The Twelve Blackened Slippers

Siobhan Ekeh

K ara’s girls are disappearing and she’s just about had enough of it.

Well, okay, to be fair to them, they always end up being right where they’re supposed to be, but Kara knows, she knows when she leaves their room after tucking them in at night, even when she locks the door, that they get away somehow.

“It was the shoes that tipped me off,” she tells Yira, who also tends not to be in the same place from one second to the next, but that’s more a mental condition than a physical one. “In the mornings there’s started to be this black sludge caked over their outsoles. I keep washing it off and it leaves a stain. Then, the next morning it’s back again. What the fuck, right? They’re so sinister sometimes, those three. I get the creeps when they all look at me at once. Whenever I ask them a question they just laugh.”

Yira smiles sympathetically. She’s trying to read and wishes her sister would quit complaining. Kara should just be grateful those girls are so well-mannered and academically successful. Demanding that they be completely unsinister in addition to all that seems unrealistic. “We were like that at their age, too. Secretive.”

“You were. I was normal.”

Kara is still normal. A successful modelling career in her early twenties set her up for a very regular American life: a mid-century Victorian home retrofitted as an open-floor modern farmhouse, a crusty white terrier, three daughters (which isn’t as normal as one daughter and one son, but hey, she tried her best), a husband who manages data or something, and a second career as a social media lifestyle content creator.

Kara isn’t really cut from a motherly cloth, if there is such a thing, and she does find the girls hard to stomach at this age. But up until now she’s enjoyed her neat little life almost to the point of excess. Maybe one person should not get to enjoy so many things to such an extravagant degree.

Kara stretches across the couch in her white Lulu Lemon tracksuit with a glass of chilled rosé and considers her less-than-normal counterpart. “You’re going to have to do me a favor, Yira.”

“Am I?”

“The girls trust you. You’re like one of them. They look up to you, for whatever reason.” It baffles Kara that young women would rather take cues from an unemployed spinster with a failed fine arts career than a successful, happily married businesswoman, but far be it from her to disallow her daughters from any kind of ambition they might stretch their willowy necks towards, even if she doesn’t understand it herself.

The girls must see themselves in the melancholy Yira projects across her presence in America. The family was forced to flee the Niger Delta when Kara and Yira were only teens, arriving with nothing left to lose except each other. Since then, Kara has thrived exactly where she was re-planted glad to shake free the slick of that polluted land, whereas Yira never fully recovered from that initial uprooting. The loss of the land, the farm. And most of all, the loss of Kisi, the missing piece without whom this new place could never become home to Yira.

The girls, yes, they are like Yira. Disbelonged. Ghostly. “You’ll find out where they’re going, won’t you?”

Yira closes her book. She’s long been a harbor for her nieces’ secrets, some big, some small. Usually, Kara doesn’t ask what the girls are up to, so Yira doesn’t tell. But now… well. Her allegiance to the girls can’t surpass that which she retains towards her older sister. Yira has always lived in Kara’s house, has always eaten Kara’s food. Kara asks for almost nothing in return, because she knows Yira has almost nothing to give her, but also because she wants for nothing. Now, for once, she wants something she can’t have. Something Yira may be able to obtain. “I’ll try,” says Yira. “No promises.”

That night, Yira reads to her nieces before bed. Although the house is massive, the girls prefer to sleep in the same room, three beds arranged in an asterisk at the center. Yira sits in the triangle between the beds. Osila lies on her back, converting Yira’s words to images on the ceiling, Nua unravels a loose thread on her nightgown sleeve and forgets to listen, and Lera reads several lines ahead over Yira’s shoulder. Yira closes the book before the chapter is done and all three roll onto their stomachs to fix her with a six-eyed glare.

“Girls,” says Yira. “Your mother is concerned about the state of your shoes. She’d like to know why they’re so dirty.”

“Concerned?”

“If she’d like to know then—”

“—she should really just ask.”

Yira has grown used to this, all three of them talking as if projecting their voices into each other’s mouths, one moving lips while the sound comes from another direction. She can see why Kara finds it off-putting. “She says you all laugh at her when she asks questions.”

“She asks so strangely—”

“—well, funnily, it’s funny—”

“—how she seems afraid of the answer.”

“It’s rude to laugh at your mother,” Yira says. “Anyhow, she buys you such nice shoes. You ought to take better care of them.”

“The shoes, who cares about stupid shoes.” This one has come from Lera, squarely. “We have a million pairs each.”

“Okay, fine. The shoes aren’t really the problem,” Yira admits. “Where have you been going at night? You girls know you aren’t allowed out after dark.”

“Oh, yes, well—”

“—you’ll be happy to hear—”

“—it isn’t dark where we go.”

“You should come along, in fact!”

“Auntie, you should—”

“—you’d like it there.”

Yira flushes, flattered to have been asked in spite of herself. “Well, if you insist.”

The girls share a circling grin and spring forth from their beds to don their stained slippers. They coalesce chain-linked across the small bathroom adjoined to their bedroom. Yira finds herself across this chain in three links, one to each girl, and has only one free limb, a left leg which feels abandoned. Lera, the right arm of this big new body, plugs the bath and runs the water. The tub fills, a rising mirror, revealing inch by inch the faces, chins, and necks of a four-headed girl.

“Oh, this is good, I think…”

“…yeah, very…”

“…symmetrical, right?”

The girls spring a leak of giggles as the tub fills to the very brim, a skin of clinging molecules sealing the water inside.

“What are we laughing about?” Yira asks.

“Oh, not about anything,” says Osila.

The tub full, the girls fall forward, or maybe just one does and drags the rest. Yira hardly has the chance to take a deep breath before her head breaks the surface.

The mirror repeats, surface and bottom, a pane of glass through which to shatter again and again, upside right then right side down. Yira sees herself beneath and above herself. She looks surprised, and the girls look pleased, amused even.

By virtue of the girls landing on their feet, Yira also lands upright, dragged along out of the water and into a gentle dawn. Water streams from her hair and shoulders and drops with gentle reverberations into the surface of the river around her knees.

The river, the river, the river. Yira knows this river. This is the river that ran along the farmland of her childhood, where her mother scrubbed dirt stains from playclothes, where her cousins crouched and waited stone-like for fish to fill their nets. That river was subsumed decades ago by thousands of barrels of spilled oil. That river grew a sheen of fuel, caught fire and burned for years, taking with it almost everything Yira had ever held dear. The girls break their chain and Yira falls with nothing to hold her upright. The river accepts her into its shallow embrace, and as the surface closes over her again she leans her cheek close to its silty chest. She closes her eyes.

Something touches her nose and Yira opens her eyes to find her own face doubled before her as if she’d pressed her forehead to a mirror: dark skin, round cheeks, twelve shiny braids buoying up to the surface. Yira sputters out of the water and the other person does too, but she is laughing where Yira is almost choking. Yira steps back and the other girl leans closer, squinting. “Mama, is that you? You’re here, I knew you would come!”

“Kisi?” Yira stumbles back, unnerved, because she has seen Kisi many times since her sister’s death, but never so clearly defined as she sees her now: solid as gold, scarred on her forehead where their father once hit her with a stone for stealing sugar from the kitchen. Their noses had touched – Kisi is no apparition, she is so solid that when she reaches for Yira’s wrist, Yira cannot get away.

“It’s me,” she says. “Yira.”

“Yira?” Kisi looks her over and starts to smile. “It is, isn’t it? You’ve gotten old.”

“And you haven’t.” Yira doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She opens her arms and her sister falls into them. No, Kisi hasn’t aged a day. Her skin remains dark and smooth as tourmaline, her hair black as a smoke cloud where Yira’s has gone rainstorm silver.

Kisi pulls back, her smile traded for wide-eyed concern. “Why are you here? You haven’t…?”

“No, no. I’m…” Yira can’t bring herself to say alive, to imply that Kisi is in fact dead. She looks around but doesn’t see her nieces. “Kara’s daughters brought me here.”

“Oh. Those girls.” Kisi presses her lips together. “I see them sometimes.”

“You do? Have you spoken to them?”

“They don’t like to talk to me.” Kisi points to the water’s surface. Instead of her own reflection, Yira sees her three nieces, floating lazily with their hands cuffed around each other’s wrists. “They don’t want to hear what I try to tell them.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I’ve tried to warn them, and I’ll warn you now.” Kisi holds onto Yira hard, her gaze becoming intense. “You cannot stay here. The way you think of this place, how you remember it, is not the way it is.”

“What do you mean, Kisi?”

“The sky is blue, the water is clear, the sun is shining, for you.” Kisi shivers. “But after dark… this is a terrible place. The sky crumbles. The water turns to poison. The fire ignites again and again and again.”

“That sounds horrible. I wish I could take you back with me.”

Kisi pulls Yira down into the water again. “I’ll show you.” She submerges and takes her sister with her.

O nce again Yira is enveloped by the river of her childhood, the unseen shape of the memories she re-inhabits through dreams, drawings, and retelling. The green of this water is the scaly surface into which Yira’s grandfather sank fishing nets over the side of his creaky old plank canoe. The softness of this silt is the finishing line for Yira, Kara, and Kisi’s swimming races, which Kisi always won thanks to her long legs. These raffia palms are glorious baskets of shade under which so many hours of sleep slipped away…

Until the fish began washing up dead.

Until the silt turned black.

Until the raffia palms wilted and crumbled.

Until fires bloomed from the spilled oil.

The embrace of the river tightens to a strangle, and although Yira opens her eyes she sees nothing. The brilliant crystal of the water has gone opaque. An acrid taste fills her mouth and the heaviness of this new, black water crushes her.

Six strong hands dredge Yira’s body from the river bed, shaking and prodding her. The girls thump Yira’s back and a flood of water projects from her mouth. Eyes still stinging and blurry, she can’t make out if the water she spits is black or clear.

“Stand up, Yira…”

“…you aren’t a fish, you know…”

“…and even if you want to be…”

“…you haven’t got any gills.”

Yira blinks and finds the river once again beautiful, water going periwinkle under the closing eye of the sun. The raffia palms rustle together like plotting sets of hands and the silt feels soft as powdered sugar under her toes. Kisi is gone. The three girls shade Yira from the sun like the walls of a tent.

“Do you like it here, Yira?” Osila asks, brushing some silt from her aunt’s cheek.

“We thought you would.”

“We hope you do.”

“I do,” says Yira. “It’s just like—”

“Home?”

“Yes, we think so too…”

“…just like the home we’ve always wanted.”

Just like the home Yira’s always wanted to return to.

“We’d like to live here forever,” says Osila, her mouth only moving in her reflection.

“We’d like this to be our home,” Lera clarifies.

“You could stay here with us, dear Yira,” Nua offers.

“Yes, you could…”

“…that would be nice. Very, you know…”

“…symmetrical, right?”

Stay here. Forever. That’s what Yira’s always wanted, isn’t it? This is where she has lived all her life, anyway. She’s never really been anywhere else. Her heart hasn’t. Her mind hasn’t, even if her body has.

“But…” she says, Kisi’s words ringing in her ears.

“But?”

“But.”

“But!”

“…but this is a place that no longer exists.”

“Well, I mean, existing…”

“…what really exists? Nothing much…”

“…or nothing good, anyway.”

This, Yira can develop no argument against. So, the girls pass the evening playing and splashing in the water while Yira submerges her head again and again, searching for evidence of decay.

When the sun finally dips to the horizon, the girls reassemble, easy as stitches knitted by three quick twists of a needle. Yira hesitates. “Have you ever stayed after dark?” she asks. The sky darkens to cobalt.

“Oh, no,” says one girl, and in the waning light it might be any of them, or all three.

“Kara wouldn’t like that, would she,” says another.

“No, she’d surely send us off…”

“…to some kind of boarding school, I think…”

“…the military, maybe…”

“…and we’ve already been gone too long.”

“Hm. Alright.” Yira drags herself in a slow circle, stalling a minute more as the sun slips behind the trees.

“We should go,” says one girl, nervousness creeping in.

“Yes, just one second…” The last of the light fades, the darkness turning the river into an inkwell. In lieu of a flashlight to inspect the water, Yira opts to put her head under and take another taste. But just as she starts to submerge, Yira finds herself looped into the pattern the girls have made, arm over arm, leg under leg, and has her balance pulled out from under her by a great synchronized dive. This time, the water is no mirror, only the black of dreamless sleep, which breaks solid and painless over Yira’s head like a prop vase.

Yira and her nieces break in four again on the bathroom floor. The girls scurry like roaches. Six ruined slippers swell together by the door and delicate feet tap three times each across the carpet, and disappear into the welcoming pockets of spotless white sheets.

Yira picks up her own slippers and switches on the bathroom light. She is clean, save for her feet. There is no mark where her cheek touched the bottom of the oily river. Her slippers have taken on a slick, black carapace that comes away on her fingers but leaves dark stains behind.

It’s just dawn now. The softest blue light presses around the corners of the bedroom curtains. The girls have gone invisible beneath their sheets, wrapped up like embalmed bodies. Yira turns off the bathroom light and cannot stop thinking, You could stay here with us, dear Yira…

When Yira opens the bedroom door, Kara is there with coffee and an eager strain in her eye. She didn’t sleep a wink last night – how could she? She spent the night scrolling through New-England-Chic dinner party concepts on Pinterest, barely able to contain herself from bursting into her daughters’ room, demanding to see whatever Yira was being let in on. It’s eating her now, the seconds of Yira’s silence prickling away like hours.

“So?” she demands. Her gaze catches on Yira’s dirty slippers. “Tell me.”

Her sister accepts the coffee and beckons her to the kitchen, where she begins making an infuriatingly slow pot of oatmeal. The oats have been boiled, cooled, consumed, and the dishes done before Yira finally speaks.

“They don’t go away to disturb you, your girls,” she says.

“Oh, don’t they?”

“No. They aren’t troublemakers. They only go out looking for some kind of peace.”

“Yira, I’ve been plenty patient with you. Quit it with the riddles and tell me where they took you.”

“I’d like to tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Oh, Yira.” Kara sighs deeply, annoyance rushing in where anticipation had been buoying her up all night. “If you want me to believe you, then say something believable. I’m begging you.”

Yira bristles with indignity – her sister has never believed in any world that isn’t the one she inhabits. That’s why the world didn’t end for Kara when she was forced to leave home. For Kara, that world, home, ceased to be real the moment she left it.

Yira opens her mouth, unsure if she’s about to tell her sister the unbelievable truth, but she never has to make that decision. The apparition of two out of three nieces cuts her short. Osila and Lera appear in the door frame full-moon-eyed, casting frightened glances over each other’s shoulders.

Kara shudders, a startled hand pressed over her heart. “Girls, you should really try making some noise before you come into a room. Footsteps or something.”

The girls only look at Yira.

“Something’s wrong—”

“—yes, something must have…”

And there is no third sinister shadow to finish the sentence, so there is no way to know what must have happened except to follow the girls down the hall.

At their bedroom, Osila and Lera stand in the door frame but won’t go inside.

Kara shoves past everyone the way she always has whenever crises occur, whenever a shoulder has come out of place at a gymnastics meet, whenever a hand has slipped from monkey bars, whenever a cough has turned into a choke. She is there in three steps, down on her knees at Nua’s bedside, ready to comfort, ready to fix.

But.

It isn’t Nua in this bed at all, but someone who should not – cannot – be there. From Nua’s pillow blinks a face that seizes Kara’s heart mid-beat.

Yira comes up behind and freezes. “Kisi?”

In the doorway, Yira’s nieces are reduced to nonverbal hysterics without their third component. As if some vital cord has been removed from their throats. As if it was only from watching Nua talk that they’d ever been able to figure out how to form words at all.

“Kisi, what are you doing here?” Yira asks.

Kisi sits up in Nua’s bed, looking pleased. And it is Kisi, for sure: twelve shiny braids, sweet round cheeks, glittering eyelids, a dot of brown in the white of her eye. Yira runs her finger along that sugar-thief scar on her forehead to be certain.

Kara speaks to her daughters but can’t look away from Kisi. “Where is your sister?”

The faces of the girls clearly scream, Wouldn’t we like to know!

Kara is too engrossed in the details of Kisi’s face to see her daughters. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“I’ve missed you, little sister.”

“You’re here,” says Kara. “How are you here? You’re dead.”

“Oh yes, I was.” Kisi nods gravely. “I was in a terrible, terrible place. I’m so glad to be out of there.”

Although this older generation of sisters refuse to look at the younger ones behind them, they can all hear a sound fighting to get out of those two throats. It sounds like a choke, like Nuh… Nuh…

Yira speaks for them. “Nua. Where is Nua?”

Kisi blinks at her youngest sister. “She said she’d like to stay forever and you said you wished you could bring me back with you. So I thought…”

The two girls know now where the rest of them has gone, and they do not care one bit for confusion or begging. Their slippers are on and the bathroom door shut, leaving three sisters on one side and three on the other. The girls fill the tub and launch inside without a thought to the banging and shouting of their mother and aunt on the other side.

A nd yes, this time something is different about the water. It tastes acrid like gasoline and slides slick over their skin, collecting on eyelashes and clinging to arm hairs, sticking together lips and eyelids. Warm, crushing, it suffocates, and they sit up gasping for air that is hot as a furnace and no less acrid than the sludge they have crested out of. Osila drags black gunk from her eyelashes and finds their paradise ash-black, the water, the sky, the trees, all of it, coated in a sooty grime that fills her lungs and threatens to choke her on every breath.

There is no sun or moon. Just a great flare of orange rising to the east, boiling the water at the mouth of the river, painting a sickly brownish glow along the horizon. Beside her, Lera is a statue of black granite, no features, only oil.

Osila wipes her sister’s eyes and pulls her to her feet. The two cling to each other, wanting to call for Nua but afraid that to open their mouths would be to attract whatever demons might hide in the dark remnants of these burnt-up trees.

They trudge towards the sound of weeping – that is, toward the fire. The nearer they get, the hotter the fire breathes, the more stifling the scent of gasoline. The landscape quivers with heat.

By the bend in the river nearest to the fire, where the water is unbearably hot and the air unbreathable, where they cannot see the way ahead for the soot and waves of heat, is Nua, clawing for the bank of the river with panicked fingernails, but safety is just too high for her to reach. Her sisters grasp her with greedy hands and the three are sealed together again, ringed into a life buoy amongst themselves.

There is no talk of going home. What is home, anyway, except a place with no time, where any number of hours can pass with nothing to anchor them? That house and its claw-footed bathtub, the asterisk of their beds, their fading aunt, disinterested father, and concerned mother, is all the grayness of purgatory.

Yes, let those older sisters have it and each other, for all these ones care. Here, at least, in the sun there is paradise and in the fire there is Gehenna, somewhere to wail and sweat out the pain that plagues them always from the slightest distance. The pain that has always followed them out the corners of their eyes where they could never properly feel the burn of it.

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