it left an impression, a mark, like a bright shining star in the middle of my chest.
This star, the symbol of my mother’s love and my sister’s hate, is another way my story ended.
I am told that I refused to follow, that I lay inside my mother, after her waters spilled, after my sister abandoned me, gasping like a small fish, gasping for breath. That in her delirium my mother sang to me, calling, begging me to make the journey on, that she made promises to the old gods, to the ancestors who once walked our land, to those of the deep, promises that a mother should never make.
“You were the bebe one, head so shiny, slick like a ripe green seed,” our oma would say.
“Ripe,” Yera echoed, her voice sweet for Oma, sweet as the sorcadia tree’s fruit, but her mouth was crooked, slanting at me. Yera had as many faces as the ancestors that once walked our land, but none she hated more than mine.
While I slept, Yera took the spines our oma collected from the popper fish and sharpened them, pushed the spines deep into the star in my chest. I’d wake to scream, but the paralysis would take hold, and I would lie in my pallet, seeing, knowing, feeling but unable to fight or defend.
When we were lardah, and I had done something to displease her—rise awake, breathe, talk, stand—Yera would dig her nails into my right shoulder and hiss in my ear. “Shadow, spare. Thief of life. You are the reason we have no mother.” It was my sister’s favorite way to steal my joy.
And then, when she saw my face cloud, as the sky before rain, she would take me into her arms and stroke me. “There, my sister, my second, my own broken one,” she would coo. “When I descend, you can have mother’s comb, and put it in your own hair. Remember me,” she would whisper in my ear, her breath soft and warm as any lover. “Remember me,” and then she would stick her tongue inside my ear and pinch me until I screamed.
Our oma tried to protect me, but her loyalty was like the suwa wind, inconstant, mercurial. Oma only saw what she wanted. Older age and even older love made her forget the rest.
“Come!” I could hear the drumbeat echo of her clapping hands. “Yera, Fele,” she sang, her tongue adding more syllables to our names, Yera, Fele, the words for one and two. The high pitch meant it was time to braid Oma’s hair. The multiversal loops meant she wanted the complex spiral pattern. Three hours of labor, if my hands did not cramp first, maybe less if Yera was feeling industrious.
With our oma calling us back home, I wiped my palms on the inside of my thighs, and ignored the stares. My sister did not reach back to help me. A crowd had gathered, pointing but silent. No words were needed here. The lines in their faces said it all. I trudged behind Yera’s tall, straight back, my eyes focused on the fishtail’s tip.
“They should have buried you with the afterbirth.”
When we reached the courtyard, my basket empty, Yera’s full as she intended, we found our oma resting in her battered rocker in the yard. She had untied the wrap from her head. Her edges spiked around her full moon forehead, black tendrils reaching for the sun. She smiled as Yera revealed the spices and herbs she collected. I pressed fresh moons into my palms and bit my lip. No words were needed here. As usual, our oma had eyes that did not see. She waved away my half empty basket, cast her eyes sadly away from the fresh bloody marks on my shoulder, and pointed to her scalp instead.
“Fele, I am feeling festive today, bold.” She stared at a group of baji yellow-tailed birds pecking at the crushed roots and dried leaves scattered on the ground. They too would be burned and offered tomorrow night, at Yera’s descension. And we would feast on the fruits of the land, as my sister descended into the sea.
“I need a style fitting for one who is an oma of a goddess. My beauty.”
“A queen!” Yera cried, returning from our bafa. She flicked the fishtail and raised her palms to the sky. “An ancestress, joining the deep.”
Yera had been joining the deep since we were small girls. She never let me forget it.
“Come, Fele,” she said, “You take the left,” as if I did not know. Yera held the carved wooden comb of our mother like a machete, her gaze as sharp and deadly. Her eyes dared me to argue. She knew that I would not.
Together we stood like sentinels, each flanking oma’s side. The creamy gel from the fragrant sorcadian butter glistened on the backs of our hands. I placed a small bowl of the blue-shelled sea snails, an ointment said to grow hair thick and wild as the deepest weed of the sea. Yera gently parted our oma’s scalp, careful not to dig the wooden teeth in. Before I learned to braid my own hair, Yera had tortured me as a child, digging the teeth into the tender flesh of my scalp. Now her fingers moved in a blur, making the part in one deft move. A dollop of gel dripped onto her wrists. She looked as if she wore blue-stained bracelets—or chains.
I gathered our oma’s thick roots, streaked with white and the ashen gray she refused to dye, saying she had earned every strand of it.
“This is a special time, an auspicious occasion. It is not every year that Oma Day falls on the Night of Descension. The moon will fill the sky and light our world as bright as in the day of the gods.”
I massaged scented oils into the fine roots of her scalp, brushed my fingertips along the nape of her neck. I loved to comb our oma’s hair. The strands felt like silk from the spider tree, cotton from the prickly bushes. Oma said in the time before, our ancestors used to have enough fire to light the sky, that it burned all morning, evening, and the night, from a power they once called electricity. I love how that name feels inside my head—e-lec-tri-city. It sounds like one of our oma’s healing spells, the prayers she sends up with incense and flame.
Once when Yera and I were very small, we ran too far inside the ancestors’ old walled temples. Before we were forbidden, we used to scavenge there. We climbed atop the dusty, rusted carcasses of metal beasts. We ducked under rebar, concrete giants jutting from the earth, skipped over faded signage. We scuttled through the scraps of the metal yard at the edge of green, where the land took back what the old gods had claimed. I claimed something, too, my reflection in the temple called Family Dollar, a toy that looked like me. Her hair was braided in my same simple box pattern, the eyes were black and glossy. She wore a faded skirt, the pattern long gone. When I flipped her over, to my surprise, I discovered another body where the hips and legs should be. The skirt concealed one body when the other was upright. Two bodies, two heads, but only one could be played with at a time. I tried to hide my find from Yera, but she could see contentment on my face. So I ran. I ran to the broken, tumble down buildings with blown-out windows that looked like great gaping mouths. I ran into the mouth of darkness, clutching my doll but when I closed my eyes, searching for the light, Yera was waiting on the other side.
That is when I knew I could never escape her. My sister is always with me.
Before the Descension, our people once lived in a land of great sweeping black and green fields, land filled with thick-limbed, tall trees and flowing rivers of cool waters, some sweet and clear, others dark as the rich, black soil. Our oma says when our ancestors could no longer live on the land, when the poisons had reached the bottom of every man, woman, and child’s cup, they journeyed on foot and walked back into the sea, back to the place of the old gods, the deep ones.
But before they left, they lifted their hands and made a promise. That if the land could someday heal from its long scars, the wounds that people inflicted, that they would return again. In the meanwhile, one among us, one strong and true, must willingly descend into the depths to join the ancestors. This one, our people’s first true harvest, will know from the signs and symbols, the transformations that only come from the blessing of the ancestors, when the stars in the sky above align themselves just so. Yera is that first harvest. She has wanted this honor her whole life. And from her birth, the signs were clear. Her lungs have grown strong, her limbs straight