Little Ebun was playing in the “backyard” near the clothes line. Suddenly she heard her mother’s voice calling out “Ebunayo!!”. “Ma!”, she answered reflexively, running round the side of the apartment building to the front gate. She opened the pedestrian side, looking out on the street and around for her mother, careful not to go outside. Her neighbourhood was not the safest of places.
She drew back in, not really puzzled, just so very happy that she wouldn’t have to be home alone again today. She could count on one little chubby hand just how many times she had seen Mother or Father during the day in the last month, okay one hand for each of them she amended with a giggle.
She rummaged around in her dungarees for her key to her family’s cozy apartment and got it in the lock on the second try. She hoped Mama wasn’t mad that she had to let herself in and wasn’t too tired to play. Ebun shut the door, remembered to turn the key twice to lock it properly and then took out her key.
She made her way to her parent’s room and knocked twice before turning the knob. It was then it occurred to her that Mum’s coat wasn’t slung over the couch like it always was when she got back from work. By now she was in and could see that her parent’s room was empty.
Increasingly confused and even more sad she was about to leave when she thought she heard a faint trickle of water from her parent’s bathroom. Since she wasn’t allowed in there, she tentatively opened the door and sure enough there was Maami, sitting on the closed WC. But something was wrong, Mother was sobbing with her head bowed and her shoulders shaking. “Mummy..” Ebun said, “Mummy, what’s wrong?” her already tiny voice barely a whisper. Mother slowly looked up and on some deeper level than she could fully comprehend, Ebun knew things had gone lightyears beyond wrong.
Mother’s eyes were blank, completely white with crimson tears brimming at the corners. And she wasn’t sobbing oh no, it was grotesque mirth that moved her petite frame. Her face was a parody of jollity and her grin reminded Ebun of the huge rat that had been staring at her early the previous morning. And then she sang:
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun oluwa
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun olorun mi
It was the song her mother had made up when Daddy said he did not want her to call Ebun “Princess” for fear of spoiling her. The.. Thing’s voice filled Ebun’s mind with pure unadulterated fear. It was the snicker of the bogeymen under her bed. It was the big mean children pushing her down in the sand on the playground for being too quiet. It was death and decay and rot and everything that had ever gone bump in the night.
She made to stand up and Ebun promptly passed out, her mouth frozen in a little “o” as she had tried to draw breath to scream. That was how her parents found her and rushed her to the neighbourhood clinic down the road. She was resuscitated and looked after. The next day she had her first asthma attack, wheezing just like her mother.
———-
“Stupid woman. The double agent was obviously hiding in the doorway. Nonsense.”, Ebun muttered to no one in particular. This is boarding school and she is now a skinny awkward teenager bearing the label of “weirdo”, what with her head always being buried in books.
She was on her way to the dinning hall for lunch, she had perfected the art of reading while walking. Suddenly, while descending the last and longest flight of stairs to the hall, she heard a whisper right by her ear, her mother saying “Ebunayo?” in a quiet worried tone. “Ma?” She answered turning her head to the side, her mind still mostly in the tale of Soviet espionage. But there was no one there and in the split second it took for her to register surprise she made a misstep and went tumbling down the stairs, landing on her shoulder which gave out with a loud “Pop!”.
Not one for unnecessary attention, she got herself up with her good hand, brushing off those who had rushed to help her while ignoring the hastily muffled laughter of those who were dying to say “I told you so.”, “Reading while walking is a bad habit, now you’ll learn.” or some such irritating variant. Snatching up her novel, she walked back up the stairs and made her way to the sickbay, grunting with pain.
Normally she would laugh at her clumsy self but she was not in that mood. There was something nagging at the corner of her mind and it was annoying that she couldn’t grasp it.
She got to the sickbay and the nurses made a fuss over her, displaying their Mother Hen feathers in all their glory. Her shoulder was set, and a sling put on it. She was then send to the “ward” to rest.
Waking up after a relaxing nap Ebun found her mother was sitting by her bed, head bowed, apparently dozing. She groaned, sure she has slept for longer than she thought and the nurses had called her mother. Worrywart that she was, she would have sped over almost immediately. Her eyes glanced briefly at the wall clock and she noted that it was 3:40pm. Then it clicked; lunch was at 2:30, there was no way on earth Mother could have gotten to her school in so short a time, not without a helicopter and even then. All this thought out in less than the second it took for Ebun to turn her head back to the woman seated beside her.
The woman’s head was up now and the distant feeling of unease that she had had was forcibly yanked and thrown on center stage. It was her mother alright, or her evil dopplegänger as seen when she was but 5, and mercifully repressed until now. The.. Thing cocked its head, letting a crimson tear spill over watching Ebun’s eyes widen as she began to gasp.
The.. woman moved a puppet-like arm and touched Ebun’s damaged shoulder. She couldn’t move, all her joints were locked with fear, even as screams echoed from the walls of her mind. The woman sang in her voice of ten thousand fingernails on chalkboards and a thousand quarries at work, yet barely above a whisper:
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun oluwa
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun olorun mi
She laughed and vanished, the gutchurning sound lingering after her. And then Ebun screamed, and screamed, and screamed. The nurses rushed in to see what was wrong. When nothing was immediately amiss, they wrote it off as a more violent delayed reaction to the pain, because no girl her age should be so stoic.
———-
Ebun’s mother looked at her with tears in her eyes, she was that happy. She was joyous in fact. Her only daughter, her Morenikeji, was getting married tomorrow and she had never seen her daughter so radiant. She was practically bouncing, giggling and chatting with everyone that had come to spend her last day of spinsterhood with her.
Iya Ebun had been worried that she might lapse into one of her odd episodes of depression like the time she was 5 or the other when she dislocated her shoulder. Ebun had refused to talk for days then and had looked at her accusingly, almost as if she knew… No, that wasn’t possible. She had best go clear her head before she did or said something stupid. With that she went down the hall to the nearest restroom.
As she was washing up at the sink, she looked in the mirror above it and froze. Her reflection had blank eyes, bloody tears, was wrapped in a pure white cloth edged with cowries and wore a ghoulish grin. Speaking with the voice of a hundred untuned guitars she said:
“Asiko ti ya. You’ve had her long enough, it is time to pay.”
“No, rara o! This is not what was agreed. Mi o gba! Take my only child away from me? At this time? While I’m still alive?! Olorun maje!” Iya Ebun replied in a fervent panicked whisper.
“Aje melo l’Olorun ni?”, countered her dopplegänger laughing.
Iya Ebun ran out with the mocking sound at her heels. She returned to the festivities and met pandemonium. Ebun was having the worst asthma attack she had ever seen. Everyone was scrambling for an inhaler but those found were either empty or jammed. Iya Ebun ran to her daughter’s side praying she wasn’t too late and sang her song, Ebun’s song, as it should have been all along:
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun aye o
Ebun mi ma re o
Ebun Yeye Osun
On the last note, Ebun went still and her mother’s tears flowed like her spirit would go out through them and bring Ebun back as they made contact with her cooling skin. But she had made a deal and they had come to collect, come to collect..
Makings of a MiniManiac 