Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way.…
By the time Hamid learns they’ll have a guest, it’s a done deal. Kathy has this habit of inviting people over for beer on a whim, but having someone—a man, no less—stay for a whole week without consulting him?…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
In Ashley Whitaker’s hilarious, satirical, and at times devastating debut novel, Bitter Texas Honey, we follow Joan, a recent college graduate with an Adderall problem who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Her biggest obstacle? She’s plagued…
Essay by Abby Manzella • In Karen Babine’s latest memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Milkweed 2025), the author preps her Scamp camper and drives from her home in Minnesota to the Acadian coast of…
On an early spring day in Flatbush, I sat down with my friend and neighbor, Shayne Terry. Our five-year-olds went out with their fathers while we talked about Terry’s debut book, Leave: A Postpartum Account, which came out this…
By Jen Craven • Here’s a truth many writers (myself included) sometimes resist: if your characters aren’t suffering, your story probably is. In the world of suspense fiction, suffering isn’t just dramatic flair—it’s fuel. It’s what cranks the tension,…
We strive to slide and glide but list from side to side, bob up, bob down, settle for a sec or a minute. We shake our balding heads in minute arcs, lest we fall and fracture. We slake worries,…
The concept of what is or what is not a weed is not precisely defined because it has both biological and sociological elements. Biologically, weeds are plants having the ability to colonize, inhabit and thrive in continually disturbed habitats,…
A Tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces. —Wole Soyinka When sleep accepts one week, it becomes death. My father’s earthly cloth, as per tradition, must wait in his hut until the fourth day before he is confirmed…
In pre-colonial Igboland, a corpse is left undisturbed for one Igbo week (four days) before they are believed dead. René Maran’s Bataoula bares the Banda custom of tying a corpse to a tree for eight days to confirm death before it is buried. Two years ago, my aunt died and was in the ground within hours. Couldn’t they even wait for her to die well? What if she awoke in the grave? My dad’s response: “The doctor confirmed that there is no drop of life in her.” But I couldn’t unthink Stephen King’s “Autopsy Room Four,” where a man, cataleptic from fer-de-lance snake venom, feared his own autopsy might be his cause of death.
In pre-colonial Igboland, maybe even now, Igbos performed bedazzling feats. They flew, not with brooms, no. Their legs lifted from the ground, and they shot skyward. All you’d see is a shooting star. This is called Ekili. They could split into multiple selves and multitask. They could simply vanish into thin air. In my short story, “The Healer from Kiruopa,” I explore the ability of Igbos to walk through walls. In this story, I recount how their essence can shrug off their corporeal forms, temporarily, to assume a beastly form. This is called leaking. I first heard about this from my dad, who told me that his grandfather could turn into a lion at will. Did his grandfather wear a lion’s costume or what? “No,” he said, “he becomes a lion. Ọ na-eshi agụ.” I did not know what “ishi” meant. I’d learn, decades later, in J.A. Umeh’s After God is Dibia, that “ishi” means “to leak”; that such a person’s soul leaks out of their body and takes the physical form of their desired animal; that their human form is, however, left untouched else that-which-left be unable to glide back in. The encounter between our protagonist and the tiger is exactly as recounted to me by my dad about his contact in the bush with a lion who turned out to be his grandad. That part is the true story (realism), the muse from which the plot, which is purely fictive/speculative, proceeds.
In pre-colonial Igboland, we had practices that, if left be, could have equalled modern-day science; that, if left be, who knows, could have been beneficial to the globe now. In this story, and most of my works, I re-collect and carve morsels of our forgotten selves, chiefly to strike a match, to relight the lamp of self which colonisation de-oiled. When our protagonist’s father dies, something leaves him. It’s like what happens when your world is stamped savage, less, and bashed with erasement. Nothing fills him whole. Crying can’t; ingesting his father can’t; replacing his father can’t. Nowt can recall that which “stood up and left him” except a return of that which left.
KASIMMA is an author from Igboland—obodo ndi dike. Find her on Twitter @kasimmam and Instagram @Iamkasimma.
