She turned to Maya. “I’m going to tell a story—it’s a traditional ngano, and I’m a sarungano, a storyteller. You’ll be the audience and you’ll have to ask me questions when I stop, all right? And answer mine when I ask you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Maya said, and looked puzzled. “Is it like a spell?”
“It’s like a story,” Vimbai answered. “Ngano is how children learn.” She cleared her throat and started, the knife in her hand rising and falling in rhythm with her story.
“Who is the wisest animal in the forest?” Vimbai said.
Maya opened her mouth and laughed. Then said, “I don’t know. Who?”
“Is it a jaguar?” Her knife fell, leaving a long thin mark on the catfish’s smooth skin.
“No.”
The mark swelled with blood.
“Is it a baboon?” Another cut, crisscrossing the first at a sharp angle.
“No, it is not.” Even Maya fell under the spell of her rhythm and swayed along, and gave her answers in a singsong voice.
“Is it a hare?” The new cut fell, and the overall patter of crosshatching grew apparent to Vimbai.
Maya hesitated, and Vimbai shrugged at her, indicating the correct answer. “Maybe,” Maya said.
“Is it a tortoise?” The skin of the catfish was now developing a pattern of blood-stained, elongated rhombi.
“Yes?” Maya offered.
Vimbai nodded and smiled. “Go on, ask.”
“Why is it wise?” Maya asked.
“Because it does not chase after things.” Cut.
“Because it is satisfied with what it has.” Cut.
“Because it carries his house on his back and does not covet a new one.” Cut.
“He is never aggressive and yet he gets his way.” Nod to Maya.
“How?” Maya said.
The knife in Vimbai’s hand trembled and paused, raised over the devastation it had wrought—the skin of the man-fish was a pattern of bloodied diamonds, a horrible jester’s suit. “Because he knows that he already has everything he needs, and if he ever needs more, the creator will give him more. It is up to the Mwari, the creator, and the mhondoro, the tribal spirits, to give everyone what they need. Otherwise, the eyes grow greedy, the hands feel empty, and there’s never any satisfaction and no one is ever sated and happy with what they have.”
“Except the tortoise,” Maya offered, sounding more confident.
“Except the tortoise,” Vimbai agreed. “May the moon forever slosh in his belly.”
At her last words, the man-fish’s mouth snapped open—a dark tunnel of unquenched hunger—and he lunged, his jaws snapping shut just a hairbreadth away from Vimbai’s nose. She screamed out and jerked away, the hand holding the knife lashing out in a reflexively protective gesture.
Maya gasped nearby and out of a corner of her eye Vimbai caught a blur of motion as Maya struggled to her feet, as the man-fish slithered and snapped, trying to get to Vimbai’s soul, his evil reaching out in a final desperate gesture. Vimbai’s knife caught him across the throat, and the last cut, ragged and cruel, traced the pale skin below his jaw, carved away a good chunk of his snout.
The fish fell back, exhausted, the bloodied chunk of his face in Vimbai’s lap. She pushed him away, kicked his limp slippery body away from her, and struggled to catch her breath.
She dropped her hand with the knife down into her lap and looked at her handiwork. For a moment she worried that the man-fish would bleed to death, expire because of her incompetent magicking—and even he had tried to drown her not too long ago, even if he tried to steal her soul it would seem wrong to her, having killed someone who voluntarily went under her knife, preferring it to the needles of the wazimamoto and the eternal hunger of the cursed.
Then, the man-fish stirred, and the flow of blood stopped. The diamonds of his savaged skin glowed and silvered, and Vimbai and Maya could not quite believe their eyes and had to touch them with their fingers, to make sure that those were indeed scales—something no catfish ever had.
“Whoa,” Maya whispered. “How’d you learn to do this?”
“I didn’t,” Vimbai said.
“And that story?”
“I just made it up.” She tossed the knife to the ground and sat back, her weight pushing her heels deeper into the muddy soil. “I don’t really know anything. I just make shit up, you know?”
“Seems to work just fine.” Maya crouched low next to Vimbai, close enough for their knees to touch, and watched the man-fish’s continued transformation. His skin was now covered in perfect silver scales with small shimmering white and green spots, and his face was changing too—the whiskers had disappeared and his upper jaw curved into a haughty beak, extending his face forward, covering up the disfigured lower one. His head and body did not look flat anymore, but acquired the graceful proportion of a fast fish that did not feed on the bottom but propelled itself with strong strokes of its lobed tailfin.
“That’s a lake trout,” Vimbai said. “I think.”
“Is it good?” Maya dared to pat the fish’s head, and it flared its gill covers in response.
“Hey, Mr. Fish?” Vimbai said. “Can you still talk?”
The fish opened its mouth as if in silent laughter, splashed its tail in the shallow water like an oar, and—one, two, three—it was gone, disappeared under water. In just a few moments, the surface of the lake grew smooth like silk again, and did not betray the presence of a large fish underneath anywhere.
That night, Vimbai could not sleep. The thoughts of the previous day kept churning in her mind, and her imaginings of the day to come charged the air with great anticipation. She wasn’t the only one—the previous evening, even though no one had said anything about it, had been taut with barely concealed excitement.
The two grandmothers in the kitchen argued about what needed to be done food-wise, seeing as how they only had some preserves and canned soups and ramen and a bag of flour left. They compromised on pancakes but barely spoke to each other afterwards. Felix retreated to his room, but seemed to be in high spirits—the universe around his head, drained and ravaged and discarded, had been growing again, and Vimbai supposed that soon enough it would resume its normal undulation—although without Balshazaar, whose demise in the hands of wazimamoto passed unlamented by anyone; only Felix was kind enough to acknowledge that he had ever existed.
Peb would not stop babbling now that he had his tongue back, and he traveled all over the house, his many limbs bristling like the fins of a lionfish, yelling cheerful nonsense about brimstone rivers and blue electrical storms, of the worlds made of ball lightning and fire and of black unfathomable chasms populated by creatures capable of swallowing entire galaxies.
Maya’s dogs and Vimbai’s horseshoe crabs remained outside—the former curled up on the boards of the porch, their bushy tails covering their glistening wet noses from the cold, their eyes looking up wetly at whoever ventured onto the steps. The crabs stayed hidden, but Vimbai could imagine the restless churning of their legs, the clusters of their soul shells waiting for them on the ropes, waiting for the day that it was warm enough for the creatures to become whole again.
Maya and Vimbai had left the kitchen with its squabbling old women and the overexcited Peb, and sat on the porch, under the stars, the hunk of land black against black sky, its outline only hinted at by the absence of stars. In the darkness of her room, Vimbai smiled at the memory, at the contentment she felt whenever she and Maya could be away from everyone else and sit side by side, listening to the quiet sluicing of the waves and talking in low voices, as if sharing secrets even though they discussed quite mundane topics.
“What will you do when we get back to New Jersey?” Maya had asked. “I mean, besides going back to school and freaking out that your mom would yell at you.”
Vimbai smiled at the barb, at the fond familiarity of it. “I will start looking into horseshoe crab conservation. I mean, there are initiatives now—like they don’t allow fisheries to use them as bait anymore, but I’m sure there are more things I could do. And no one thinks that the medical research is damaging them, but I know it does—you can’t just drain away most of someone’s blood and think that you’re not harming them.”
“I’ll say.” Maya’s face was hidden by the night, but her voice was smiling.
“Anyway,” Vimbai said. “Shouldn’t you be spending more time with your zombie grandmother?”
“Not when you put it this way.” Maya laughed softly. “No, I will. I’m just . . . it takes getting used to, you know? And then there are all these crazy notions that she would be disappointed in me for not finishing college, for not making more of myself.”
“You still can.”
“I know.” Maya sighed. “Still.”
“I’m sure she won’t be disappointed.” Vimbai continued.
“Well, maybe not. But it’s strange for me too, having her back and yet not quite knowing if it’s really her, you know? How did you cope with your grandma?”