FALL 2025, FLASH, 800 WORDS
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Like a fugitive thing transmorphing, you are alive with a sea of names. Bianonyerem. Stay with me. An impossible plea. Chimamanda. My chi will never fail me. It did. The Idibia had said to your mother the second time you were born: “Even our personal gods respect destiny.” The third time you were born, your father’s nostrils twitched as he inhaled the snuff on the back of his left palm in one swift motion. He was weary of spending so much on naming ceremonies that ended up inconsequential. Truly, why invite the whole village to celebrate the coming of a child who shared the same destiny with the sunset? Your mother turned you up and down in the dim flickering glow of the candle, her hands searching for a sign that you were a fragile evil thing reborn. A gentle lament slipped through her lips when she felt the healed gash on your right thigh. Managing to creep out of her hut, she raised you to the luminous, midnight sky, her teeth sunk into the tender softness of her lips, her tongue in crimson baptism and anointed you with a name. Hamaka. Leave me alone. But you were not one to follow orders. Leave who alone? The witching hour carried your sharp, piercing wails on its wings, until your tiny, delicate lips found your mother’s darkened nipple, overflowing with milk.
The next day, the Idibia paid a visit to your father’s house, his white wrapper tied firmly around his waist, his worn-out leather bag over his shoulders, his feet bare. He resembled a man who did not accept defeat easily, a handful of cowries entangled in those long-dreaded beards of his. It was not your first time seeing him. He had a habit of addressing your spirit each time you came into this godforsaken mortal world.
“Don’t torment your mother so,” he tried to cajole you into staying the first time you came. “You slip in and out of the door between the living and the dead like water in open fingers, but you must take pity on your mother. She has begged in every way that you stay with her: look at your name, look at the beautiful waist beads she made with her very own hands to adorn your waist, look at the tears in her eyes…”
The second time, he shook his head and asked for a knife.
“She might go again,” he told your parents. “But I am making this mark on her right thigh so her blood can touch the earth. This way, she is bonded to mother earth and the next time she comes, she will stay longer.”
This time, he chewed a chewing stick while staring at the heavens. The clouds, like white foam, veiled the sun’s harsh rays. The breeze sang, rustling leaves, and the red sand in your father’s compound shone. After minutes of chewing, he cleared his throat and lowered his eyes. His pupils seemed lost in a different world, although they were fixated on your parents.
“She must make a decision herself. Nobody can force her. She must choose whether she wants to be bound to a string of restless souls taking turns at life or if she wants freedom from it. It is a choice only she can make.”
Finding your puffy cheeks with her thumb, your mother ran tired circles on them. In her eyes, you could see the sad resignation of a woman whose strength could never equal that of the gods. Your father waved off a fly.
“Can we, no matter how little, influence her choice?” he asked in his usual quiet baritone voice.
The Idibia chewed his plump, dark lower lip in thought and said with a shrug, “You can beg her.”
“Please stay,” your parents said in unison, and while you wanted to respond with don’t beg me, you found yourself staring at your mother’s swollen breasts whose milk would sour without suckle, her red eyes and frail heart. And while your father put on the air of a man unaffected, you could see the desperate rhythmic tapping of his toes, digging into the red earth as though trying to drill a hole. You squirmed in your mother’s arms, like a worm trying to wriggle its way out of a terribly uncomfortable dilemma. Hamaka, please stay, she whispered. And your soul and spirit thought strongly of the liberation before you, felt deeply the need to honour the pact you made with mother earth in your last coming, and while you were uncertain of how long you would linger, you were sure of one thing: you would surrender to this blooming freedom and like your first name, stay.
Temidayo Testimony Omali Odey, also known as Testimony Odey is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of literature, film, spoken word and music. With publications in several magazines, she has been shortlisted for the African Human Rights Short Story Prize, Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, and global Writing Ukraine Prize, and is a recipient of the Nigeria Prize for Teen Authors, African Teen Writers Awards, HIASFEST Star Prize, Wakaso Poetry Prize, and JCIN UNIBEN Ten Emerging Leaders and Legacy Award. When she’s not creating, she is either reading, watching a film or spinning philosophical theories in her head.