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The River Keeps Her Name: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Power of Belonging
Paperback
Series: The Palmwine Fables, Book 1
Currently unavailable to order
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ISBN13: 9798186840640
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 34
Weight: 0.13
Height: 0.07 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 34
Weight: 0.13
Height: 0.07 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The river does not forget. People forget-they forget names, forget promises, and forget the taste of the water that first fed them. But the river remembers everything it has ever touched, and it touched Ijeoma before she could walk.
The year Ijeoma turned six, the Osimiri River rose without rain and swallowed the footbridge whole.
Nobody in Amaefula could explain it. The sky had been clear for a week, the kind of hard blue that made old women suck their teeth and say the weather was hiding something. Then, on a Tuesday morning, while the market women were laying out cassava and the children were chasing a half-flat football along the bank, the water rose up like a hand and pulled the wooden bridge apart plank by plank, the way a person might pull apart bread to share it.
Ijeoma was standing in the middle of it when it happened.
She would not remember, later, the details her mother remembered - the scream that tore out of Mama Nkechi's throat, the way the fishermen dropped their nets and ran, the way Chief Eze's father, old Papa Eze, had stood very still at the water's edge and said, in a voice gone strange and small, Ah. So it is time again. What Ijeoma would remember - the only thing she would ever be sure was not a dream stitched together afterward from other people's telling - was the water closing over her head like a door, and then the cold, and then the woman.
The woman had hair like a river at night, black and moving even when nothing else moved. Her skin held its own light, the way the water sometimes did in the hour just after the sun went down, when you couldn't say if it was reflecting the sky or making its own. She did not look upon Ijeoma with menace. She looked upon her the way Mama Nkechi looked at a fish she was deciding whether to keep or throw back - assessing, patient, already halfway to a decision.
Small one, the woman said, though her mouth may not have moved at all; the words arrived the way cold arrives, from everywhere at once. You have your mother's face and your mother's debt. I could take payment now and be done with waiting. But you are not yet a debt worth collecting. Grow first. Become someone worth the river's patience.
Then there was a hand at Ijeoma's ankle - not pulling her down, but pushing her up, up through water gone suddenly warm and full of light, up until her face broke the surface and Obinna, nine years old and already too brave for his own good, hauled her out by the wrist onto the muddy bank, both of them coughing up river water and fright in equal measure.
They pulled the rest of the bridge apart that week and did not rebuild it for three years. The old people said the river had been owed something and had only been reminded of the debt, not paid it. The young people said the current had shifted, that was all, these things happened.
Ijeoma did not tell anyone about the woman in the water. Not because she was told to keep silent. She simply understood, the way children understand certain things before they have words for them, that some doors, once opened, are better kept between yourself and the one who opened them.
It would be twenty years before the river came to collect. GET A COPY NOW !!!!!!!!
Ijeoma was standing in the middle of it when it happened.
She would not remember, later, the details her mother remembered - the scream that tore out of Mama Nkechi's throat, the way the fishermen dropped their nets and ran, the way Chief Eze's father, old Papa Eze, had stood very still at the water's edge and said, in a voice gone strange and small, Ah. So it is time again. What Ijeoma would remember - the only thing she would ever be sure was not a dream stitched together afterward from other people's telling - was the water closing over her head like a door, and then the cold, and then the woman.
The woman had hair like a river at night, black and moving even when nothing else moved. Her skin held its own light, the way the water sometimes did in the hour just after the sun went down, when you couldn't say if it was reflecting the sky or making its own. She did not look upon Ijeoma with menace. She looked upon her the way Mama Nkechi looked at a fish she was deciding whether to keep or throw back - assessing, patient, already halfway to a decision.
Small one, the woman said, though her mouth may not have moved at all; the words arrived the way cold arrives, from everywhere at once. You have your mother's face and your mother's debt. I could take payment now and be done with waiting. But you are not yet a debt worth collecting. Grow first. Become someone worth the river's patience.
Then there was a hand at Ijeoma's ankle - not pulling her down, but pushing her up, up through water gone suddenly warm and full of light, up until her face broke the surface and Obinna, nine years old and already too brave for his own good, hauled her out by the wrist onto the muddy bank, both of them coughing up river water and fright in equal measure.
They pulled the rest of the bridge apart that week and did not rebuild it for three years. The old people said the river had been owed something and had only been reminded of the debt, not paid it. The young people said the current had shifted, that was all, these things happened.
Ijeoma did not tell anyone about the woman in the water. Not because she was told to keep silent. She simply understood, the way children understand certain things before they have words for them, that some doors, once opened, are better kept between yourself and the one who opened them.
It would be twenty years before the river came to collect. GET A COPY NOW !!!!!!!!
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