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Heavy footsteps thudding against the cold stone disrupts the thick silence lying across the hallways like an all encompassing fog. The air is heavy with whispered confessions and crippling dread. Unbreathable. Toxic to the lungs, like petrol to the water. The ghost of unheard screams, pleads, unanswered prayers, echoing against the nude walls. Like a phantom, she dances barefoot, as if to ward off evil. Heavy footsteps against cold stone. Bare skin against chill air. Deep voice, scraped, unused, singing angelical. Sweet. Pained. A body that doesn't match the soul according to those who watch, but still she dances, still she lives, no matter how much they claim its madness. She knows the truth. And so she dances, in circles she dances the length of the hallway, and she dances it back. Like a vengeful wraith refusing to let go. She dances, like she knows nothing else, because perhaps she doesn't, maybe all she remembers is the thumping of her feet on the warm ground, the sun drawing shapes across her face. Drums. Chanting. Gods. Maybe that's all she knows anymore. How could she ever let go? Knowing that it's not madness, knowing how the sun feels against her bare skin when her feet dance drawing shapes on the dirt. So she doesn't. And she teaches them all to dance. She tells them stories about her ma, who taught her to dance, who knew the truth about her, and cradled her. Tells them about her pa who was a sorcerer. About the red stones she learnt to dance on. Men standing atop long wooden shoes, trailing down streets. Carnivals. Rum. Warm sand against the cold waves. She tells them all she knows, so they know the truth as well.
That they belong.
That they're not broken.
That they have a place in this world.
And the others will call her mad, and laugh, and leave her, and their captors try to kill her. But she's guarded by her spirits. They can't touch her. They can't break her.
They stop trying.
Last who dared to take away what’s hers lost it all. Lost it all. Lost all he had, and then some more. And when the sickness came he had nothing left to live for.
And maybe the others have to start believing her.
Eventually they have to let her go, there's no pathology, no symptoms for her madness, other than her joy in the face of oppression, nothing but the wishes of her spirits.
She knows the truth regardless.
Is it madness to know who you truly are? She knows she was made in the image of her gods, they are her, and she is them.
Rum, sand, brown dirt. Drums. Calling. Voices singing. Calling names in elder tongues. Possession, and wooden necklaces. Flamboyant skirts twirling in plazas, the wearers as barefeet as she, paying no attention to the sun boring down on their dark skins.
She goes home. Home to a country full of artisans, to white sanded beaches, and warm rum, her handcrafted leather sandals in one hand. She goes home like she never left, and they welcome her back with open arms and a cup of dark coffee like she’s been here all along and not gone to hell and back.
And she returns two years later, to the sterile white halls heavy with the smell of industrial disinfectant barely covering the salty stench of tears and the iron of blood. And she's changed. Remade by her gods in their image. Swaying hips, and brown braids falling to the small of her back, intricate designs on her scalp, charms clanking together when she steps confidently down the sickening halls that saw her dance. High heels, and beautiful patterns covering her swelling breasts, colored like the earth that gave birth to her. Beads on her waist. Flowing blue reaching her knees. Green and yellow still adorns her right wrist. Rings on every finger like nothing they’d ever seen before. Un-uniform, some chunky and vibrant, shining like the sea she left behind, some thin and silver. But perhaps that's their divergence is it’s beauty.
And Gods if she's gorgeous. But she says her beauty was never on the outside. That to measure it for what can be seen now, insults her. Perhaps she knows something the others don't, perhaps she knew it all along, perhaps she learnt it while she was gone. She speaks like she carries the secrets of the universe etched in her dark skin, like the scars that litter her body. Like her ancestor’s spirituality opened doors for her that most will never even know exist.
Maybe she does.
Maybe it did.
No one else will ever know.
Paper in one hand, pen in the other. She shuts them down for their crimes against humanity. They can't run, and they can't hide. Not from a woman with the ancient knowledge of an entire god made civilization blessed with powers so beyond the comprehension of others that they were labeled demonic once, and their beliefs outlawed. Unanswered prayers echo off the nude walls, chasing her as her heels clack down the hallways, and back up. And where she goes they follow, because maybe someone's gods finally listened after all. Unanswered prayers finally freed from their binds of anguish by dark skin, and tight coils maneuvered into braids underneath the Gele she wears on her last day in the god forsaken facility.
And everyone who banished their kin to that hell on earth and then mourned them as if they’d died, and then again when they did, killed by the decisions their alleged caretakers made, were left to face the horrifying reality than it was to see what they’d really done, but for once without their rose tinted glasses painting their abuse as care.
The building went down, and where it’d once been plants refused to grow. For years a deserted patch of dirt remained in the shape of that monstrous place. That was the last time she visited the place; a few of the people she’d met there went with her, and they joked amongst themselves about being ghosts haunting their place of death. They joked about the grief of their families of blood mourning the distorted image they had of who’d they been. Because their true family had been built by bonds of friendship, shared pain, and acceptance. Love of the strongest kind.
She sat in the middle of the ground with a little plant, and she dug into the dirt with her bare hands, and she planted that little gift of nature in a dry land plagued by vengeful ghosts and evil spirits; heavy with the dried blood once spilt above it.
Years later tall bright yellow flowers resembling candle flames rose, improbable, in arid land that did not welcome it. As perseverant as they'd all been. And the air felt lighter to breathe when the ghosts had finally moved on.
