Embers

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Embers
• Adaeze Elechi (bio)

Nnedi returned home seven years after her own death. She arrived on foot with the sun rising behind her, luminous and deep orange in a lilac sky. Her mother Kainebi was already awake and tending to the back garden of her cottage when she heard what sounded like thunder in the distance. But this was not the season for thunder or rain or anything that came down from the sky except sunbeams and moonlight dappled by a haze of dust. She registered this deep rumbling as an omen as Nnedi knocked loudly three times.

Kainebi was not expecting a guest, and certainly not her daughter whose bones she had buried years ago. So, when she opened the door to find Nnedi standing on her porch, wearing the delicate cream lace gown she wore the night she died, Kainebi’s knees buckled. She kicked the door shut from the floor and scurried away from it, covering her mouth with her soil-coated hands to catch her screams. And her heart, as weak as it was from endless grieving, began racing and snatching her breath. Scrambling around her house, she locked the back door and shuttered the windows.

If this were seven years ago, one week or even a month after the incident, Kainebi could have believed that Nnedi’s death had been a bad dream and her return would have been like waking up. She would have engulfed her daughter in an embrace without a second thought. But this was not seven years ago. Time had passed, and in that time, disbelief curdled into desperation, then calcified into a hard-shelled sadness. She could not bring herself to touch the door handle. Instead, she wheezed the name of Jesus again and again and clapped her hands over her eyes.

Kainebi remained on the floor for hours, for much of the afternoon, knees drawn tightly to her body while the sun peaked and then began to set, Nnedi’s undulating breath on the other side of the door harmonizing with the sounds of the breeze whispering through the leaves in her garden. Was Nnedi’s return not what she had pleaded for, wailed and wept for? Yet today, as her old prayer was answered to near-exact detail, it was only a choking fear that wracked her.

But what if...what if...what if God had indeed shifted the laws of nature just for her? Seven years of praying, of begging, of anguish.

What if?

The tangerine dusk now leaked into the foyer through gaps where the door didn’t meet its frame. It cast a thin, crooked, fiery rectangle around Kainebi.

What if...

She hushed her thoughts and sharpened her ears. What if... [End Page 86]

The only thing now standing between her and the answer to her supplications, the only thing now separating her and her only child, was a door. No longer the rigid, impenetrable shell of death, but one wooden door and one unturned doorknob.

What if...what if...

If this were a dream, she wondered, where impossible things became as easy as one inhale and one exhale, what would she do?

She stirred from the ground, hauled herself onto her unstable feet, and feeling as though she were floating, made her way to the door and pressed her ear against it. Silence. She gripped the handle, half expecting to see nothing on the other side but dust rising in the breeze. She carefully cracked the door. There was Nnedi, standing where Kainebi had left her, now holding her breath.

They marveled at each other, soaking in the ways time had changed them: Kainebi, already a small woman, had lost inches from her breadth and height. Her eyes had receded into hollows, and lines now decorated her face—each one marking a question asked to God. One more was now forming between her furrowed brows. And Nnedi? Time had not touched her. She was tall, sloe-eyed, and broad like her grandmother. Her skin was still like smooth mahogany, she was still a very young woman, and her hair was threaded into long plaits that stood tall around her head in a field of...