Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor Page A

end of the bridge. When she got there, something possessed her to stretch herself into an arabesque. The music abruptly stopped. She felt her spirit face pull in and she gasped, teetering on the bridge’s slippery wood. Directly below, she saw something undulate. The river creature! She thrust out her arms to keep her balance.
    “Ah!” she shouted as she fell. Something tugged hard at her neck. Sasha had her by her gold necklace. He pulled her forward and she stumbled into his arms. As he held her, she looked back, tears in her eyes.
    “Here,” Sasha said, helping her to a nearby picnic table under a large iroko tree. “Sit.”
    “You okay?” Orlu said, running over.
    She nodded. “Thanks, Sasha.”
    “Thank your necklace,” he said.
    “What happened?” Chichi said a minute later, after emerging from the mist.
    “What do you think?” Orlu said.
    “Oh,” she said. “The juju should have lasted longer than—”
    “Come on, the river beast can break that, easy,” Orlu said. “It probably waited until she was close to safety to make the fall to her death more dramatic.”
    “One of these days, someone’s going to get rid of that thing,” Chichi said, kneeling before Sunny.
    Sasha laughed and said, “Girl, please. Anatov told me that monster is older than time. It’ll be here messing with shit long after we’re all gone.”
    Sunny shivered, knowing they’d have to go back over the bridge to get home. It was already noon. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it , she thought drily.
    As her heartbeat slowed, she took in her surroundings.
    So this was Leopard Knocks. The entrance was flanked by two tall iroko trees. They were slowly shedding a constant shower of leaves, though their tops remained healthy and bushy. At the foot of each tree were small piles of leaves. Beyond was the strangest place Sunny had ever seen.
    She’d traveled to Jos in Northern Nigeria to visit relatives. She’d been to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, too. She’d been to Amsterdam, Rome, Brazzaville, Dubai. She, her parents, and her brothers were seasoned travelers. But this place was something else entirely.
    The buildings were made of thick gray clay and red mud with thatch roofs. They reminded her of Chichi’s house, but more sophisticated. Almost all of them were quite large. Many had more than one story; several had three or four. How clay and mud could stand up to this kind of use was beyond her. Every building was full of windows of various shapes and sizes. Large squares, circles, triangles—one building had a window shaped like a giant heart. All were decorated with white intricate drawings—snakes, squiggles, steer, stars, circles, people, faces, fish. The list of things was infinite. Pink smoke billowed from the center of a large one-story hut.
    The buildings were crowded tightly together. Still, tall palm trees and bushes managed to grow between them, and a dirt road packed with people wound among the buildings. From somewhere nearby, up-tempo highlife music played. She turned around and saw more people emerging from the mist. She stepped closer to Chichi, feeling like an intruder. “Maybe I should just go home,” she whispered. She thought about the monster again and cursed.
    “Huh? Why?” Chichi said, looking surprised.
    “I’m not supposed to be here.”
    Chichi laughed. “You’ve got over a hundred chittim in your purse! Trust me, you’re very welcome here!”
    She took Sunny’s hand and they followed Orlu and Sasha. There were a few people ahead of them. She stopped. Iroko leaves were falling around her, and as she watched, one of the leaf piles took a humanoid shape. It sloppily cartwheeled over to a man and fell apart, burying the man in its green leaves. As the leaves covered him, the man looked more annoyed than afraid. When the leaf thing took a humanoid shape again, a gun was disappearing into its chest.
    “ Biko, please!” the man begged, holding his hands up and smiling, embarrassed.