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Part 1 here,
Part 2 here, and
Part 3 here.
There were a group of us that night, and by the time Nab’hia came to the center of our yard, we were already all gathered around the small fire in between the animals’ lean-to and the house. I was pensive, seated a little away from the others, and this is where Nab’hia came to me and settled herself down on a flat stone next to the fire. In its flickering glow, she looked like a dark, dangerous snake warming herself on that rock, her yellow eyes dining lazily on the flames.
“So, Karine,” she said to me, “how does your mother treat you?”
I was puzzled. Usually, the ritual would go thusly: Nab’hia would approach my mother first and ask her how we all did, or what we had all been doing. And then my mother would offer some vague and completely unsatisfying platitude about the absolute mediocrity of our existence. And then, when this part of the ritual was finished, Nab’hia would turn to me and ask me how my mother treated me, and I would tell some tale about how she had broken an egg I had brought in from the hen house, or that she had turned out my pail of water before it was dirty and I had been forced to go all the way back to the stream for another. And then Nab’hia would smile her little smile and she would slap my mother, or scratch her cheek with her claws, or pinch the muscle in her upper arm between her strong fingers. And she would always hiss this cryptic reminder to my mother not to take what didn’t belong to her. And my mother would whimper, and I would feel sick. But I was powerless to stop it. I was powerless to stop myself from giving Nab’hia what she wanted.
Except when it came to my daughter. Nab’hia had my heart. I didn’t know where she kept it, if it was in a glass jar somewhere or buried in the ground, but she had it. And she could keep it. I would not give her my daughter. There was nothing she could do to me that would ever make me give her up.
So now I sought to play my part in the ritual with Nab’hia even though the rules seemed to have changed without my knowledge. There she sat on that stone next to me, separating me out from the other women. Her slanting yellow eyes gazed intently at me over her high cheek bones, and she chewed on some piece of nearly dead vegetation. At first I had thought it was a stalk of long grass, but now it looked more like what the Americans called a cat-tail, but I wouldn’t have even known what that was then. I watched her jaws work on it and tried to figure out what it was that she wanted to hear from me.
“My mother went into the village last week,” I said to her warily, “and found my father drunk. While she was there, she got drunk herself and I saw her dancing in the street with some of the boys that I grew up with. She was letting them touch her while they were dancing with her.” It was funny, but I was running out of things to tattle on my mother to Nab’hia about. This one was even almost a lie – I had seen my mother dancing in the street with some people, but I hadn’t known who they were, and I hadn’t known if she was drunk, and I certainly hadn’t seen them touching her.
Nab’hia chucked smoothly deep in her throat, and her jaws continued to work on the plant stem she held between her long, brown fingers. “Now what’s so bad about that, Karine? Why shouldn’t your mother have a little fun?”
I was shocked. It was the first time Nab’hia had ever questioned anything I said about my mother. It was the first time I’d ever been put on the stand by her. I gazed back at her, and as I watched her in the firelight, that quiet, unsettling change of appearance that sometimes occurred to her seemed to take place. Her features became more pointed, her eyes more yellow. And then she smiled at me around the stalk in her mouth, and for a moment, all of her teeth were gone, and all I could see was the open mouth of death.
