Chapter 4: The Name the Dust Forgot
She wakes before the sun, before the crows remember their purpose, before the dust dares to settle. The world is still thick with the residue of night—an ooze of whispers from dreams unfinished, a miasma curling through the banana trees like a second skin. Ayaa. That was her name once. Or was it?
The chickens outside do not cluck. They watch her with eyes too round, too knowing. A line of ants scrawls poetry in the dust, their movements not random, no, but precise. She steps over them and does not read the words they etch. She knows better than to listen.
There was a time when the village spoke in straight lines, when words meant what they were meant to mean. Now the market murmurs in tones that scrape against sense. The fishmonger hisses syllables that loop, swallow their own tails, spit bones of unfinished sentences onto the ground. “Fresh tilapia,” he says, but what she hears is throat of the river opened, closed, opened again.
Ayaa nods, does not respond. If she speaks, her words might unspool too. Might unravel into the mud like the voice of the old woman who once sold matoke at the crossroads. That woman’s words bled until she had no more. Until her mouth was a silent gape, her stories now written only in the way her hands twitched in the dusk.
Ayaa does not want to be like her.
She grips her basket, woven with care from reeds that hum in the wind. The trees whisper to each other in the voice of the ancestors. The sky is different today—too flat, too taut, like an eye staring inward. She does not look up.
The market is wrong. It has been wrong for weeks now, but today it is wrong in a new way. The people move like they are being pulled, their conversations a series of tangled wires, each sentence sparking against another, fusing, melting. She sees a boy weeping, but his tears fall upward. A goat chews on a newspaper, and the letters do not remain still—they scuttle like insects, rearrange themselves into meanings she does not want to decipher. Ayaa, the paper whispers. Ayaa, you have already been consumed.
She turns sharply, basket forgotten. She must go. Now. Before her name is fully devoured. Before she becomes nothing but a sigh in the hot wind.
The path home is twisted, longer than before. It was never this long.
The ants are still there, writing, writing, writing. She finally looks.
YOU WERE NEVER HERE.
The sky is a gaping mouth. The trees are silent now. The chickens have closed their eyes.
Her name was—was—
Nothing.
The dust does not remember her footsteps. The world exhales, and she is gone.