Nnedi Okorafor by The Windseeker Mbachu Zahrah

Author:The Windseeker Mbachu Zahrah [Mbachu Zahrah, The Windseeker]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-05-27T14:18:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

WHIP SCORPION

For several days, I was sure the jungle was trying to kill me. That maybe those farmers had been right after all and that the jungle was some giant superintelligent beast manipulating its enormous body and thinking of creative ways to cause my demise. It had lured me in with its mystery, but once I traveled far enough into its body, it closed around me and showed me what it was really like. And when it was finished playing with me, it would just swallow me up. These were the days when I looked death in the face and, because of this, learned how to survive.

For a while, I was still bothered by my dirty clothes, which I couldn’t change because I had no other clothes. I broke out in an itchy rash because of the heat and lack of bathing. Whenever I stepped under patches of sunlight, the rash itched horribly! But in desperate times, even old habits die, I guess.

I was from the north, and that meant that I was used to tidy, clean, and civilized attire. Back home, I went through great pains every morning to make myself look just so. My hair had to be neat, my clothes perfectly matched, my shoes scuff free. It’s just something you learn as you grow up, like the slang of your community.

Still, my habit of obsessing over my appearance started leaving me the minute I began my journey. I had no choice, really, with all the sweating and the dirt and no place to bathe. But it left me completely the moment I realized that I could be much worse off than dirty, that I could die a very painful, ugly death. And that was when I came face to face with the giant scorpion.

It came clambering down from a nearby tree while I made a snack of a mango. I now know what it’s like to feel absolutely sure that death is moments away. What could I do against this thing?! The scorpion was an ancient-looking beast whose flat disk of a gray body was bigger than a grown man’s! It was a scurrying nightmare. The scorpion hissed angrily as it moved on many thick pairs of legs armed with double rows of sharp spines. It clicked its large, scissorlike mandibles, a yellowish saliva dripping from them. Even from where I stood I could smell that saliva, or maybe the stench came from its entire body. The strong acidic odor stung my nose.

I had encountered a scorpion once back home. It was standing quietly on the side of a tree, black, shiny, and smaller than the palm of my hand. I’d run inside and got my father, who flicked it into the bushes. Scorpions are deadly when they sting, but they sting only when attacked.

This scorpion, though, was nothing like that scorpion back home. Aside from being far more aggressive and many, many times larger, it had no stinger. Instead, it had a large gray whip.

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