Chapter Text
It is always on the bluest of days that Bonnie Bennett feels the most alive. Those days when the air is dry and heat sweeps away the clouds like the opening of a curtain and there awaits her endless sky. It was like that one sticky day in June when her, Caroline and Elena got dropped off at the lake and didn’t come home till her skin was cocoa bronze and she had laughed enough to fill the entire summer. Or when she kissed Tyler Lockwood’s brace face behind a lilac bush and swore to tell no one. The fall cheer practices when she was called off the bench and tossed nearly high enough to taste it herself.
Today is no different, but it would be selfish to claim it as her own, for this day could have been yesterday, five years, or a thousand years ago for someone else. And what a wonder it must have been to dream of anything different.
After all, no matter where you were, you were all under the same sky.
“That one there is pregnant.”
TJ tugs at her sleeve, and the breeze sifts his whisper, bears a flutter of sand that tickles her skin, yet the excitement in his voice is almost palpable.
Bonnie inches forward in her seat, for the gemsbok have finally arrived. The first of them stop at the watering hole, heads bowed low and spiked horns black against golden dunes. They must have travelled miles to get here, and even though her own mouth is parched, ready to be relieved by her flask, this drink is theirs, and with it, a moment that she must honour. She follows the length of TJ’s arm to the back of the herd, carefully raises her camera and snaps a photo: a striped belly full with life, head high, spear-tipped and dignified.
The minutes seem to stretch into hours as everyone gets their fill, and it’s a quiet affair. The driver stretches his legs and takes a nap. TJ rotates between wiping his forehead, and scribbling notes in his pocketbook. Like the youngest of the gemsbok, Bonnie takes tiny sips of water, just enough to be refreshing, and just enough for it to last. She winces when the truck has to start up again, roaring to life.
“Namibian elephants here have wider feet and are slimmer. We will find them in a couple of days,” TJ says as the driver picks up speed towards the horizon. “We call them bush elephants. Different from the ones up west.”
Her grip is tight on the trucks's handle and she has to yell above the whistling wind. “What do they eat here?”
“Grasses, shrubs. If they get lucky, tsama melons.”
But only barren dunes greet them, stretching for miles. The survival of these animals is fascinating — and a stark reminder of how life folds at the will of the skies and the stars that have shaped it.
As the dust clouds behind her, Bonnie spares one last glimpse at the expecting gemsbok against an orange sky.
Congratulations mama.
They cook her steaming potjiekos for dinner: spiced broccoli, carrots and tender lamb. She volunteers to put out two extra plates by the tents of those who would have accompanied her today; German tourists who unfortunately woke with loose bowels. Luck had been on her side according to TJ, but it was likely the buffalo thorn bark she had been chewing unfailingly since she got here. She did listen when he had recommended it, after all.
The sherry in the stew warms her face when she’s settled back down in front of the fire, taste buds pleased.
“You saw those circles in the dirt as we drove by, yes?” TJ asks, tending to the remains of the fire. “There are hundreds of them across the desert. Those are fairy rings. The scientists will tell you it’s termites or the low precipitation, but my tribe, we believe that our ancestor Mukuru created them and suffused them with magic.”
“Magic?”
“For sustenance and protection. Do you not see the way the grass grows around the rings alone? Cattle eat from them every day near the villages and the predators stay away. So, tell me what science lies in that?”
Bonnie has no answer for him, and she doesn’t need any convincing to believe it, for everywhere she has stepped foot on this continent, she has felt the threads of magic in the air, sharper, thicker than what she felt back home. It feels one with the earth, primordial even.
“Your tribe?” she prompts him instead.
“Himba. Most of my family lives to the north of us, about half a day's drive. We tend to keep to ourselves, but I had a curiosity about the wildlife that brought me to study in Windhoek. It is how I found myself doing these tours.”
When Bonnie retires to her tent, belly full and happily fatigued, she creates her own little fairy ring around it with her own strings of magic. Let TJ — short for Tjiwone as he finally explained — see it for himself come morning. She’ll imagine it filling her with sustenance and protection and peace.
Among the husked welwitschias and the web footed geckos that scamper across her path, shipwrecks buried in sand from the eroding coast miles away, and dark sky so bright with stars, perhaps she had finally found a lasting moment of reprieve.
She wakes to a tightness in her neck. The morning fog blankets her as she emerges from her tent, pressing and kneading at the knotted muscle to no relief. It’d be a miracle if she could find some calendula here to mash into Gram’s soothing paste, but this one she’ll have to let her body and time do the work.
Giggles splinter the stillness. Suzana and Benedict must have recovered from their ails, for they exit their tent and stretch their arms up high, smiles on their faces. A honeymoon trip of a lifetime.
“Bonnie!”
She waves to them in response as they approach, planting themselves in the sand.
“What a lovely morning,” Suzana says, shifting to rest between her beau’s legs. Benedict attempts to pull back Suzana’s hair into a French braid. “What did we miss?”
“It was quiet yesterday,” she says. “TJ took me out to see the gemsbok. There are lots of young ones this year, apparently.”
“Ah, you’ll have to show us some pictures.”
“I didn’t take much, but sure.”
Her camera roll is really only five images full. Five images, five countries. A halfhearted stamp that she was there and that she tried.
“That there is quite picture worthy,” Benedict says, pointing out ahead. The sun, in all its resolve has begun to fight through, burning up the desert's thick white shroud.
“My grandmother is very traditional,” Benedict says, answering TJ’s questions about their future plans.
They have been trundled away to Soussivlei, and the sun bleached clay basin has baked to a warm white.
“She expects a great grandchild by the end of next summer.”
Suzana pats his hand and Benedict pulls her closer.
“But we’ve got plenty of time,” Suzana says. She catches Bonnie’s eyes, giving her a soft smile. “It feels kind of endless here. What a nice thing to have.”
Bonnie excuses herself with a desire to take pictures. But she roams between the bare trees, their gnarled branches grasping for relief, or perhaps punishment from the ground and feels like an interloper, a wraith, disembodied and always looking back.
While Benedict snaps a dozen photos of Suzana, her camera rests heavy between her breasts, and the weight she selfishly thought lifted from her chest comes bearing back down. Forever was a kiss of blood and the damnation of a soul away, and she could have had forever, but she aimed for higher and only met the ground. Might she too have been sown with life like the gemsbok, renewing the Bennett line? They had spoken about it in hushed, excited whispers, cure sitting safely in Elena’s veins. Starting and creating a new life together. A life where their kids would never be orphans, a life where they’d grow old and pass on jokes that ‘dad’ was really born in the 1800s to unbelieving young minds.
Travel, Enzo told her to do, so travel she did, deep into the world's wild heart. But therein lay the problem. He didn’t tell her what to do next. So the Serengeti became stifling warmth, the waterfalls lost their shine, and it's unfair, because when the sun rises tomorrow, even in her fairy ring, she knows the ochre desert of the Namib will be dim and dull.
Later that night, Bonnie reaches out of her sleeping roll to fish for her phone deep in her backpack, all the while worrying at the necklace around her neck. She waits for the screen to light up as it powers on all the while debating her next course of action. Her next destination. It doesn’t take long.
Maybe one day she will return to see those elephants.
The smell of petrol clings to her nose as she disembarks into the clamour of Lagos. Several drivers take one look at her clothes, her hair, her cross body bag and there is a flurry of ‘madams’ as they promise to take her to wherever she needs to go. 100,000 naira to Lagos Island. Half of that to the city centre. One cuts down the number further, and it starts a chain of what feels like one-sided negotiations.
She lets the crowd of exiting travellers edge her away from the commotion and towards a food stand, where she patiently waits for her turn to try the golden flaky beef pastries. It is hot on her tongue, and she swelters even further in the already high humidity. It drives her right back to the remaining drivers, slipping out a paper from her bag and unrolling it for him to see.
“Will you take me here?”
The driver nods, tucking his earbuds over his ear and opens his trunk for her to put her things.
“It will be at least a two hour drive, madam. 300,000 naira at least.”
“Whatever it’ll take.”
The AC is bliss, and as they leave the waning gridlock of taillights, car horns, and asphalt to reach the quieter dirt roads, she sinks further into her seat. For light, she balances her phone on her lap and slips out the postcards to pen her next set of overdue greetings. Caroline would appreciate a funny story. Damon and Elena, at this point, would appreciate anything. Something different from their abrupt 180 into domesticity. And last, one she’ll write to her own address and never send.
“American, yes?” The driver catches her eye in the rear view mirror. “You have family here?”
“No. Just visiting.”
“Ijebu is a small town. I don’t see a lot of visitors other than family going there to visit.”
She ends up telling him that she’s going to the Ojude Oba festival, and what a festival it is; for it is a microcosm of colours, pomp and pageantry. The drums beat away her exhaustion from the night before, and the flavours of food in the air draw her attention and feet far and wide. Despite it all, she feels distinctly out of place in her linen dress as she weaves around the dancers, the children and the curious faces. The King's Forecourt was one of the most spiritual festivals celebrated in the state, and it was where a fellow traveller had told her she might find what she was looking for.
Samiya was her name. They had met in a hostel in Ethiopia, a double bunked room where upon learning she was from Virginia, asked her if she too had come to find her true ancestors.
Qetsiyah, as it turned out, may have been the spring from which the Bennetts descended, but as Samiya explained, the Mediterranean was at a crossroads of trade and conquest back then, stretching even as far as Africa, and Qetsiyah’s family could have easily migrated along any of those trade networks to Greece. Samiya herself had discovered that for all the ancestral plane in New Orleans had to offer her coven, nothing was as rich and powerful as reading the talismanic scrolls that opened her mind to stronger, longer-lasting spells. She would take her knowledge back to her coven, and she said they would thrive.
Although the Bennett coven was currently sitting at a population of one, Bonnie danced with the idea of too, aptly putting it, finding her roots.
Perhaps Nigeria was to be the place.
Everyone begins to funnel their way to their seats in the square for the live shows, but she hangs back from the crowd, watching and waiting for a masquerade.
She’s been told of the signs. Look for a superstitious mother who pulls their children close and covers their eyes, fathers who tense up and the ones that simply leave the area.
She spots one in the far distance, covered in gold damask sheets embroidered in cowries, moving smoothly amidst the crowd. Stowing her camera away, Bonnie follows, magic ready at her fingertips. Be prepared for anything, Samiya had warned. A curse, a hex, even death.
Trailing at a healthy distance, the noise and the houses fall away until she’s on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and as if waiting for that exact moment, the masquerade halts.
“What tales have brought you here, American?”
With the thick sheets covering their body and their feet, for all she knows, the figure may have been walking backwards the entire time, watching her. If there was anyone underneath it at all. Bonnie shivers despite the heat.
“I wish to meet with your Egungun.” Her voice comes out as a whisper, and she straightens and repeats it again with more conviction. “I would like to talk with your living dead.”
“The American wishes to meet with oku ara orun,” the masquerade sighs in harmonious highs and deep lows.
“What for? For love?”
Bonnie settles her face into a neutral mask.
“For riches, for power?”
“Or to search for what is missing?”
She falters then, and the masquerade bows mockingly.
“You will not find it here.”
The masquerade continues their unhurried pace and so with concentration on the reddened road before her, Bonnie traps them both in a ring of fire.
“Parun,” the masquerade booms, and the fire in front of them breaks. They continue to move along.
Sweat beading on her forehead, Bonnie lifts her hands once again, prepared to make as many cages as possible.
It turns into a little dance. Every fifty feet, she halts the masquerade with her fire and the masquerade effortlessly extinguishes it, continuing on their path. The cicadas clack in the distance as her arms start to ache, and to Bonnie, it was as if they were laughing at her. But the masquerade has not turned back once with reprimand.
“Are you done, American?”
Bonnie wipes at her face and nods.
“Then follow me.”
They walk under the scorching heat of a 3pm sun, into the foggy sunset and eventually, only moonlight guides their path. When she finally spots firelight in the distance, she hopes it is real and not a conjuration of dehydrated delirium.
A dense tower of palm trees hides the smattering of thatched roofs and shelter before her, and she hesitates as two women emerge from the dark, sleeping babies wrapped at their backs, and gesture for her to come along.
They sit her in front of a fire amongst others, press water and smoked meat in her hands and encourage her to drink. She starts with small sips and light bites, but the food is too good and her hands are filled again in less than a blink.
“The òrìșà welcome you.”
A woman with piercing dark eyes and thick braids woven into a crown on her head greets her. Bonnie recognizes her voice. The masquerade. But despite the welcome, the woman’s face remains solemn.
“You too, have felt it then?”
Fire-lit faces all stare at Bonnie in expectation.
“I am Yemoja,” the woman says. “There are few of us who speak English out here.”
Bonnie sets down her tin of water. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Òya has visited me in my dreams. I have seen the water buffalo many times. Another storm is coming.”
At her blank stare, Yemoja speaks quickly to the rest of the crowd, indiscernible. Some rise from the fire and leave, and the women with the babies on their backs readjust their wraps and turn away from her. Over the din of conversation, Yemoja comes to sit next to her.
“Why did you come all the way here, then?”
Now that she’s been posed the question, now that she has walked miles, Bonnie feels sheepish about her possible answers. To her, the air is still and the palm trees do not sway. Inside, her tempest has decayed.
She settles on some modicum of honesty. “I am trying to find my anchor, my origins. Seek out my ancestors.”
“Who is your oldest known ancestor?”
“Qetsiyah.”
Yemoja’s face flashes with pity. “Then our ancestors are not yours, Bonnie. But you coming here was for a reason, and as I said, the òrìșà welcome you. Stay with us,” she offers with a smile.
She doesn’t have to travel far to sleep. Four clay walls hold a mat, built with straw and softened with the plushest material she’s ever felt. With only a torch for light, Bonnie lays out the little things she brought with her in her day bag: a hat which she probably should have used, a memoir that Samiya graciously passed on to her in the hopes she would enjoy it too, her passport and her camera. Her dreams come to her as vivid images of regrets and bitterness: Enzo’s graying face in front of Stefan’s cold stare, a universe where she crashed his wedding and returned the favour; holding back hellfire supported by Bennett witches she’d never meet.
She wakes to giggles from beyond her bed, and emerges from her stay as a gaggle of children sprint away.
Yemoja spots her rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and waves her over.
“Here. Let me show you where you can wash, then you can tell me more about your family.”
A loose fitting blouse is pressed into her hands, along with a matching roll of fabric that she is to tie around her waist. Afterwards, Yemoja takes her inside to a shrine room. At its centre lies a bowl of water, and it is surrounded by blue and white candles.
“As you may have noticed, we don’t get many visitors here.” Yemoja lights each candle and indicates for her to sit. A young girl brings in a covered dish of food for them.
“Peppered yam,” Yemoja explains as she serves Bonnie a plate. “Please set some aside for Yemaya.”
Yemoja reaches across to a table and dips a piece of bark into a candle flame and the smell of cinnamon fills the air.
“There are different ways to worship the òrìșà. When I talk to Yemaya, the water spirit, the goddess that I was named after, I always offer her peppered yam and burn cinnamon bark. Apart from being the mother of the ocean, she is the protector of children and families. Your family must be well-revered for you to use your abilities in the open.”
Bonnie swallows her bite slowly. “I may have been trying to put on a show.”
“Ah.” Yemoja’s eyes crinkle with her smile. “You must be careful here. We isolate and hide ourselves for protection. The òrìșà may have given us fractions of their power, but sometimes that is not enough against the colonizers and the proselytizers. They think we are fetish and devilry. Aganjù, gives us the power to light fires and preserve the wilderness, with Aje we can help with ailments, to name a few.”
“Who helped you figure out my name?”
Yemoja’s laugh echoes off the walls. “You are a smart girl. Orula is the òrìșà of wisdom and knowledge.”
They finish their meal and Yemoja asks her to show her what she can do.
Bonnie wonders what it feels like to be gifted magic. Is it like drawing from a well, knowing how deep you can go? For her, her magic was an extension of herself, like using another limb. With ease, she extinguishes and relights the candles. Focusing her gaze on the lone bowl of water, it slowly rises into the air.
Yemoja claps her hands in delight but immediately plucks the hovering bowl from the air. “I use this for libations.”
Contrite, Bonnie rushes to explain. “I draw from the energy of the earth, and the forces of nature. Then I can use it in any way I see fit.”
“Any way?”
“Within the bounds of nature. She isn’t too happy when you try to violate that.”
Yemoja rubs her chin. “Your abilities remind me of the Liberian craft my mother told me about when I was young. Maybe you will find your answers there.”
Yemoja stresses that she can stay as long as she likes. Mothers let her carry around their wide eyed babies, the children clamour to play with her and show them her power. She captivates a small audience by growing desert sunflowers and four petaled pawpaws and hands them out as gifts. Some of the girls offer to braid her hair, and she sits patiently for 6 hours as they decorate her head, then grease down her scalp. They add brown and beige beads to the ends of her braids that snick every time she shifts. They add a weight to her that keeps her steady on her feet.
Yemoja tries to teach her how to connect with an òrìșà, to little success.
“Repeat after me. Fi ìmọ̀ tí mo ń wá hàn mí. Show me the knowledge I seek."
Her pronunciation is horrible, and she feels nothing.
“Maybe it’s clashing with my own energy?”
“Perhaps,” Yemoja says, and they fall into a short silence. But Bonnie can’t help but notice the troubled expression on her face.
“You said a storm was coming?”
Yemoja’s eyes grow distant. “Yes. Òya , the goddess of lightning, the mother of the spirits, has been talking to me. Several of us are getting premonitions. Darkness gathers again on the horizon. Are you sure you haven’t noticed anything different?”
When Bonnie sinks into her bed, the softness suddenly becomes suffocating, and a familiar itch scratches at her chest. The feeling comes and goes over the years. An affliction she would like to say was borne from her time in the 1994 Gemini prison world and its resident. She had felt it when Damon presented him like a chicken on a platter at Caroline’s birthday rave. The itch had only gone away once she saw his head roll on the floor in that wedding hall. It returned from time to time at random, and she’d soothe it by visiting her dimensional bar and staring at his desiccated body until she was sure he hadn’t moved an inch. What was a quick trip to stop this oncoming episode?
She doesn’t need a fancy spell to slip from the comfort of her bed, and when she whisks herself away she finds herself standing in broad daylight in front of the pub.
Glass crunches underneath her feet as she swings the door open. He’d be the first thing she saw; she made sure of it when she put him there. No dark corners to turn, no anticipation of what she could encounter.
Except glass crunched beneath her feet. It reverberates through the silent bar, as Bonnie rubs at her eyes.
The boombox she set up in the corner has been smashed into pieces, bottles taken with it. At the back of the wall, a smiley face has been drawn in blood.
And centre stage, spotlight shining where the wicked performer himself should be, Kai Parker’s chair is empty.