She walked through the crowd and disappeared between the blocks. The curtain was drawn; the audience, perhaps dismayed by Sisi’s brief but knowing stare, lingered. I began to think of Dora. She had asked me to run, to leave her alone. What for? I began to speculate what her reasons were, but could not draw any reasonable conclusions. “Where is Dora?” I asked Ibe.
“I don’t know. They say her Ma is looking for her.”
For once Ibe did not know someone’s whereabouts.
*
The crowd was beginning to buzz again. Word was going around. Dora was missing. Did she leave with Jide? Someone had seen her crossing the road before the first rooster wept at dawn; she was sighted 30 kilometers away, somewhere between St. Peters and Okeke’s barber’s shop; she was seen in a black car heading towards the police station, but the car itself looked like the ones that ran the Aba route.
I ignored the crowd.
Her stone was still in my pocket, quite. I touched it. Her red, ripe eyes returned to me. I tightened my grip on the stone, and left the crowd to their confusion.
*
I returned to the lake before nightfall. Maybe she was nearby, in the bushes. I sat on the mound where she last sat, and waited.
*
That night, word came that her body was found on the other side of the lake, floating, bloated.
*
“What’s the matter?” Mama asked.
“I am cold,” I said.
“Are your joints aching? Is your mouth bitter?”
“No. I feel it inside.â€
“I will make you pepper soup, with uziza leaves, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks Ma.”
It was a full moon that night, and there were no condescending clouds above. The moon beamed, dispelling the blackness of night and offering faux daylight to exuberant kids. I searched the moon and saw nothing but a ball of suspended vastness. The frozen woman and her baby were in that vastness, immobilized. I recalled the story we were told to keep us from breaking community rules: the woman had gone to the market on a sacred day. The gods, enraged, froze and installed her and her child in the moon as a warning to all.
The moon illuminated the shrubs between our block and the next. An ominous wind rustled their leaves, adding to my fright. Each jubilant leaf grew more grotesque with each whip of wind.
I looked up again. The woman-in-the-moon seemed to be moving, genuinely animated. Her hair pointed in three directions like Dora’s antlers. Her baby kicked and blabbed at something outside the circumference of the moon.
Did Dora offend the gods? I touched the stone in my pocket. Is Jide a god? If he is, gods and men are wicked. I squeezed Dora’s stone in my pocket. But I am a man, will I become a wicked god? I squeezed the stone again.
“You are crying? I will call mama.” It was Ricia my poor, little sister.
“No. I am fine,” I said in my finest masculine voice.
“Why are you crying then?” she queried
“I don’t know,” I said, as helpless as the tears that warmed my cheeks.
“It is the cold,†she said. “It makes people cry and shiver like small flowers.”
“Yes, it is the cold.”
“The pepper soup will warm you up,” she said.
“Yes. I will give you some.”
“No. It’s for you. I am not shivering like small flowers.”
*
