Nab'hia - Part 5: My Mother's Keeper

Read Part 1 here,  Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.


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.

            “It’s time Karine.”
            “No,” I said.

            “It’s time for you to keep your promise.  I’ll be needing your daughter now.”

            “She’s not here, you can’t have her.”

            “I’ll keep coming back Karine.”  Her voice was barely a hiss now.  “I’ll keep coming back until you’re weaker and weaker, and then, one day, you won’t be able to stop yourself giving her to me.”

            “Never,” I said.

            She smiled again, and this time, her mouth was huge and filled with decay.  “Then I will take what I need from you today.”

            I barely heard the scream start from my lips.  It was dark and wild, and if I had been able to hear it from the outside, it would have made me feel like the jungle was bearing down on me out of the mountains, coming for me, hot and moist, looking to take another piece of my heart that I would never get back.

            Nab’hia left me by the fireside in a daze, without even speaking to any of the other women, with out addressing my mother at all, and as she stood up and passed in front of me, in between me and the fire, my hollow eyes gazed over the hot flames and met my mother’s eyes for just a moment.  And then it dawned on me.  Whatever Nab’hia had done, she had done in secret.  The others were oblivious.  None of them had heard my cries, not even my mother.  But somehow my mother knew that something had happened.  And when our eyes met, I saw the terror on my mother’s face and saw her touch her breast, just above her heart.

            And I knew the truth.  Nab’hia was done with my mother.  She would never come to see my mother again.  She had her piece of my mother’s heart, and now she had what my mother, too, had promised to Nab’hia long ago.  She had finally taken my mother’s daughter.

To Be Continued...