Idol

First I felt the sensation drain from the tips of my toes and fingers. Not quite like they tingled– alive, but with the patient threat of dying– more as though I'd forgotten I had them. This forgetfulness permeated my limbs and crept into my torso: my back no longer pressed into a mattress, but afloat; my chest no longer a home to a beating heart, until what I'd once regarded as the vessel to my self, but what I now realise really was me, consisted only of a tingling face– clinging onto life. I still felt a cheek against mine, wet with tears (whose tears?) before the light behind my eyes went out. 

Then the crackling of electricity. A bright flash. Darkness. Dull, yellow lighting in a dry, empty room. I could see everywhere, as the wind. Then there came a voice and it spoke thus:

In Life, you turned against me. You closed your heart to your people– now I must close my heart to you. Face your fears.

And there was nothing, but a fluid warmth. A comfort that enveloped you like amniotic fluid in the womb. Here, too, I felt constricted: swaddled by the stomach of a boa. I thought I must breathe, but I'd forgotten my lungs, my oesophagus; I thought to shout, but I'd swallowed my tongue. A light flashed:  it was an uneven sphere amidst this fluid, sort of clumpy and cancerous– illuminated from within. It began to grow, first rhythmically, each clump multiplying in unison, then violently, unpredictably, gastrulating. Cells caving in, so an indent formed, like a ball pressed in by a thumb, and eventually the sphere became a cup; a head and tail sprouted  from its anterior and posterior. It was then that I knew this was me. My tail regressed, and I waited for my limbs to come, but they didn't. I waited for my face to form, but it wouldn't. Nor did my ectodermal cells become my epidermis, so I remained in this fluid, as a fluid and unenclosed, soft mush of cells, unable to move and incomplete. But I could feel. I felt the cord that tied me to the walls of my enclosure. 

From these very mucous walls, shapes began to protrude. The way a person's head would from behind a curtain. But they were sharp, and soon ripped through the tissue: ragged flesh gave way to blood, and the fluid around me went from clear to metallic black. First beside, then above and below the first wound, these things began to peck at my wall: some bursting through, some playing at bursting through, in cruel mockery of my immobility. A beak rammed through what would have been due to become my stomach, crowding out my ventral cells. But I felt it like a stab. In that moment of sickening pain, they all broke free. Birds stormed past, hard beaked, feathers brushed the wrong way and wet with blood, screeching and raving all around me. Thrashing– for they too were submerged in this fluid, but unlike me, they were drowning. The one that had stabbed me bubbled up– dead. Disjointed and stiff, as though perversely stuffed. Like me, it had no eyes. Like me, it had died. This turbulence did not stop. In the few minutes it took each bird to die, two more would rupture the perforated mucous tissue, slick with blood, to take its place drowning. Though the corpses piled up, the water compensated for them, with time nearing bottomlessness. Rachises disrupted my body's arrangement; their barbs punctured my membranes and at once I knew: This was not a womb, but an iron maiden.

Like this I stayed, and time did not halt, but ceased to exist, so, as I remained static in my fluid environment; skewered, as this bloody water sloshed over and into me, an understanding, born from the thick silence behind my wall being met by the panicked struggle against death, settled itself in the cavity of my chest; such that I knew: There would be nothing other than this.

I saw you before me. I had a body again. 

The surface I sat on was hard, and still there were walls around me. But these were made of dirt, and their ceiling was the sky. Silhouetted against it were you, Femi. In your hands you held the glowing idol of a bird. By its light I saw your eyes. I saw your tears. I saw the grime underneath your fingernails, and I saw you leap at me– weeping. 

I could not return your embrace. I could not move in this unfamiliar environment. The breeze touched against the hairs on my forearms, and the intricacy of the feeling made me break the tension in my lungs and breathe. I cried out: Oh! But the sound got stuck in my throat. Ayo! You kept saying Ayo. Over and over you said my name and I said It was so terrible.

It's over. 

It was so horrible, I said, those birds.

You began to soothe me, but it didn't help.

Finally I said Femi and your embrace tightened. I said thank you. I sobbed into your shoulder, repeating your name, so as to make sure you were real and you stayed. You patted against my upper back rhythmically. My older brother. My older brother.

The light of this idol we sat by began to dim, and with it, the pace of your hands and your breathing slowed down.

There isn't much time, Ayo. I brought you here, but at a price. I am to take your place.

…What? My heart sank.

I give you my life.

I thought of Femi in still waters. Rats in the walls.

Listen, I began, and pleaded with my tongue, that it may let me find the right words, but there were none. How can I persuade him now, when we all know across our lives what awaits us, but we dismiss it in adolescent hubris?

Your weight is almost fully rested on me. Your eyes have closed. Your mouth is agape and through it my name trickles down.

I take the idol, and press it to my tongue. First it melts against it, then the opposite happens and my tongue and mouth begin to harden, and protrude– a fleshy beak. My skin stretched and tore, my nostrils tore open, and my eyes fell out of their sockets, rolling over your back onto the ground, followed by blood and blood.

I think you slept. But I felt your pulse rise, chest to chest, and I knew: it was good. 

My feet first tingled, then itched, then burned: the searing pain of proliferation as their skin turned to keratin, and my toes crunched five into three. All the hair on my body sighed, and fell off. For a moment, there was relief. Until, from each follicle, a feather sprouted: stabbed through my skin, and clothes, slick with blood. I stood, letting you fall forward into my coffin, and began to climb over the walls. My feet tore the hem of my black dress, but I could not take it off: skewered, as it was, by my feathers. I dug my hands into the dirt to pull myself up, but in the moment I hung there, my arms broke: my radius and ulna concentrated at half their length, and angled themselves beneath my humerus– winged. Like this I could not climb. So I pressed my beak into the wall to keep from falling, I would not crush Femi. Pressed deeper and deeper, the cool of the dirt a slight relief to this pain. One last time, I pushed deeper, and all of a sudden, my whole body fell through the hole: feathers pushed the wrong way, slick with blood. I tried to claw at the wall with my feet, but to no avail. I merely tore at it and gave way to blood. I cried out in desperation, but it became the horrid screech of a bird, soon muffled by water.