Tale by the fireside
Zora remembered the day she died.
This story comes after Mama’s milk. Or you can directly read this one.
Zora remembered the day she died.
She had buried her Gona in the morning and killed another daughter, Mavi, in the evening.
Her husband found them both in the burning house when he had returned drunk. The owners of the estate were livid at the smoke entering the main house.
Rob was left with nothing. He had sat down at the front of his burnt home till he was dragged away by his friends.
Zora liked his empty eyes as he wandered around the estate, working on the fields, getting drunk, and waking up with nightmares. But this punishment was still not enough for killing her Gona.
She loved that when she saw her reflection in the stream, her burnt skin resembled the dark brown of Gona. She felt at home when she crawled down her daughter's grave and kept her company during the night. She was right. It felt cold whenever it rained. The basket that was used to bury her Gona was falling apart. How she would have loved to make her a new one from fresh straw. She would have made sure to make it extra thick.
At the break of dawn, she would leave to go to Mavi. The sun beat down on them as they sat around the blackened land. Whenever Rob tried to visit, she would blow soot in his eyes. If he tried to sleep there, she would make the leaves rustle so loud that he got scared and ran off to sleep in the slave quarters.
But her days still felt empty. She started going into the forest to gather straw and weave a basket. She would even hum the song that made her daughters sleep, the wind carrying it to them. The woods thrummed with energy whenever she got lost in her trance. The villagers started fearing going in. Their fears were heightened by seeing the claw marks at Gona's grave and feet marks at the place where Zora’s house used to be.
There were talks of throwing Rob out of the estate. They brought it up with the master, but he brushed it away. So, they ran him out to placate the spirits.
Zora would soon spend longer hours weaving. One basket for Gona, then one for Mavi, another for Gona, another for Mavi, and on and on till she weaved whatever she could get her hands on. Soon, she stopped going back to the estate.
It felt like the trees were swallowing her whole. But she was the one knotting the forest in different places.
The villagers saw it happening. A clear vision of the darkness one day, then they couldn't see past the bundled blades of wild grass.
Zora's voice stopped reaching her daughters. She couldn't hear Gona's teeth chattering from the cold, and Mavi's loud sobs when she felt smoke clog up her airway. But the area surrounding the forest still hummed with an energy that felt like a warning to the intruders.
One day their master tried to burn his way into the forest, but it wouldn't catch. He poured gallons and gallons of fuel while his slaves watched. When that failed, he took a machete. His wife had to drag him away. They sold the place and left for the city.
Zora went in deeper and deeper into the forest, humming the lullaby her mother used to sing when she worked around the house, the songs she had heard when the community danced around the fire and some modern songs that she remembered playing from the box that the master kept on the porch.
She kept weaving till there was no grass left, till the trees were barked up, till her hands ached and bled. Then again, she started weaving.
Yet the forest lived on, and so did she.
