Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé

Author:Morowa Yejidé
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

REQUIEM FOR THE LIVING

Osiris had traveled many waters since he was murdered and dumped into the Anacostia River. Each time he thought about Nephthys, he felt the interstellar cold of his solitude. And he knew—as all ghosts do—that the dead worry about their loved ones even after they are gone. So it was no surprise that Osiris visited her on each anniversary of his death, the only time of year he thought his sister might sense him through the brume of her melancholy. Each time he wandered the floors of her apartment building and through the sights and sounds of the lives of others, until he came to her door and moved through it and found her slumped in her chair.

He whispered her name and shouted her name but she did not respond. Sometimes he tried to influence the things around her to get her attention: banging on the walls until the plaster cracked, stopping the refrigerator motor, pressing against her front door so that it was difficult to open. He often moved the many objects that littered her living room floor from one place to another. And to his surprise, he even found a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made in her closet, and he put it in other places where he thought Nephthys might find it and remember what they once had and who they once were. And he sang a Gullah riff from that faraway long-ago place they once shared, hoping she would realize that he was there:

Indigo swirlin’ round de vat

No beginnin’ and no end

Circlin’ round de ring shout lap

No beginnin’ and no end …

But she never reacted when he sang. He listened to her labored breathing through the haze of liquor, and her commitment to self-destruction pained him. That was why he moved her bottles of alcohol. She sat them on the little end table next to her chair and he moved them to places he thought she wouldn’t think to look: on the broiler tray of the unused oven; beneath the piles of debris in her closet; behind the piping under the bathroom sink. He knocked the flask from her hands and watched her pick it up again, and he hid other bottles only to discover that she had found them. He watched her get in and out of the Plymouth and go into Sonny’s Bar. Countless times he’d even stepped into the wall mirror glass, looking at her as she stared into the reflection, hoping she would see him. But now the mirorr was broken. He tried harder to speak to her in the symbiotic language of twins, but she did not seem to hear him through the rancor of her despair.

* * *

In the early dawn, Osiris moved through the old steel of the Plymouth Belvedere and into the passenger seat next to Nephthys. He knew that she was waiting for the fog, and he watched her put the key in the ignition as he had a thousand times before.

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