clawing at his eyes.
Ozioma caught the eye of her oldest brother. The son of her father’s second wife, he always turned and walked the other way when he saw her coming. He stood still as a stone beside the writhing man. Ozioma didn’t allow herself to look too closely at the man in pain on the ground. She’d recognize him. She looked up at the tree and beyond it and felt her heart flip, then she felt her body flood with adrenaline. She blinked the raindrops from her eyes, sure that she couldn’t be seeing what she was seeing. But she was. It was just like in the stories the local dibia liked to tell.
The enormous chain dangled through the heavy grey clouds between the tree’s top branches. It looked black in the rain. Ozioma knew it was made of the purest, strongest iron that no blacksmith could bend. It was older