Above, the festival weekend named Equivox. The city celebrates its voices on the longest day of the year. Children run, so their streamers of black and red will fly. Thin lengths of fabric tied around fingers: never forget. Yarns sewn to shirts dancingthat dance in the wind like an afterthought. Colored beads surrounding fringes of leather, hanging from jackets of Nameate hide.
Some adults wear chiffons that trap the air when they run and billow when the winds blows. But those of means wear chains. Not like mine. Pretty chains of intricate linkage – some gold and some silver – between a solid ring necklace and solid ring bracelets. They do not run. They don’t have to.
The scent of slow-roasted minotaur wafts from earthen ovens with black garlic and saffron, turnips and beetroot infused with tarragon and garnished with shishito. Oxtail stew bubbles and burbles above the fire lizards. Tamarind-kissed nabovgo sizzles on skewers against the grill, and its succulence swims in the air like these space whales before they’re caught.
Of course, there are yams. Ever-roasting yams make for a yam-scented city. Or roasted and placed in cold cache. Or roasted and put into stills for yamwine. Yamwine for which the city is known. Yamwine which that calls visitors and procurers to the city all year long, not just at Equivox.
For their masters, street urchins sell jars of lightning, desert wind, or summer rain: wares for which there’s always a demand. Some refuse to line an adult’s pockets from the labor of children. Most favor this exploitation of children over the other options.
In the square, six families sit in teams upon the dais, waiting for the annual impundulu eating contest to begin. One of the psychedelic effects of consuming impundulu in large quantities remains, unfortunately, self-cannibalism. And since all cannibalism is forbidden within the city, a cadre of healers and constables stand by to treat and restrain the victors and runners-up.
The Mayor, Keyamu, greets each head of house by their given names while he wends his way to the woman who’s known for the best escolar crudo on the delta. A quartet of pre-teens follows him, and he purchases for each a parcel of this woman’s work. They eat with wooden sporks and murmur their thanks. To the youth but loud enough for the crudo lady to hear, “Only strong bodies can be of service to our fair city.” He presses platinum discs into her hand.
Parents charge after children. Children propel themselves down the lanes between stalls to fly their fabrics. Stalls where artisans whittle sculpture from wood blocks and mediums predict every future but their own. In one of those stalls, I notice something amiss. Someone amiss?
A stranger?
The Stranger? I’ve never felt him in the city before. Never felt anyone like him in my city before. His skin drinks the light, dark like mine, dark like the cell. He wears no streamers, no chains. He speaks to the Ceramicist in the sweetest tones, leaning on the table between them. The Ceramicist also leans on the table, whisking his locs over broad shoulders. When they laugh, I feel a twinge of envy.
So rapt is my attention, the opening cell door takes me by surprise. Mayor Keyamu carries lamplight, and my head lolls away from the little flame’s capacity to light up the dark in my cell. Beneath the ground and behind stairs, light cannot find me easily and it never stays long enough for pupils to dilate.
“On Equivox, we celebrate the freedom to speak. This is where freedom begins. The Daemon of the Forest stalked the forefathers, directly above this spot. The demon they bound. Our city they built. And it is your duty. Nay, your privilege to contribute to the Binding.”
Mayor Keyamu stands just inside the door, athame in hand. He cuts into their palms and their candle wicks kiss the Mayor’s lamplight. Each youth finds their wall and re-trace the painting in blood. They come to touch up the only art I see in a year.
“I don’t understand. Can’t we just go back to the festival? Groove Congress performs tonight.” This girl wheezes while she wrings her palm to extract more pigment.
“You may return to it, Abigo, when you’ve done your civic duty,” the Mayor says.
“It looks like a boy,” a toad-voiced boy says, sneaking glances at me while blood-painting. He tiptoes over my chains, careful not to touch me or them.
“Whatever it is, it’s very dirty,” the short-haired girl says.
“Perciva!” the Mayor shouts, his words cacophe against the hard surfaces of my room. “Respect the Binding of the Daemon!”
“It is dirty!” Perciva says. “And it smells! And why is there a horse’s bit in its mouth?”
“It looks like a boy,” the croak-voiced boy says again. I can feel his breath on my skin as he examines me from behind. When my hand shifts, the chains ring and he gasps.
The Mayor laughs. “Zorai, are you finished? Good,” the Mayor says. “Daemons take on many forms to vex us. But come, let us end this moroseness and indulge in yamwine and nectar.”
“Aren’t we too young for yamwine?” Perciva asks as they mill out, closing their bleeding hands around the flame and closing the Binding ritual.
“But you’re never too young to watch the Mayor drink yamwine,” the Mayor’s voice and their footsteps grow distant.
Sweet relief from inane voice and callow questioning and reminders.
The sun is high on the first day of Equivox! The movement competition begins! Dutty wine and p-poppin’ and steppin’ and footwork and crump start and gyrate for hours. Motion plays against jodecidal choruses and timbalandic polyrhythm. Bodies tut and wack to every syncopation and subdivision of the beat. The joy of song vibrates through the air and reverberates onto bodies.
Across town, musicians take the stage and night takes the day. The air is humid with electricity. Anxious bodies stare and while in wait for this collection of songs and players and singers to begin. The seashell recordings for the Groove Congress, on any other day, can be heard throughout the city. The audience is a force – the anticipation of alchemy, the desire to be changed, the hope to be surprised – that shines onto the stage.
When the music starts, the crowd erupts like a geyser. Audiophiles shower the music-makers with appreciation for relief from wait. Not unlike ambrosia, feeding the demigods of sound.
In response, the staged collective tow the lines of practice and spontaneity. They sing, slide, strum, beat, jam, squall, harmonize, and break it down before building it back up for the people swaying and screaming at foot level.
It’s a false worship. Not because the soulshine from the crowd couldn’t lift the Groove Congress to godhood. False because the sound godlings shine soul back onto the audience. No one rises to deification but each of them feels transformed, blessed by the other’s presence and adulation.
That’s how I find him again. Concerts form a praise circuit and somehow he stands amid, observing not the performance, but the exchange in energy. Now I feel his every footfall like ice dripping down my vertebrae. As he dances, my body shivers and jerks against the restraints. Pressed together, the Ceramicist – his name is name Laem - and the Stranger undulate like a snake in the grass. Their bodies glisten with perspiration in the night’s heat. Every time the Stranger’s body evades, the Laem’s body fills the space. Their bodies are a back-and-forth, like their tongues joiningthat join the conversation as well.
When the concert ends, the Stranger wraps his hand around the back of the Ceramicist’s neck, massaging. They ride the deluge of people into the open air. Laem laughs when the Stranger takes running leaps and circumnavigates random circles in the streets. I’m not sure what the Stranger is doing but part of me is certain.
The Stranger follows Laem to his home. They share yamwine and a blunt before sharing a bed. Under covers, they join into a familiar animal of writhing and limbs and sweat and moans and saliva.
And then sleep.
Or sleep for the poor, spent Laem who sprawls across his own bed as if no one else was there. He doesn’t feel the Stranger leave his domicile because the Stranger willed him not to wake. His power is such that no glass or crag on the ground could pierce his sole. So barefoot and nude, the Stranger walks down the lamplit road when he happens upon a couple whose youthful fervor ignores their advanced age. “Nice night for it,” he says, grinning. The couple waves unfazed and oblivious to the dangling bits.
And still, he leaps invisible hurdles and meanders around non-present cylinders. His steps quake my body and my brain itches. I can… sense… no, feel the trees that he avoids.
The tremors in me grow in intensity as I hear bare feet slap against the stone floor. Thundering down the hallway. Until they stop.
The scent of fresh copper assaults my nose while something drags across the metal of my door, fast and methodical. Three knocks, then the door disappears. Like it never existed. My head does not lift to look, but I know it is him.
His mouth gawps, I can hear it. When I turn to see him, he’s surreal in person. His face is beauty but that which makes up his soul – it’s a maelstrom of spirit and light – manages to be magnificent while turbulent. His iridescence does not hurt my eyes. It isn’t that kind of bright.
“The ones who walk away,…” he says, his honeyed baritone little more than a whisper in a long dead language. His wide eyes are still above an Adam’s apple that yoyos. “Until they walked my way, I thought you were murdered, your name taken as a trophyas trophy.”
He stops talking – maybe he sees he’s talking at me. His lookhead ricochets around the room, seeing my surroundings for maybe the first time. “Get up.”
My mind races and all I can muster is, “I cannot,” in words I don’t remember learning muffled by the metal bar pulling at the sides of my mouth.
“You can and you will,” the Stranger says before bowing his head in prayer, barely a whisper, and his hand touches a vevé on the wall opposite me. All four vevés on all four surfaces glow a bright blue. Simultaneously, an unseen claw rakes them. My wrists lighten. The manacles fell from them and my ankles. The gag that felt like part of my face falls to the floor and my mouth aches at its absence. The wall cools my back while it holds me upright.
His nudity glides across the floor. His hooked index finger lifts my chin and he peers into my face, mournful. With two extended index fingers, he touches my forehead. The loa in him ignites the loa in me, the loa I forgot I had. My cell. The slums. The square. The amphitheater. The world. They all fade, unbuild, unpave, disestablish. And I see it.
The forest. The forest surroundingthat surrounds the clearing. The clearing surroundingthat surrounds the thicket. The thicket that the natives refused to forage o. Out of respect for the nature spirits livingthat lived within. The nature spirits about whom the natives warned the pilgrims. The pilgrims who picked fruit from the thicket. The nature spirit whothat departed when curiosity proved more piquant than interlopers. The bereft spirit that lashed out in anger of being defiled and left behind. The spirit lured by the pilgrims. The spirit punished. The spirit bound.
The binding.
The Binding.
When I open my eyes, he stands away from me.
“Do you remember who you are?” Errant threads of me knit around his silken voice.
Shards of memory, connected to nothing at first, find their place in the whole. “Why are you here?” I ask. “Why do you give me this story?”
“I give you nothing. This story lives in you.” His outstretched hand rises in wait of mine. “Come.” I stare at it, titillated but afraid.
“Where?” I ask, wrapping my arms around myself, abruptly self-conscious of my nudity in contrast to his. “I belong here. I belong to the city.”
“You belonged here once. When this was your thicket, when you were its dryad,” he says, pity quivering his voice. My resolve falters at his tenderness. “But they built a city that prospers and breathes upon your back. This festival celebrates your capture – feeding you belief to grow you into a god but demanding your bones for infrastructure.”
He looks away. I don’t know if it’s to hide his hurt or to avoid seeing mine.
When I’m not looking at him, I feel the effects of his loa. Touching his mind expanded mine and for the first time in however long I can smell the mildew and the excrement and the compacted funk of ages.
“This is my home, Treili.” His name feels natural rolling off my tongue but foreign to my ears. The Stranger whirls his head around, too late to see the words fly from my mouth. Those insurmountable cheekbones rise for a second before temperance reasserts itself over his hope.
“This,” he says with raised hands and furrowed brow, “is your prison! It hinders your imagination more than your movement.” For a moment, his fury is bigger than his body. Then he quiets his voice and stills the firestorm within. “It’s been one thousand years, Omé. Remember little Aszra? She’s a goddess now, a war goddess no less. Clomeld blesses those who work with their hands, farmers, artisans, players. Mother rains on their crops and provides respite from the summer sun. You belong with your people,” he pleads.
This news about family I only just remember makes memakes me makes me tired on a soul level. His words, like hail, chip away at me. At the way I see, and am seen.
“Am I the god of cities?” I ask.
Treili takes a breath before starting to speak but he stops to start again. “I’m a god of merriment. Portents are not my favor. But as sure as denying wine will not get you drunk, you will not know what awaits you until you’ve gone.”
I regard his hand, outstretched again.
I reach for him.
He supports my weight and I step forward, falling into him. My hands find his shoulders, my arms pinned between our chests as his arms encircle me, his heart beats against my ear. When he pulls me farther into his embrace, I melt into him.
In my ear, he whispers, “Come.” Stretching my arm across his shoulders and wrapping his arm around my waist, Treili supports me, and we walk out of the blackened room that’s no longer my life. Up the stairs from my cage. And out of the edifice that chained my mind.
My eyes squint beneath the sun I’ve not seen in so long, it might as well be the first time.
“When did the sun rise?”
His eyebrows rise and scrunch at the center. “Their experience of time does not have to be our experience of time, Beloved. What we are cannot be contained within their small minds.”
For years, I sensed it through a canopy of leaves, the dappling light blinded my eyes. But as I acclimate to the surface, I see the city – my city, with my eyes, for the first time – and it is brilliant. Brown children play It in the square, and impundulu make sport of dropping putrid bombs onto grounded bodies. Salt-encrusted yams roast next to fire lizards. A rootworker mixes a loa-enriching elixir.
My face itches and a beard plumes beneath my scratching fingers. My bones ache to a length that makes shouldering me more challenging for Treili. I am not who I was or who I think myself to be. I am who he envisions, and he sees me in all my possibility.
I have the strength to walk under my own power. And it turns out I’m taller than Treili. Instead he laces his fingers between mine.
The citizens. Some go about their business because they don’t care about two naked strangers. Others stop and stare: Can they see the Daemon Below lives under this beard? And others just know.
The Mayor, dressed in overconfidence, trots into our trajectory, fussing and clucking like a coop of chickens. Treili takes my wrist and arcs our palms across the Mayor’s face. I feel his loa move parallel to mine, flexing my muscles. For a second, I smell the fermented idenka on his breath before he meets the ground for a nap.
The Mayor lies in fetal inebriation and we step unceremoniously over him. We walk around the ghosts of the trees that made up my thicket, trees long slaughtered. We leap over dried up riverbeds I’m only beginning to mourn.
Grand-méres wail the fall of the city. I remember their immature faces and wonder why the octogenarians care about my departure. They were unconcerned about my stay.
Young warriors pelt us with rocks and spears. But the projectiles clatter against some unseen barrier before tumbling to the ground.
Sadness crawls across my heart, wondering what will become of the city. Treili senses that and projects his thoughts into my mind. “This city is more of you than you are of it.” And he’s right. Of course, he’s right. I spent a millennium nursing it. But now…. “The city will stand as long as you do. Though it may be a little less prosperous.”
This thought inspires a smile. The city and I were part of each other for such a long time. “Why did you come for me?” I ask.
Treili thinks at me, “The ones who walked away–” “
“No,” I say with my voice. “Why now?”
“I’ve searched the world for a meadow to match this particular shade of green or greener.” He lifts his hand in mine and presses the back of my palm to his lips. “And I found them, Omé. Danced in them. Rolled in them. Slept in them. But if I compare all shades to yours, why am I wasting time with what could be when I could have what is and always will be?”
I lean into him, the fullness of his lips crush against mine. He tastes of yamwine and nectar.
LP KINDRED (he/him) is a Chicagoan-Angeleno who writes Speculative Fiction that features Black and/or Queer Lives. When not writing he can be found singing, eating good food, pretending to be fancy, watching bad TV, and lifting heavy objects. He is or will be alum of Hurston-Wright, Voices Of Our Nation, and Clarion Foundation workshops. His fiction is or will be featured in Fiyah Literary Magazine, LeVar Burton Reads, Speculative City, and now Prismatica Magazine. LP is also a founding member of #GhostClass and Voodoonauts. Find him on Twitter @LPKindred.