I awakened from the void with snatches of the previous lifetime, carrying the weight of a gruesome death, brimming with memories of a great wrong, an unrequited love, unavenged injuries. An unfinished life.
I am not supposed to remember any of this, but I do.
I remember everything.
I remember how I died.
Hands tied behind my back, feet bound tight with ropes, writhing in agony beside the Odikro’s corpse in an uncovered grave. I remember fire ants skittering across my face. They burrowed into my nostrils and crawled out of my mouth, their bites worse than any torment I ever felt. For every twist to break free of my bounds, fresh bites tore into me, pain setting my body on fire, consuming my senses and forcing me to scream the incantation that would end my existence and transition my return to the abode of souls: into the shadows vanish, unknown and unseen.
It took me three days to die.
The instant I exited the bite-ridden body, my memory of this lifetime should have ceased.
I shouldn’t remember the obaa panyin peering down at me and refusing to meet the questions in my eyes. Or the way she stood at the edge of the trench, while her voice, which any other time would lash out at me in rebuke, oozed grief, saying I was lucky to accompany her husband on his journey beyond. “Serve him well,” as if it were some great honor. How could I serve one who no longer breathed? That she deemed me, rather than herself, a better companion for her husband made me want to scream, to spit blood in her face, but the gag in my mouth shoved down the bitterness until it curdled in my throat. Choked with rage, I thrashed against the binds cutting into my skin. If it was luck to follow the Odikro into the afterlife like some wretched dog, why wasn’t Darko the ‘lucky’ one? Darko, who’d seen the same thirteen seasons as me. Her precious Darko with his easy smile. But I knew. My kind was inconsequential. Any slave could have lain in the trench beside her husband’s lifeless body and it wouldn’t have made any difference to her. We didn’t matter.
There was a time I mattered, but that was long ago, with a different people who called my name and I called them Baba and Maami. I remember the morning of the first day I was stolen from my people, the Odikro’s skin was a deep brown then, and his eyes, the color of cocoa kissed by the sunlight, had retained a sacred glint. I was just a boy, no more than eight seasons old, and had winced at the weight of the Odikro’s hand on my shoulder when he squeezed and said, ‘Your life is ours now.’ I thought he meant, ‘You’re one of us.’ Five seasons later, I understood the meaning of his words.
Stretched out on the cold earth, I took one final glance at the most wicked of worlds—a gray sky quickly turning dour, wet wind slurping at my cheeks, and an unsympathetic crowd staring at me. They were the same faces I’d met at the stream and greeted on the way to the farm. I don’t remember crying, just the wetness on my cheeks as they stared through me like I wasn’t lying in a trench that wasn’t mine. I remember the face I didn’t see in the crowd; my young master, Darko, who swore me an oath of protection. And a searing hate coursed through me. I cursed him through my gag, dribble and all, until my voice went hoarse.
Death freed me on the third day.
Before that, it was three days of life slowly draining from my body, stretched between moments of blinding pain and numbness—each breath more labored than the last. My skin grew cold, my thoughts scattering like leaves caught in a storm. I felt my grip of this world loosening as I waited for a final drawn-out breath.
A howling wind tore through the village on that third day. It ripped roofs from houses and smashed into trees, which, unable to withstand the assault, snapped like twigs, their branches flung violently through the air. The sky tore open, and rain poured. Loose clumps of sand slid from the pile the diggers had left beside the trench, hitting my chest with dull thuds. Water flooded my nose and mouth, and I gasped, panic rising as I struggled to breathe. Feet slipping in their scramble for safety, the mourners fled, abandoning me in the fast-filling trench with a lifeless companion. I heard their shrieks pierce the storm. I heard the obaa panyin’s half-formed scream as her fate was sealed beneath the crushing weight of a falling palm tree.
I remember fear and the gnawing certainty that something important was slipping away. Like the sunlight that pierced through the leaves of the old guava tree in Grandnana’s backyard, creating shifting patterns on the red sand. The wind rushing past my face on the moonlight nights I chase screaming cousins around the chicken coop. Baba’s deep voice calling out greetings to passersby from the front of his hut, where he sat soaking in the sun.
Remembering is my pilgrimage.
It is trying to make sense of the things I already know, yet not knowing exactly what I am looking for.
Remembering is the present backwards.
It is the branches tearing through the air and reattaching to trees that stood upright once more. It is the fallen palm tree lifting itself off the obaa panyin and righting into place, her dress no longer sodden. It is the sand floating away from me back to the diggers’ pile, ants running backward to a reformed mound, and roofs settling on houses.
Remembering is the village whole once more, untouched.
A clear sky with the midday sun shining brightly.
And me standing beside obaa panyin, her hands poised to shove me into the freshly dug trench. But instead of her husband’s grave, I was staring at the flickering flames in the hearth of my childhood home, once again a baby cradled in my maami’s arm, her small voice singing lullabies that lulled me to sleep. At night she had those horrible dreams. The one where masked men came to steal her child from her. She cried out and reached for me, but instead of Maami’s soft hands, I was clutching Kwame’s rough hand beneath blooming cherry blossoms by the riverbank—Kwame, the boy who dreamed of a life beyond servitude, who spoke of a place where our affection was not forbidden, where the harsh sun that aged us prematurely could no longer find us.
Safe from prying eyes, our fingers laced together as we pondered the possibilities beyond our shores, how different our lives could be. Kwame’s laughter held me spellbound as we listened to running water. The fading light blurred the marks on his skin, yet it was his face that captivated me, the creases hinting at a sorrow he thought he’d safely tucked away.
“Do you think all of this will ever end?” Kwame’s voice was almost lost in the rustling leaves and wind.
I yearned to say yes, to tell him there was still hope for us slaves. That we’ll be all right somehow. I longed to tell him a lot of things.
Kwame’s near-silent words—‘we’ll be together someday’—were like the petals falling at our feet: fragile. It was a lie.
An empty assurance that crumbled the night he crept to the window of the room where the obaa panyin locked me away like an animal, spitting accusations. “You brought war to us,” his words opening a chasm between us that swallowed everything we had been, widening as he added, “That is what everyone is saying.” Repeating rumors was one thing, hiding behind them was another. “What do you think, Kwame? Do you believe I would ever bring war to you?” Something between shame and guilt crossed his face, fleeting, quickly disappearing before I could identify it. “I think . . . we should be prepared for anything,” he said, and was gone.
I remember walking out of that room, the door finally scraping open. Obaa Panyin entering to say, “It’s time.” I shrank like a leaf. Behind her, each step into the blinding sun felt as if a giant rock was bearing down on me. But I forced my legs to move, pushing one foot in front of the other. Forward the only path left.
***
“You must break away from these memories.” The child’s lips are crooked in a grin that gives her the appearance of finding existence funny. “Otherwise, you will be stuck here in the in-between. Doomed to wander these desolate lands for eternity.” She is tethered to this place by memories too. I wonder how many planting seasons have turned since she first arrived in this barren wasteland of the lost and hurting.
“What does it feel like not to remember?” I ask, needing to stop the memories and be rid of them.
The child tilts her head to the side as if I pose a strange riddle. And I realize how absurd my question is—if she knew the answer, she wouldn’t be here. I’m on the verge of surrendering to the silence when she finally speaks, her voice cool, detached, yet wise.
“When it comes upon you, you will know.” Her words hovered like mist. “But isn’t the real question why you’re here at all?”
Around us, lost children gaze at me with pity. Their eyes holding a sadness beyond their age from witnessing countless others swallowed by the darkness, unable to return to the abode of souls for rebirth. Instead of childlike innocence, their faces are smeared with lingering grudges and unquenchable thirst for vengeance—children who met brutal ends. Each child bearing a story etched in the lines of their spectral faces, their thoughts echoing soft whispers in the wind that speak of forgotten dreams and unanswered prayers, of the fragility of existence, and hopes dashed against the jagged edges of despair.
The girl’s grin stays wide. “To break free, you must return to the surface and complete your unfinished business.”
A group of minstrels begins to play a mournful dirge, a haunting tune weaving through the air but the children show no inclination to troop out and perform. They remain in the same spot, their stares fixed on a horizon only they can see.
But the horizon collapses back and the faces of the children become mine, their rage latching onto my bones, dragging me down into their abyss, until the last strand of melody fades and the answer to my question is loud in the new emptiness.
Not remembering is the blankness.
It is the forgetting . . .
This story previously appeared in Con Scio Magazine.
Edited by Marie Ginga
Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with over seven published novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in CON-SCIO Magazine, The Easterner, Daily Trust, and more. A tutor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Gloria has also served as a reader for Barely South Review. She is the winner of the Brigitte Poirson 2024 Literature Prize and a finalist for the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize 2024. Find out more at Gloria Ogo.