Possessed

Possessed







"...all you thought I wasn't,
 All I've always been,
 The sweetness you lack,
 The venom to smother you.

Your blindness kept you away,
Your fears shut you out,
You were buried deep in,
You couldn't notice.
Here I am,
Right before you...."


 Qetsiyah©







 "It's been years. Fifteen long years since the worst of it all. You'll be fine. Just damn it all." I try telling myself this over and over again while staring blankly at Mayowa who is seemingly absorbed in his own reassuring words. He must think I'm actually listening to him considering he's not even slowing it down the least.

 "I can't." I cut in, putting my hand up to stop him. Making a gesture of my fingers to point at the both of us, I shake my head still,
 "We...can't." Then I reach for my handbag beside me on the bench, sling it across my shoulder and shut my eyes as he lets out an exasperated gasp. Whoever said marriage proposals were always accepted in open places....

"Folusho..."

His call is calm but my reassurances to myself are overcome by the memories I have stamped in my head forever. The memories that added a psychological dysfunction to my physiological one. The cruellest of all beginning the week after my eight birthday.

 






 My truth






I pulled myself slowly over onto the jarred piece of foam that served as my mattress in the eight feet square room I occupied. My already aching tummy hurt even more as I lay face down on the mattress. I was definitely going to die this time.

 The thought of dying this time though actually freaked me out and coupled with the dizziness that was swarming my head, the reality of being locked away dawned and unable to help it anymore, I put all of the energy left in me into a yell for my mother, the only person who never could stand my sickness,


"Mommy, please! I'm sorry! I swear it by everything. I won't attack them again. Please..." My last two sentences faded into sobs as my plea was met with dead silence.

This was hell. Wasn't anyone at home? Or did Father take them to his mothers' house after Remi was confirmed dead? Did they really fear my powers? My "alleged" powers?
 Shutting my eyes and wrapping my arms around myself, I turned to
the wall and mumbled comforting words to myself, hoping by the time I let my eyes open, an angel from the carved images I always stared at in church would have flapped down to take me home to heaven.


 No one's coming.
 No one would remember you.
You killed all of them..


 "I didn't do anything." I found myself talking to the empty room as my subconscious tried to convict me. I really didn't do anything wrong. I didn't. I was unaware of when I had drift away in sleep but the rousing noise that jolt me was enough to wake Smaug of The Hobbit from his eternal sleep.
 I opened my eyes, starting up from the mattress as I thought someone was already in my room. "Mommy? Seyifunmi?" I called out and jumped to bang at the door from within.

The room left me with a sense of suffocation as the only window was shut tight. I needed some air at least. After what seemed like forever, I turned back to my solace in the mattress but slipped on the smooth terrazo floor, twisting my left foot and consequently hitting my knee against the cold floor. I tried to relax but couldn't lift any further as pain formed within my bones. I couldn't help the cry that escaped me as both my legs ached me sore.

The rheumatism had set in again. Slamming both fists against my legs, I pulled and rubbed, trying to bring myself some sort of comfort, no matter how short lived it would be. Finally I just lay down, crying.

Just then, the lock to my room clicked to let in my father. I almost thought he had brought in the daily meal I was allowed for the past two days, palm oil and solid pap,Èko, just like an extraterrestrial sacrifice but he just glared at me.

"Is this her? The Ogbanje?" The voice wasn't any familiar and I tried raising my eye to see whoever it was.

 The pain sensation however took over and I cried in pain, my eyes begging my father to help as the pain was spreading fast to my knees and thigh.

"Awon emi yen lo n nii lara... Those familiar spirits are bothering her. Can't you see?" The other remarked again.

I looked up to see my father nod stiffly, his face contort in disgust as he gazed at me, whimpering. It really wasn't any use asking him for help, he cared more about Remi, my latest dead brother, the one I had allegedly brought to his demise.

 The boy was already four years old and believed to finally be doing well. Up until the other morning though, three days ago.

 All five of us kids had gone out to fetch wood for mother, although warnings had been given against taking Remi along. He was the jewel of the family. The only surviving son after the death of three other boys and a girl in the span of seven years. All after my birth.

 So it wasn't any guessing why I was the Ogbanje that killed them all. Remilekun had chosen to running about the farmyard a few plots from our home and Seyifunmi, the last daughter, younger than himself had joined in his game. He had collapsed when he reached me, only to start awake in gasps. He never survived as he was all stiff before Shade could run all the way home, craddling him and yelling for help.

 The point is that he died. My baby brother died. Another one. Again. And now they were here to appease my spirits. As they always did.

"Are you taking her now?" I heard father ask the other who I still hadn't seen but apparently was here because of my Ogbanje story.

 "Wait, let me assess how bad it is..."


Pointing a shaky index finger at me, my father began his lamentation, "How bad could it be? She's an Ogbanje. She has sacrificed my sons to her group of fellow possessed spirits. Don't you see how she's turning and curling? That's how it is all the time. Over and over again, she keeps showing herself and making things go wrong in this family. She's sick and dangerous. Everytime she has the sickness, there's always a problem."


 I didn't know what happened next but my already yellow eyeballs, ghostly from my poor diet with which I turned to glare at him probably freaked him out a little as he glanced away hurriedly, bumping into the wooden cupboard that stood by the wall side.

 "WITCH!" He spat and slammed out leaving me to the scrutinizing gaze of the other.

I expected it would be one of those older ones that never seemed to run out of ideas on how to treat a child like me, but this one was quite young. Probably younger than even father.

 "What do you want from them?" His voice seemed to slice through my head as I tried to turn away.

I shook my head, careful not to say anything lest they used it against me in future. I could still recall vividly the last time I had spoken when my grandmother confronted me about the deaths of her grandsons, and I told her I needed a doctor and not a traditional herbalist. She had come down with a fever the next morning and I was to be taken to the dumpsite to kneel, offering sacrifices to my alleged fellows that wouldn't stay out of the family matters.

 My schoolteacher who particularly thought I was a pretty and smart kid had called me into her office one day to ask why I always missed school and after asking some more questions, she told me to ask my parents to take me to a doctor in a good hospital.
How could I ever have told them without something else creeping up? Mother was a cloth seller at the fortnight market and father was the clerk at our local post office. They would rather swim in ignorance than be dictated to by their eight year old anaemic daughter.

 Shock waves danced through me as I felt a slice through my back. I
didn't see him pull out the palm branch, Mariwo. It was dripping with something I couldn't quite place, but had a really foul smell, worse than our lavatory, most likely to ward off unclean spirits. He hit me with it again. And again.....and again.

 It stung and that coupled with the clog traveling rapidly up my thighs and slowly beginning to form somewhere in both arms, I was sent into a fit.

 Mommy...

I thought I was screaming but dear me, my call was the softest of whispers. I could almost hear someone come up to the door before my breaths gave in, my head spinning and finally, oblivion.





   
 
  
 Epilogue









Of course, I lived through this also. Woke up to be surrounded by candles that seemed to travel on and on and then I was beaten to ward off the spirits, nearly drowned in freezing water to cleanse me, beaten again, forced to swallow pots of herbs to rid me of my unending crisis, hit hard again and again and eventually sentenced off to live with Ewejoko, the young herbalist that eventually resorted to rape as the next best option. He hadn't just used me as his sex tool, he has broken me apart in everything I possibly could exist as.

 It was nearly five years later, I was thirteen when I had put a knife in his gut that night. He couldn't have survived it, yet he probably did. I never found out as I fled to the catholic church in Ibadan sparing the money I took from his blood soaked "sokoto" for my transport fare, never to return again. Never to set eyes on my parents again. I don't think they bothered searching for me.

 My ritualistic grandmother would most likely have cheered that I had "faded" and Seyifunmi might just have cried. No one would miss me, that much I was sure off.

But then, right now although I've lived through the worst, the crisis still sets in and although I live in an enlightened setting, I still receive a number of discriminations being a sickle cell patient. I might have stuck a knife in Ewejoko but he had murdered what was left of me first and although it still thumps, I'm most sure this heart of mine is dead.










 "The defiance you taught me,
 The limits you pushed to.....
I've evolved,
You know me not no more.
 Now I'm the queen
 A mermaid I've become."













 'Siyah