If they asked me when everything started, I would say it was the night after she had Somkene. In the weeks before that night, she had looked forward to having her child, decorating the nursery with different shades of pink teddy bears, the bed smelling of baby oil and powder. But when I brought Somkene, wrapped in a plump, white shawl, her face registered disappointment.
“Sister, meet Somkene, our beautiful baby girl.”
She waved me aside and turned her face to the wall. She was supposed to take the crying baby from my arms, cuddle her closely to her gorged breasts, and sing those nursery rhymes she had planned to sing after birth. When she finally took the baby, she held her with a distant, tasteless look on her face, seemingly frustrated by her sore breasts, before tossing her back to me like a porcelain doll.
“Do you think it is because of Chidozie?” Mama queried.
Though Chi-Chi had a difficult pregnancy, it could not be because of her deadbeat baby daddy, Chidozie, the sweet-talking businessman who had promised her everything in the world only to abscond when he heard about her pregnancy, closed down his shop in Ogwu market and never returned any messages or calls. She had seen such men as weak, men who wanted the easy way out, who drove themselves through legs without any form of protection and rejected the consequences later. The baby screamed for the warmth of her mother’s body or breasts but found none. Chi-Chi neither asked for her nor cuddled her weeks after we were discharged from Central Hospital, Ogwu.
The day Chi-Chi finally reached out for her, I placed the baby in her hands.
“She looks like Chidozie,” she muttered. “She cheated me.” She smiled, looking at Somkene absent – mindedly. A whole nine months for you to come out with his coffee brown eyes and lush lips.”
“Leave us, I want to bond with my child.”
I swelled and deflated with relief before leaving the room to hunt for scent leaves that Mama would later use to make her pepper soup. I was barely finished with harvesting the greens when I heard screams and shouts from the compound. I looked up at the cause of the commotion and saw Chi-Chi on the balcony, baby in hands, smiling. It was a strange smile, the kind one wears before doing something regrettable. The baby shrieked as if she had a premonition of what her mother wanted to do. My mother was on the ground, tumbling in the dirt with her kiri kiri star wrapper.
“Chi-Chi, nwa m, biko, come down, don’t do this.”
Everyone was begging her.
I could have slapped myself for leaving her in the room alone with the baby. She wanted to kill Somkene, not bond with her. Praying for a miracle that slowed time, I tiptoed upstairs to the balcony, sneaked up behind her, yanked her back, and grabbed the baby from her hands. She fell hard to the ground.
“Chi Chi, ara o na agba gi?! Are you mad? What kind of mother thinks of doing this to her child?” were the questions asked when everyone gathered in the sitting room, heads bowed like we were mourning.
Chi-Chi just stared into the emptiness, her eyes just as bland.
After that day, my sister was given a new moniker: the suffix of onye ara was added to her name and I was christened, “Nnenne, nwanne Chi-Chi, onye ara” – Nnenne, the sister of Chi-Chi the mad woman. Anytime I was coming back from the market, little children would trail me, clapping, making up songs referencing my sister until I would turn and give them a hot pursuit.
Chi-Chi was kept in solitary confinement where she crept further back into her shell, saying few words and staring out the window towards the clump of bushes. I entered from time to time to take the dirty plates by her bedside to wash, change the sheets and pour hot water for Mama to bathe her.
“How is my child?” She startled me. Ever since the incident, she hardly talked about her child or anything else.
‘She is healthy,” I replied her. “We are giving her infant formula.”
She looked at her breasts bloated with milk and sighed.
“How big is she?”
“Six months big’ I replied, so much time had passed.
“Sometimes I hear her screams from here and my breasts become very full and sore. From the time she was conceived, she has caused me nothing but pain. Chidozie, the man I thought loved me, abandoned me to my fate to eat my own thoughts till my blood pressure spiked. She took my life when I was just finishing school. I had to keep everything on pause for her, yet she keeps crying. Sometimes, I want to use a pillow and stifle her forever, but I am not capable of those dark thoughts that that woman is asking me to do.”
My eyes bulged out at the mention of “that woman” till I was sure they were as round as akara balls.
“Which woman, Sister Chi-Chi?” I enquired, and she raised her hands slowly and dramatically to a dark corner. My eyes followed her hands, hoping to see whom she spoke of. But nothing was there, just a wig stand with her brunette wig that hadn’t been worn in months. Was the silhouette making her imagine there was someone else in the room?
“She is not here now but she comes sometimes. She wears a faded jean skirt with floral shirt that billows in the wind and an eighties-themed wig, ruffled and stringy. She is the only one who understands me and advises me on what to do.”
I hurriedly went to Mama and told her what I heard.
“This is where Prophet Ukoh comes in. Before Chi-Chi will wake up one day, tears her clothes and enter Eke Uboh.”
I knew Prophet Ukoh, the tall man with an intimidating physique, dressed in white from head to toe with well- cut Afro hair and wide nostrils that flares out when he commands the evil spirits to come out and drown in our Osimmiri River. He came with a procession of white-clad zealous believers tethered to him by an invisible string and latching onto each word with a feverish Amen! He danced around Chi-Chi for some time, as if trying to inspect the demon he was expunging and group it accordingly.
“This one is strong,” he mumbled and his interpreter chorused in Igbo.
He reeled off, telling Mama that Chi-Chi was suffering a possession from the ghost of a woman who drowned her babies when she was alive and had taken her own life, too. The woman often visited women who recently gave birth and had access to those with porous spiritual fields. The woman had ruptured Chi-Chi’s mind. He mentioned some items that they would buy for him to banish the woman and rebuild and fortify Chi-Chi’s spiritual field once again. I heard words like pure alkaline water, raven’s eggs, red and white candles and aromatic incense.
“The alkaline water will neutralize the damage caused by the evil spirit, the raven’s eggs is to make sacrifices to appease her, the red and white candles is to build a protective wall around her while we carry out the rituals and the incense is used to invoke and welcome good spirits to replace the bad one’
Mama set out to gather the items requested by the prophet. On the morning of the first ritual, we walked to Chi-Chi’s room and met an empty bed with the bed sheets wrapped neatly and piled in a corner. The window was open and the wind floated the curtains. I rushed to it, screaming her name, but no one replied and my words reverberated in the chilly breeze.
“I told you the woman has been pulling her into her world. Now she is gone. We have to make offerings for her safe return instead,” Prophet Ukoh spoke heavily, shaking his head as my mother rolled on the floor and Somkene joined in the confusion, crying her tiny lungs out. I fell to my knees and wept.
We never saw Chi-Chi again. It was only when I entered school I started hearing things like “postpartum depression” and linked it to what might have happened to my sister. It was the metaphor for the monster under her bed; the one that convinced her to eat her young. I realized that we had stigmatized my sister without knowing her full story. Somkene calls my mother “Mama” and she is the only living reminder of the beauty that sprouted amidst the sadness and chaos of our home. That sunflower that wasn’t stifled by thorny weeds.
I still say prayers and book masses for Chi-Chi’s safe return and her soul. Maybe she would change her mind one day and appear at our gate. We could only hope.
Udochukwu Chidera also known as Chidera is a Nigerian writer and pharmacist of Igbo descent. Chi Deraa won the second prize in the 2024 Dissolution Climate Change Essay Contest organized by the Litfest Bergen Norway. She was shortlisted for the 2024 AKACHI CHUKWUEMEKA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE. She was a recipient of the 2024 Illino Residency. Her poem has also made it to the PIN Best Poems of 2024 Anthology. She also won the 2024 Factory HQ’s TV series Short Story contest. She won second prize in the 2023 AS ABUGI PRIZE and was a finalist 2023 E.C MICHEALS SHORT STORY PRIZE. She took the third position in the 2023 BKPW Poetry Contest. She was also shortlisted for the 2023 The Green We Left Behind CNF contest organized by the Arts Lounge Literary Magazine. She won the 2022 Movement of the People Poetry Contest, the 2022 Shuzia Songs of Zion Poetry Contest, the 2022 Shuzia Prose Contest. She is a contributor/ forthcoming at IHRAF Thorn, Tears, and Treachery Anthology for the Sudanese War, Non-Profit Quarterly Magazine, Love and Other Stupid Things Anthology, Fortunate Traveller, Indaba Bafazi SFF Anthology Tabono Anthology, Tush Magazine, 2022 Chinua Achebe Poetry/Essay Anthology, Conscio Magazine, Ngiga Review, World Voices Magazine, Valiant Scribe, Our Stories Defined Anthology, Writer’s Hangout Initiative, Arts Lounge Literary Magazine, amongst others.