“Faith is a Butterfly Resting on a Rotting Eye” © 2024 by Shan

The string of coral slid from Udo’s wrist. It belonged to his brother Akpan, so he should have known it wouldn’t fit. Akpan had bought it, along with matching pieces for his neck and ankles, from a fledgling market settlement called Kuwo. While he was showing off his purchases, Akpan and his friends laughed at the foolishness of the settlers. Bad enough that they had built homes so far away from the river, but on top of that, they had made new gods for themselves. Can a plant grow without water? Ndia would surely curse them for turning away from her.

Udo had listened as they mocked.

“Can you imagine? Gods of trade and travel,” Akpan hissed. “Can you trade if you do not fish? Will your boat not sink if the river does not grant you grace? The fools will never prosper without Ndia.”

Udo looked at the coral that had slipped to his knuckles, the rich red sheen of it, deeper than blood.

“Maybe there are other things to trade, and other ways to travel,” he said quietly. It was not a question, but Akpan answered like it was, like he always did when Udo spoke.

“No, brother.” He had laughed, patting Udo’s back and turning back to his friends.

Udo had smiled tightly at the dismissal.

Akpan was born three dry seasons before him, but it had always seemed like the distance between their ages was much wider. As children grow into adulthood, it is often hard to know who is the elder until you are told. With Akpan and Udo, anyone could tell at first sight, on first hearing, who was Akpan, the first son in every way, and who was Udo, the one who came after. Akpan was tall and solidly built, handsome and bold, a skilled fisherman, well travelled and wise. All that Akpan was, Udo was not. He was clumsy and cautious, with hands that refused to learn work, a frame small and slight enough to be lost in his brother’s shadow.

It is easy for bitterness to brew from behind a shadow, and that might have been the case with another two brothers, but Akpan, beloved by all, was loved most of all by his brother. He was Udo’s shield from mocking stares and sharp words spit from mouths turned sideways.

One time when they were young, even before Akpan was old enough to be initiated into any cult, long before Udo’s first and second and third and last attempts at initiation, the brothers had gone fishing together on the River Ndia. Udo had suggested it. Those were the days when he was still trying to prove something to their father, his cousins, their mother’s co-wives who were supposed to be his mothers now that she was dead, everyone whose eyes slid over him like dew off waterleaf.

Akpan had sat back in the canoe, cradling a gourd of palm wine, while Udo toiled with his bamboo trap. It was like the fish could smell the desperation pouring off him like sweat and dripping into the river, like Ndia’s children were sending messages through their pinsharp teeth between bubbles of laughter saying, “He needs this. Deny him.”

Even a single crayfish, he did not catch.

That evening, as the sun dipped, Akpan stretched his limbs and took Udo’s trap, saying,

“Give it to me, let me try.”

In a moment, Akpan pulled up the raffia trap and opened the cover to reveal a catfish the size of his leg, with whiskers as long as his forearm. Akpan looked at the beast and laughed.

“Hm. It’s big,” and then handed it to Udo with a wink. “Well done.”

Udo removed the coral, tightened a string of his own cowries onto his wrist, and left for the village square, where all the villagers were gathered for the beginning of the turning of the season celebrations. Akpan had gone ahead with his friends.

He was late to the ceremony, and he arrived to meet a strange, still silence. The chief priest of Ndia’s shrine was standing in the middle of the square, his white wrapper and the white chalk covering his skin putting him in sharp relief among the rest of the villagers.

“What is wrong?” Udo whispered to the young woman beside him.

“Ndia has demanded a sacrifice,” she said, mouth twisting like her tongue had touched something bitter.

The chief priest spoke then: “It has been demanded, so it has been decided. Ndia wants proof of our faithfulness to her. Blood proof.”

Etubom Ukana spoke up, “Ndia has never demanded such a thing! Even when other gods demand cows and goats at the turning, Ndia has been generous enough to accept whatever we offe—”

“Yes!” the priest snapped. “She has been generous! The river has given you your livelihoods, spared your lives as you venture on her. Your children have bathed in her. She has fed you and guided you and protected you. And in return, you have given her bony guinea fowls and half-hearted words of thanks. Now, she wants a proper sacrifice. And she will have it. One way or another.”

“But this—This is too much,” Eka Kedi shouted.

“What does she want?” Udo asked the girl again.

She swallowed before answering. “She wants …”

“She wants the best of you. The strongest, the wisest, the most beautiful, the most beloved,” the priest said, pointing.

Udo followed the finger, and it led his eyes to his brother, Akpan.

“She wants him.”

Udo felt his blood stand still.

No mourning house was opened for Akpan. No white was worn. No waterbuck killed by the hunters’ guild, or pot of soup left to burn overnight. The cults asked for no fine from his family to release him from service. They would settle with the River. No hair was shorn, no tears were shed, at least not in the open, and not a single song was sung in remembrance. It was as if he had never existed. Udo’s brother, a monument of a man, was washed away like a pebble on a riverbank.

Udo could not wrap his mind around the self-deceit. The gaps in conversation where Akpan’s name should have been mentioned. The way people ignored that silence, even as it deafened him.

Akpan’s friends had squeezed their faces and their fists for a moon or two or three, but had eventually given up their anger. You cannot challenge a god to a wrestling match. The River has no back, to slam into the sand. Death has no neck you can grip and snap.

Udo knew that mourning made some people soft, dissolved them into puddles. Loss had made him harder though, like cracked rock, weeping fresh water.

It had made him hungry too. For answers. So that he would not have to spend his nights wondering if his brother was cold, under the river, if he could feel at all.

For power. So that he would never again have to endure being held back as someone precious to him was taken. Akpan’s closest friends had been the ones to grip his wrist to keep him from lurching at the priest and performing an abomination.

After a whole season of a mourning that looked like madness, Udo shaved his head and told his father he was leaving for Kuwo. His father bid him safe travels, giving him his blessing and five manillas and not bothering to hide his relief.

Things were happening in Kuwo that would never have happened in the river towns, under the watch of Ndia and her devotees.

Inlanders had brought their family gods and cults to the city. There were more ways to worship than soups to eat. At first, Udo tried to find one divinity he could believe in. He spent a moon and a half pouring libations to the great-grandfather of a potter, mainly because the man had beautiful eyes and eloquent hands.

When the potter shattered his heart, he found himself buying a handful of guinea corn each day to leave at the root of a waist-tall mango tree where a little girl had set up an altar for a god called Itamke, whose domain was the sky. She claimed that her god let her fly if she concentrated hard enough. Udo went to the tree every day with the offering, just to see the girl smile.

He went one day to the tree and did not see the girl. He returned each day for three market days, and then finally asked the woman who sold roasted plantain in the shade nearby why the girl had not been to her altar in so long.

The woman shook her head and said, “The child climbed a palm tree and just … jumped.” She turned her hand around her head and snapped her finger to ward off evil. “I don’t know what could have possessed her.”

Udo felt his stomach turn and saliva, bitter as kola, gather in his mouth.

“Faith,” he said, and spat on the ground.

Udo tried again to believe.

This time he called on Akaya, the Land. The only god that Ndia held in esteem, and allowed her worshippers to acknowledge. He thought there must be power in something the River respected.

Akaya was a god you could stand on. Steadfast and unchanging. For as long as Udo could remember, and Udo’s memory was his father’s, and his father’s memory his grandfather’s, Akaya had been a god who answered. When it rained, Akaya gifted her worshippers. In the harmattan, she took. Yes, she was demanding, but only till the next rain.

Udo left Kuwo for Ikot Ikaran and worshipped Akaya for two wet seasons, and knew something like contentment, something like routine.

And then came the famine, when fathers spilt their children’s blood like river water to grow fields of yam; when mothers cracked the soft skulls of newborns on rocks, and used the pieces to weed plots of cocoyam. There was nothing Akaya did not ask for, and nothing she was not given. And still, she did not answer.

It was there that Udo’s faith died. It slipped into the barren, cracked earth and was buried by dust. And once again, his anger rose, restrained by utter helplessness … because how does one even curl their fingers into a fist to raise at a god? Or at that wretched accomplice to sacrifice, Death?

Akaya, as god of land and all that grew on it and all that fed on what grew from it, was revered by farmers, but her favourite children were the hunters, who dedicated their skills to her. They paid a special kind of obeisance to her. That came with particular sacrifices. They gave her a portion of every kill, a splash of every sip of wine. These were not like the farmer’s sacrifices, yams and livestock dropped at altars with fear and trembling, like a husband’s to his wife’s mother. The hunters gave to Akaya like a beloved lastborn to a firstborn sister.

And she gave back to them. Even in the famine, they had meat.

The most renowned hunter, most beloved by Akaya, was Adeh. He never came back without a kill.

At the beginning of the famine, when Ete Ene had asked why the hunters had started to return with meat already cleaned and cut, Adeh slapped him with the back of his hand and laid a curse on him for questioning Akaya.

The next morning, Ete Ene’s corpse was found, foam peeking out of the corners of his mouth, and his name became a warning.

Whispers passed from mouth to ear that Adeh’s words of anger were sure to come to pass.

Some people, wise or foolish (whoever tells the story will decide), stopped eating meat they could not place the name or taste of, hastening their starvation. Others ate and did not ask again. Some ate and kept asking, but as the famine continued, the answers mattered less.

Udo did not eat the meat, but only because he never made it to the market in time to buy it. Every time he saw the hunters, they were carrying nothing but bloodstained baskets.

The truth found Udo by chance, as he was foraging for food in the forest. He heard sounds of exertion and walked towards them.

And he saw the abomination with his own two eyes.

Adeh the hunter, cutting a muscled arm, and letting the pieces fall gently into the basket Udo had seen him carry to the market.

“What is this?!” Udo screamed, bile already coating the roof of his mouth.

Adeh startled and looked up, eyes narrowed.

“You,” he said, mouth twisting upwards in something far from a smile. “The stranger from Kuwo.”

“What are you doing, Adeh?”

“What is necessary,” he answered.

“This is an abomination,” Udo spat.

“It is a necessity. It is what Akaya has commanded the faithful to do.”

“Akaya would never command this.”

Adeh laughed. “Who are you to say what a god can and can’t command?”

Udo was silent, chest constricting.

“Before I take this to the market, I will offer a piece to her, and she will accept.”

“You liar! I know that Akaya would never—”

“You cannot know a god.” Adeh laughed bitterly, “You can only serve. And now you will serve her differently,” Adeh continued, standing up and cleaning his knife against his loincloth.

“You cannot kill me. I worship Akaya. I offered her crops and livestock when I still had them. I still give her the first bite of whatever food I manage to find. I am faithful.”

“Good. A perfect sacrifice indeed. Maybe she sent you to me personally,” Adeh said with a smile.

“You … you enjoy this. The killing. You enjoy it.” Udo said, disgusted.

“I am a hunter after all,” he said, a sickening smile spreading on his lips.

Udo was no match for Adeh. The hunter was larger than him, stronger, and fed and fuelled by the vileness he had consumed.

Adeh held Udo down, pressed the knife to his neck, and started to call on Akaya to accept his offering.

As Adeh sang a summoning, Udo saw Death appear behind him. It wore a white wrapper and had a smooth shaved head. It came to him and cradled his head, whispering dark assurances into his ear. Udo wondered if it had held his brother like this, as he was being given to Ndia.

The thought of Akpan set his spine afire with rage, and he felt his right hand tighten around a stone. He smashed it into the hunter’s head.

Adeh cried out and gripped his head, releasing Udo. In a moment, Udo was on top of him, bringing the stone down on him again and again and again until he saw blood leak and bone break and grey essence pour from his skull.

When he looked up, he saw Death staring him in the face. He gripped the stone again, remembering Akpan and the girl in Kuwo who only wanted to fly. He remembered shattered infant spines and the torn throats of firstborns and bodies in baskets, and the people buying them out of fear. The fear of Death, this dirty, devious thing. Maybe he would never see Ndia or Itamke or Akaya, but maybe if he could make Death pay, the debt would be somewhat serviced.

Stone in hand he walked towards it.

Death’s eyes travelled lazily to the stone and back to Udo’s face.

And then it laughed, a laugh as deep as a grave, as dark as eyes shut forever, and disappeared, leaving nothing but the scent of dust and loss and memory, of unfinished things.

Udo fell to the ground, screaming and sobbing, swearing and retching, staining his eyes with blood and bile as he tried to wipe his tears.

The second time Udo ran to Kuwo, he found a very different place from what he had left. The small settlement had grown into a bustling town. The market was larger than any he had ever seen and there were more people there than he had ever seen in one place at one time, more languages than his ears could catch and hold. Luckily he could still get by because most of the pidgins spoken in the city were built on the shared language of the seven river towns.

It was good that Udo already knew hunger well, because it was his closest companion in those  first days back, having arrived in Kuwo with empty hands, blood still under his fingernails.

He survived by doing any work he could, tearing the guts out of fresh fish and dropping them in sacks to be sold as manure, splitting the measly profits with the fishermen. This was not some village where he could have exchanged labour for a filling meal each day.

Sometimes all he could afford to eat was pepper soup made with fish tails and gills. The stench of the insides of the fish followed him everywhere, no matter how much he bathed and how much black soap he wasted to scrub himself from head to toe. He was constantly picking scales off his body. Sometimes he felt like one of Ndia’s children.

Udo did not worship any gods, but he spent most of his free time in temples, trying to catch a spare meal or cowry. Supplicants were often generous in their desperation. The gods of Kuwo had multiplied, but there were a few that most people worshipped now or at least acknowledged. The gods of trade, travel, birth, and death. Itamke, god of birds and air, though not one of the most popular four, now had a respectable following. Udo made sure he avoided that particular temple. He did not want to set eyes on it, even by mistake.

He wondered about that little girl sometimes. Since she died in the name of a god, even if it was one who failed her, was it a sacrifice? If her last breath was a prayer, was it carried on the wings of the wind and inhaled by Itamke? Maybe, Udo thought, that is what sacrifice is to these gods, maybe it is air to them. He wished, if that was so, that they would not breathe so deeply.

The first time Udo heard the name “Adeh” in Kuwo, fear almost peeled off his skin. It had been a whole season since he had killed the hunter in the forest and run away.

A hunter from Aboro, an inland community, had come to sell bushmeat at the market.

“Even Adeh, you people’s hunter god, would not charge that much for this oversized rat you call a grasscutter,” the trader hissed at the hunter.

“If it’s easy to catch, enter the forest and catch it yourself,” the hunter grumbled, “And I don’t even know of any hunter god named Adeh. That must be one of those gods from Obote. They’re the ones with all those strange beliefs.”

When the hunter had sold his game begrudgingly, Udo made his way to the trader, wiping his hand over his mouth to keep his lips from trembling.

“Well done, friend.”

“Well done, my handsome friend,” the trader said, with a customer-calling smile.

“I heard you mention a hunter god called Adeh. I want to … start hunting. I was wondering if you could point me to his temple.”

The trader hissed, realising that Udo was not likely to buy anything. “Oh, it’s a story the inlanders are telling. A benevolent god who was feeding a village during a famine suddenly abandoned them after he was insulted by some pompous man. They did not know he was a god, they just thought he was a hunter.”

“I see,” Udo said, swallowing to wet his dry throat.

Udo went back to his work, wondering how that lie had spread, marvelling at how the raw bloody truth could grow arms and legs and a divine head, how a ghost could become a god.

He turned his head to the side and caught sight of a black butterfly with yellow-spotted wings, standing on a rotten fish eye, moving its wings delicately. That, he thought, is how comfortably a beautiful tale can rest on a hideous reality.

As he left the market that day, Udo felt his feet carry him to a place he had never been. Even though it had only been consecrated a few market weeks ago, it was already full of worshippers. Even here in Kuwo, where the River did not flow, Ndia was known.

Udo stared at his reflection in a calabash of river water as people passed him on their way to wash their hands and faces in identical bowls, muttering prayers to Ndia and carrying offerings to the priests. In the village, they washed their hands in the River herself. Udo saw people lug sacks of corn and cocoyam and heavy leather pouches of manillas. It seemed to him that the offerers with the most faded clothes, the most matted hair, gave the dearest gifts.

Another reflection appeared in the bowl, and Udo looked up to see a familiar face.

“You are to wash your hands as you pray. Keep in mind that Ndia favours those who do not come empty-handed.”

Udo approached the priest, trembling with contained rage.

“You!” he snapped at the initiate through gritted teeth.

The man looked up, recognition dawning on his face.

“Are you not ashamed?”

“You’re the boy fro—”

“You’re the one who killed my brother,” Udo spat.

People were staring now, and whispering. The chief priestess emerged from one of the inner rooms and came up to Udo.

“Young man, wha—”

“Taking lives is not enough,” Udo continued “Now you sit here collecting offerings from the hungry, deceiving the fearful, all in the name of a lie! I said are you people not ashamed?”

The woman was quiet for a moment, before answering softly.

“Fear and Hunger. What do they both have in common?”

“Don’t ask me any useless ques—”

“They are fuel,” she continued. “Fear for your life. Hunger for a better one. Hatred of the ones who have made it so. All these drive people towards power.

“Belief in a god is a roundabout belief in yourself. That a cry, a plea, a word from you, is enough to move someone who can move something. Who can shift the ground on your behalf, make it smoother for the sake of your own two mortal feet. It is the belief that for the sake of your tears, rain will fall. A conviction that for the reason of your anger alone, lightning will drop down from the sky on a clear day and strike the heart of one who has hurt you. The god you choose to serve is a mirror, an echo, your own hand over your heart, drumming a steady soothing beat. What we do here is not in the name of Ndia, in the name of any god. It is in the name of these people. For the sake of their faith. Faith is nothing but concentrated hope, and hope is the lie which strengthens itself until it hardens into truth. So we pick a lie, and mould it into truth. That moulding is the art of faith. I am not ashamed of the work of my hands.”

Udo was silent for a moment, then he hissed and walked away.

Udo was arguing with a trader that her garri was half sand when he heard the scream. It was a young man with the desperation of a child in his voice, being dragged by two large men with resolve hardened into the lines of their faces. Udo knew that look. The look of people with a higher duty. A duty that spelt death. He had seen that look on several faces the day Akpan was killed.

The boy was screaming like someone would help, but Udo knew no one would. The same thing that had carried him to Ndia’s temple a market week ago carried him towards the boy.

“This boy cannot die.”

The two men looked up, and the one who had sharpened his knife said, “Silence. This boy’s life belongs to Akaya.”

“No, it does not,” Udo said.

“Who do you think you are?”

“I am a … a priest of Adeh. And I’ve been sent to tell you that this boy must not die today.”

“Adeh?” the man said scornfully, “Which god is that?”

“He is the god of the helpless,” Udo supplied, not knowing what had placed the words in his mouth.

The other man scoffed, “Every god is a god of the helpless.”

“Adeh is not like them. He answers to his name, and to many others. He has chosen this man as his initiate.”

“That is between you and your god. This one,” he said, pointing at the boy with his lips, “is a sacrifice offered by his own kin. The priests asked the mother for a goat,” the man laughed, “but the woman said she had seven children but only one goat, so she gave us her lastborn.”

“Maybe your Adeh can claim him in his next life,” the other man mocked, spitting disrespectfully in the direction of the boy. Spit landed on the boy’s forehead and began to drip towards his eye. He flexed his tied hands as if he wanted to wipe his face.

Udo felt rage climb up his back and onto his head, covering his eyes with a bloodred film. Was it gods who made people callous? Or did people make their gods in their own wicked image? He did not know the answers to the questions he asked himself, but he knew he would not let that boy’s blood pour as libation.

Udo went to the boy, and wiped the spit with his palm.

He calmed his rage and spoke, every word dropping like a stone into a river. “You said the priest wanted a goat? Give me until sunset. I will get you a goat.”

“We do not need your goa—”

“Hold on,” the second man said to his companion. “How many pots of soup can you cook with a goat? Can you cook soup with this bone of a boy? Will he not be just another body to bury? And the priest said they wanted a goat in the first place.”

“Hm,” the first man said, considering what his friend had said. “Alright. But when the sun sets, the boy dies.”

Udo nodded and watched them leave with the man.

He did not own a single rat, not to speak of a goat. A full-grown goat would cost at least one bronze manilla, and a generous audit of Udo’s worldly wealth would record eight cowries (one was cracked in half).

His options were to steal (another word for “thief” in Kuwo Main Market was “dead body”), beg, or trade.

Udo considered all his belongings and concluded that he had nothing of worth to trade. The only thing of worth he had … did not belong to him. It was Akpan’s coral bracelet, hidden in a bag in the corner of his home. He took it out and weighed it in his hand, then slipped it onto his wrist. It slid down his forearm, still too large.

It still shone like fresh blood, after all this time. Udo gripped it with both hands and pulled, cutting the string and scattering coral beads across the floor. He packed them in his palm and dropped all but one back in the pouch. He turned the last around his palm, and tucked it into his clothes, leaving for the market.

The two men were shocked to see Udo arrive at their temple that evening with a pitch black goat, not a spot of white on it, the red of the setting sun reflecting off its coat like the stain of spilt blood.

They handed the boy to him, took the goat, and left.

Udo looked at the boy, not knowing what to say to one who had been so utterly abandoned by his own blood, and then traded for an animal. He could not imagine how the boy must feel.

“I am—”

“You’re the answer.” the boy blurted out, eyes wide.

“What did you say?” Udo asked, wondering if they had hit the boy’s head as they were dragging him.

“I said you’re the answer. I prayed to every god I knew to save me, and none of them did. So I started calling to gods whose names I did not know to help me. And Adeh answered,” the boy said in a breath.

Udo only stared at the boy, saying nothing.

“He answered me when no one else did. He saved me. Adeh,” the boy said, holding the name on his tongue like it was something heavy with meaning, something precious, something potent. “The god of the helpless.”

“Yes,”  Udo said, because he did not know what else to say, because a denial would stab into the boy’s heart as sharp as any knife. “He is.”

“So where is Adeh’s temple?” the boy asked with too much excitement for someone who had been five heartbeats away from his next life only a few moments ago.

“Hm. His temple,” Udo said, scratching his head. “That is a good question.”

The boy refused to leave Udo alone. He trailed behind him, insisting on giving him paltry offerings. When Udo refused his cracked cowries, he started leaving him food. Roasted plantain with palm oil one day, tiny snails he must have collected after the rains and roasted over an open fire on the next, and the day after that, something resembling afang soup made with the boniest fish Udo had ever seen in his life.

He had some talent for pottery, and kept asking Udo what Adeh’s symbols were so he could make one for his personal altar. He was serious about devoting himself to the god who had saved him, who had answered him.

The boy pestered him so much that Udo finally relented one day and snapped, “A butterfly!”

“What?” the boy asked, asking another question even in the face of an answer.

“A butterfly,” Udo repeated, sighing. “His symbol is a butterfly. Those yellow and black ones.”

“A butterfly,” the boy echoed reverently, eyes wide, palms clasped to his heart.

“Yes. Can I have peace now?”

“It is the perfect symbol,” the boy said, nodding his head as he decided that it was fitting, and therefore true. “It starts out as a lowly caterpillar, and then, at its maturity, emerges as the thing it was always meant to be. It is a thing meant to transform. It reincarnates without dying. Just like Adeh’s servants. Even without death, he gives us new life. Is that not so, wise one?”

Udo looked at the boy for a long moment before nodding and saying, “Yes.”

He got used to the boy showing up at his home each morning, leaving him “offerings”, talking to him. It had been a while since he’d had someone to talk to. Even though the boy was only a few seasons younger than Udo, there was something about him that made him seem younger. Maybe his slight build, or his steady, sure belief. His ability to pull a tale from the air behind his ear, and shape it into something substantial.

Udo was unsettled when, one morning, he did not come with his daily offering. Udo waited until sunset; then he stood up, neck aching from the number of times he had stretched it to seek out the boy from crowds of passersby, and let it fall again in disappointment and growing fear, and took his cutlass to the temple of Akaya.

Udo found them, those same two men, white chalk on their faces, white wrappers round their waists, performing the final offering rites over a freshly dug grave. Their eyes were closed, so he called out to them as he came. What he wanted for them was not the bored, blank stare of Death, its swift silence, like a palm over the mouth. That was too much like mercy. He wanted them to see his face, his red-eyed tears, and know to whom the raw-throated scream belonged.

He cut them down before they could speak or scream or pray to their god. He hoped their blood was the opposite of a sacrifice to her. He hoped the bitter taste of desecration seeped into her tongue and wet it enough for her to answer.

To give an offering to the soil, you must give it whole and breathing, for Akaya to suck its final breath into her bowels.

Udo got on his knees and dug into the ground with his bare hands, until his nails broke and his fingers bled, until finally, he was holding the shoulders of the boy he had come to love. He watched the boy’s chest for an eternity of a moment, until he saw it move with breath.

Udo rubbed his back as he coughed up dirt and dry leaves and the death he was supposed to die.

Finally, the boy looked up and said, “You saved me again.”

“I missed your offerings,” Udo laughed. “You have a talent for finding those snails.”

“I knew you would come. I knew the truth.”

“The truth?” Udo asked, breath seizing.

“I know who you are.”

Udo turned this statement over in his heart, trying to find meaning in it. How could this boy know who he was when he himself had not known that since the day he lost his brother?

He looked into the boy’s eyes and all his doubt dissipated. He saw in them the certainty of a prophet, the assurance of an absolute believer. He knew whatever words came out of his mouth could not dare to be anything but true.

“You are no priest of Adeh.”

“No, I am not,” Udo confessed.

“You are Adeh himself. You are a god.”

Udo had never believed in himself. He had believed in Akpan, until death called him a lie. He had believed in gods of air and land and memory, but not in himself. He realised then, that he did not need to, that someone else could do it for him.

“Yes,” he confessed, and felt the lie harden into truth.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors