A Murder of Crows

Nailah Tataa

My mama did her best to hide me.

Her desperation to bury me and bleach my existence of the old world was all I could remember of her. 

“This place,” she told me one day while washing my hair, “would protect in ways she couldn’t.” Ugali was traded for bread, our beaded dresses and bare chests were covered and replaced with trousers and shirts. 

“Anything to protect me,” she would coo smoothing down my curls. It was because of her that the grey stones of the dingy church basement and the nauseating scent of mould and dampness were the only memories I still have from my childhood. 

Small buildings with clouded rectangle windows boxed me in where I traded the warmth of the sun for a flickering offending bulb that loomed over my huddled figure. It was there, under the pale fluorescent lights, that white angels stared down at me in disapproval warning me to behave lest I be ousted from their paradise. 

Days spent pulling languages and words I couldn’t understand out of my throat, binding and tucking parts of me I hadn’t then met, so much of me stolen I felt light and dizzy every time I left the building and stumbled into the cold Halifax air. 

It wasn’t long before my eyes dulled and the terror and pull towards him finally lessened. Not long until my mothers tight grip on my shoulders grew lighter, almost playful, as their magic worked. 

Kifo, usinitambue, Kifo, usinitambue, Kifo…

Like a mantra, my mama taught me to recite these words, clutching the rosary necklace the priest had given me, rubbing each bead clockwise in frantic intervals until the magic settled around me and I finally felt safe enough to leave the house. 

Was their magic strong? Of course. The lingua had its power. 

But it must be sealed by Didignya to truly be powerful. 

Their gods had their strengths just as all did, but the most they could be called upon to do was layer and shroud. 

For how could they truly fight the god of death and hope to win? 

For it was he that came to collect their gods when the time came.

When I was fifteen, I stumbled out the door forgetting to do my ritual. Distracted by thoughts of school and how dangerously close the humidity was getting to ruining the perky gelled bob I had agonized over that morning, it took me a while to notice the mass of crows that had started following me. It was easy to pretend that nothing was wrong. Crows usually gathered, didn’t they? It was not unusual to see pairs, trios or a murder all at once, right? 

I clutched my backpack strap tight, fear pushing me onto the bus where I quickly found my seat, kept my head down, and pretended the quiet whispers around me weren’t a commentary on what was happening outside the windows. When the bus pulled up to the school, I waited until everyone had left before slowly making my way out. A deep breath, and I began:

Kifo, usinitambue…

I stopped. Maybe it really had been a coincidence? 

The minute I stepped out, knots began to form. Shivers that had nothing to do with the weather played up and down my body while sweat began its antics on my face. In revulsion, I blanched, stumbling back, regretting the comfort I had sighed happily into this morning. More than a hundred crows of various sizes had come to greet me. 

They littered the ground, some hanging off the telephone poles, others crowded on fences, watching me with eyes too clear and too dark. They didn’t make a sound. No caw or rustle of feathers. Just beady, clear eyes following my every move. 

Pain that I could only describe as red and hot seeped out my back, radiating with every thump of my heart. I fumbled in my pockets, palms slick with sweat, grabbing the necklace I had carelessly thrown into them. I repeated the mantra as fast as I could, closing my eyes shut and after three rotations, opened them to find myself completely alone. 

The crows had scattered, the faint cawing in the distance sounding vaguely like scolding. 

To this day, the marks still stain my skin. Swirls had started to appear on my arms, climbing up like vines, extending out from my ribs to form a jagged circle around my heart. The ends appeared faded, as if the artist had run out of ink before it could truly finish its piece. I knew I couldn’t tell my mother. She would have locked me in the room after dousing me in holy water and spent hours screaming at my father behind closed doors about how he couldn’t protect me. The strange happenings had begun to wear her down. Last time the crows had followed me, she had kept me home for months citing religious needs to my teachers who eventually stopped looking at my empty seat. 

I became a ghost that occasionally haunted the school grounds and my mother…well, lines of stress marred her forehead. Her eyebrows stayed hunched with worry and quiet pain, her mouth pinched knowing only to scowl and to open to lecture. She had become paranoid, seeing the god of death in every friend I tried to bring over and every gift from neighbours who looked at me in pity while handing over stale food. It wasn’t long before she refused to meet anyone in public. Only home, and only after they had been blessed by her. 

She no longer could hold a job and began to lean into my father in a way he did not know how to support. It felt strained to be at the centre of so much misfortune. Bitterness bubbled in me, mixing with an anger I knew had been building every time my mothers hands examined my body every morning for traces of him. 

The priest’s assurance was not enough. To her, it was only inevitable that Exu would take me away. Each passing day, her anxious hands – thin and bony now – clutched me tight, speaking tongues of places I had never heard of. Wiping the smelly water she always doused me in before I left the house, I cursed Exu’s existence. The humiliating way my privacy was a suggestion, how my protests were silenced with terrible lies of care, trying to explain away the bags that piled under my eyes from our 3.am prayers… 

This had to end. 

So, I conspired. 

She had hidden all the texts that referenced him in the last level of the house, going as far as to cut his name out of books she had collected from back home. The books served as a reminder that we came from someplace. Another world where life was an afterthought and death the norm. A place we had fled as soon as I was old enough to survive the long trip. 

They only remained because my baba had insisted we have an escape plan in case hers failed and he eventually found us. 

Though running water could make him falter and the ocean’s delay, no one could escape him for too long. My mother had spent a day digging a hole in the basement burying the books and journals six feet under a layer of salt. She had topped the mound with a mixture of binding magic she had gotten from a sorcerer in Newfoundland who had prayed over it for hundreds of nights and was rumoured to have come from the Pope’s own personal spell book. 

The room had been salted in all corners. This too was blessed by prayers and by a local priest. He had done it free of charge, bemused by my mothers’ desperate plea for his god’s favour. 

Now to wait until the holy day… 

On Sundays, she claimed, Exu had no power and she could freely roam without seeing his shadow everywhere she went. She had no idea how wrong she was. 

For Exu ruled all days. All skies.

Every evil thought, every rise to anger could rouse him to come collect what was his. Even the black shape that follows you every day could be used by him to cause mischief. The soul was promised to him by the creators and to him, it must be given.

Blessed is the one called Exu. 

The air in the basement was charged with energy as soon as I stepped in. The cross around my neck pressed against my chest, breathed once, then let out a shudder. The magic was potent and thick: 

The crackling of the air and instant shivers to my body were a familiar feeling. One of safety and definitely something…foreign. 

It seemed like she had used more than just European magic here. 

Just as I stepped close to the salt circle, I heard the door creak open. 

My father. 

Haunting black eyes stared down at me, red from countless restless nights. Just like my mother, his vibrant energy had been sucked dry leaving the ghost of himself here. 

He looked at me from the top of the stairs and nodded once, giving me permission. 

Understanding. 

This had to end now or we would hurtle towards something very, very bad. I threw the cross to the ground and broke the circle. I heard my father yell as he was blown back and the door slammed shut locking me in the room with that thing. 

Exu.

He materialized in front of me so quickly I couldn’t react. 

He was a giant figure taking up most of the space in the room. His head was shaved bald, skin drawn taut over a bony body that looked out of place with its strange proportions. Truly a caricature of a human being, he reached out and the hot pain that had assaulted me that day began again and I watched, twisting with pain, as the markings grew bolder and stronger, wrapping around my breasts until finally, in one quick move, they pierced my heart and I died. 

He stood over me, a hunched figure, terrifying if I could still feel fear. 

This was the second thing he stole from me.

I only appear like this because your family has robbed me too, he replied in my mind. 

Privacy. 

The third thing he took from me. 

“This will not work until you get out of my thoughts. Please, leave,” I demanded, still reeling from the pain of his branding. He opened his mouth and let out a wailing so strong it pierced my ears and I was surprised to feel wetness leak from them. 

I thought I was dead? 

“You walk between worlds now. I am Death and you have not been claimed like that,” he wheezed. Yet. 

The warning lingered in my head, clinging to my mind. Whether it was him who did that or myself, I could not tell. 

“Honor my request and we can negotiate,” I managed to demand, clutching my bleeding ears. 

He shrank, taking the form of a businessman. Proportions still too big, his bones creaked as he moved closer. He bowed slightly and the pressure I had felt in my head finally lifted. A long breath later and I was ready to talk to the strange being that had been the centre of my life. “Save my mother from madness and I’ll serve you like I was…” I took a sharp inhale “…like I was supposed to.” 

He tilted his head, looking at me with curiosity. His head was far too big, making his tilting twist in a way that was too low and too deep. The absurdity of watching a god try to emulate humans would have been comical if it didn’t make the hair on my arms puff up. 

“Child, your mother’s demons are her own. I do not drive my vessels to where she is. She is what happens when you try to run from your destiny and parade yourself in this…I don’t even want to call it magic.” 

He picked up the cross I had thrown and crushed it in his hand. After wiping it clean on his shirt, he met my gaze. “Lay your negotiations so we can begin. I am painfully behind thanks to the meddling of your mother.” 

His eyes clouded over, dizzying as I met them. They seemed to go on and on and on…

I turned away before I would be driven mad. I didn’t know what else I could negotiate. This all depended on my mother being sane again but if that was self-imposed, I had nothing. 

Except for one thing. 

I licked my lips, remembering the disgust my mother had for me. All the times she had recoiled at my touch, fearful that he had already claimed her sweet child and what remained was nothing more than his toy and worst of all…

“I don’t want to be your wife,” I said quickly. 

He looked at me and, after a brief moment, twisted his face, and let out what took me a second to realize was a laugh. I watched his face shift as skin strained against bone as he carried on while I stood, awkwardly staring up at him. 

His laugh turned into wheezing until finally, it was quiet… 

“Your Mama still has that rotten sense of humour I see.” 

He straightened, suddenly serious. “Listen, child, I have no time for the games of humans and need my emissary now. I do not want to have to chase you to such an unpleasant place again. Understood?” 

I nodded shyly. “So, when do we begin?” 

Now. 

His voice echoed in my head, breaking the first promise we had ever had between us. A long nail cut into me, and out I plopped – raw and new. 

I struggled to get used to this form that Exu had given me as all my senses heightened and were fine tuned. The world felt strange. 

Suddenly, I understood why my mother hated him so much. 

Exu’s world was frightening. I didn’t realize how much my body protected me from the feeling of being pulled, pinched and picked at. How many things swirled around me, waiting for a single misstep to claim my body and possess the flesh and blood all of them coveted so much.

This world of Exu would drive anyone crazy. I

 could not call this thing a god. 

That word could not be used to describe this thing. 

My body filled with dread. He picked me up in his hand, suddenly too big again, and I felt the world collapse around me. I wish I had listened to my mother.

Exu exists far before our world was thought of. Where death and madness lived side by side with life and sanity. Exu is the sweetness of birth, that moment when you open your eyes to the new world. Exu is that feeling of dread and apprehension you have looking over the abyss right before you leap and are consumed. He is something equally great and terrible. You can not run from him as Exu sees all. Pleasing is not enough; no sacrifice could appease he who merely loans you your existence. If Exu found his prey, you could not escape his grasp.

Itaendelea.