This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 by Tochi Onyebuchi

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Dear Theresa,

It is habit for some to name every alien item of flora and fauna they come across. I don’t mean our scientists whose goal it is to catalogue and organise God’s Creation for us. I mean, rather, the expeditioners or those with them who fancy themselves worldly. It is they who I imagine write back to their employer or their loved one about this weed or that catlike animal or X tree which has been known to bear Y fruit. Alas, I do not possess that gift for taxonomy, nor do I understand it my purpose here. In service to God, I should remember the macrocosm is the proper aperture of my vision. I’ll leave the details to the Devil. Tessa, I can feel your hand on my shoulder, squeezing patience into me and forcing envy out like venom through an empyrean spider bite. I should not be jealous of the slavers or scientists or merchants who can look at what surrounds us, can hear and smell and feel it, and think entirely in terms of dominance. I should be grateful, and indeed I am, that upon meeting the new, my immediate posture is wonderment. The sentiment is tested when night falls and I do not make it to my mosquito net in time, but the other day we saw a waterfall. Or, rather, we heard it first only to catch sight of it afterwards. As though thunder and lightning had been reversed. Indeed, since we’ve come ashore—since we dropped anchor, in fact—it seems as though we occupy a land on which natural laws no longer apply. Tomorrow, we may find gravity in absentia. The sky will turn green, and the mammals will begin to talk to us.

Ever yours,

Nathaniel

Dearest Theresa,

This letter’s recounting of events may jump around somewhat, so I must ask your forgiveness in advance. But sometimes the thematic progression of a thing—an event’s impact on a person—defies temporal constraint. God bends causal arrows to His own delights.

I mentioned a waterfall in my previous letter but neglected to describe it, intent as I was on proving whatever point I’d had in mind. Let me now begin.

Sanders Falls is the name given to the phenomenon, but I cannot believe it is what the natives called it before our arrival. (I have made a note, upon contact, to ask them its proper name, presuming they are conversant in English.) It exists in three stages, so that if you don’t know what lies ahead, you may find yourself initially disappointed only to experience wondrous surprise afterwards. In fact, the whole entire formation is hidden by forest, and our predecessors had carved out of the jungle only the most rudimentary of trails. However, if you but follow the noise, you will come across an overhang flanked by twisting brown vines like hair from the head of some native deity lying on its side. Water rushes in a white hush over the lip of the rocks, but what is noteworthy here is that water also spouts from holes in the rock. I’d taken a few steps to better examine the waterspouts when one of our men told me to step away and that the falls backed onto a cave that held a colony of bats. There is no disease known to man that could adequately explain the combination of fear and disgust in his eyes when he told me this, so I must surmise that he has fallen into what may perhaps be local lore. Without saying as much, he worries, perhaps, that if bitten, I may be possessed of a demon.

At the second stage of Sanders Falls, water tumbles down and behind large rocks in somewhat diminutive fashion. We’re still flanked by forest and all the animal noise in it, all the insect noise in it, all the river-nourished green of it, but this trickle felt so far from the rush of the first stage as to be an entirely separate formation. Until you stepped a bit farther and saw the precipitous drop before you. The foaming speed of the thing had returned; all that had changed was the increasing narrowness of the passage.

We did not linger here, but once we arrived at the third stage of the waterfall, I had no choice but to pause. The thing towers in multiple shelves over you and spills down in a torrent. Now, I have heard tell of larger, more majestic waterfalls in other parts of this continent—Victoria Falls to our south, the distant headwaters of the Nile in German East Africa—but at neither of those locations could you hear, behind the roar of the waterfall, the music of children giggling.

I suspected to find natives bathing or washing their garments in the river water, figuring them for utilitarians and nothing else. Hence my surprise at seeing youth of a variety of ages climbing up a ways only to slide down where the rock had been made slick, splashing into a pool just past the base of the waterfall. The thought occurred to me then that God had not necessarily created this formation for the purposes of nourriture, but because He suspects that the impulse for play is as fundamental a drive as what pushes us to eat, what pushes us to drink, our need for sleep.

I have been ruminating on how I would minister to these natives, what my opening salvo might be, as it were. And God is so all-encompassing that the temptation arises in me to see Him less for what He is than for what He is not. That is to say, I landed here and knew that a portion of my work would be education. I would need to tell of the Virgin Birth. I would need to tell of the miracles, of the wedding at Cana, of the burning bush. I felt this was a place I would be bringing God to. But that concedes that there are absences where God is concerned. These children and the natural formation they had made into their playground have already reminded me that the truth is otherwise.

Before we arrived at the forest that led to these waterfalls, we passed through desert, and I must confess that I thought the entire place absent of God’s love, His presence. A Catholic priest had made his way through the Kingdom of Oualo some years prior, and he recounted to me a tale of a land that existed only at meteorological extremes. Freezing night and blistering day. And no matter how he covered himself—be it with goggles and a turban—dust always found his eyes. Indeed, sand and all types of grit and pieces of the earth seemed to burrow into every pore of his skin. He spoke of a land that seemed intent on expelling him. Could such a place ever house messengers of our Lord and Saviour? But, Tessa, I must remember that He is the sun’s burn, as well as the waterfall’s nourishing nudge.

The children fled upon our approach, but they waved as they did. And there were smiles on their faces.

Basking in the radiance of the Almighty,

Nathaniel

Theresa,

Some days, I wake up and see little difference between the people here and the animals. Savannah surrounds the village where I am to establish this church, and several times our men nearly fired upon a group of hunters, mistaking the noises they emitted for the calls of birds and beasts of the field. Indeed, man and animal bathe in the same rivers, pick fruit from the same bush. Sometimes, it is the animal who walks on two legs and the man who scrabbles by on four. Most frightful are the hyena men. Always men, they wear loose-fitting trousers and often wander by bare-chested, and all over their torsos are scars. Around their waists or sometimes their wrists is wrapped a length of rusted chain that connects, after some length, to the collar around the neck of a ravenous, spotted, furry creature. Wolflike in build, with hindquarters close to the ground and backs that slope, their forelegs run high, and at each paw is a set of short, blunt claws. Their ears are short but large, and when one of them sights you, its face folds in on itself in what would look like glee on a demon’s visage.

My Theresa,

I am frustrated. A barrier of misunderstanding has risen between me and the locals. When they are not working in service of the merchants under contract to the Queen, when they have settled in the village and before they’ve eaten, I’ve taken to gathering them together in a field—the more willing, at least—and explaining to them God’s love. Only a few of them speak English, and only one speaks well enough to translate for me, though I doubt the child has the facility to adequately capture and convey the depth of my message. My suspicion is thus because I will sometimes speak a sentence, and the little boy will translate it, and some in the gathering will giggle like schoolchildren when the thing I mean for them to know is of the utmost seriousness. I understand the limits of my articulation, but it was my hope, paradoxically enough, that my simplicity of language might be a boon here. Children are not exempt from complex emotional states for their inability to articulate those states. So it stands that I should not be any less valuable a tool in the hands of God than the most sententious of my compatriots. My hands are incapable of miracles, so my words are all that I have left.

Some would say it is luck (I would say Providence) that I managed to pack the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher in my valise for this journey. There is a decidedly liberal and individualistic cast to his texts. This idea that self-consciousness is a marriage between the universe and our unique capacity for reason makes way for the notion that we each contain the universe within us, which is to say that we each, primordially, contain God within us. Each person is a representation—a metonym—for the universe, which is to say that each person is a metonym for God. This is what is meant when we say that we are crafted in His image.

Schleiermacher also holds that divine punishment was not penal but rather rehabilitative. It is Correction. Which, in itself, can take the wind out of one’s sails if pridefulness has one seeking out suffering in an attempt to manufacture virtuousness. But disallow me from casting stones at my brethren.

Still, Schleiermacher has nudged me into thinking that the fault perhaps lies with my style of messaging. How easily can one understand the greatness and omnibenevolence of our God if one’s crops have failed or if one’s child has perished from sickness? Isn’t it hypocrisy to try introducing alien fruit to a spirit caged in a body with more immediate needs? I am preaching to a drowning man of our Lord’s miracles from the safety of my boat. As God becomes remote to the imagination, the Devil becomes more immediate, eager to take credit for the universe’s current order, thereby announcing himself.

Let me endeavour to help create a world where it becomes easier to believe in God’s grace. If I am to pity these people, let it be at least a productive pity.

Yours in Christ,

Nathaniel

Theresa,

My young translator is named Solomon. I told him he will grow to be a very wise man. The look in his eyes told me that this was not the first time he had heard those words. Has there been another mission prior to ours that passed through this village? And did that mission have a minister such as myself, schooled at seminary, fumbling with his words, unsure of himself? And did that minister have the loveliest and most long-suffering wife to write back to as well? I joke. As far as I can tell, this is yet untouched territory, the frontier of the Queen’s dominion. The boy must be joking as well.

Love,

Nathaniel

Dearest Theresa,

I have enlisted some of the local men in the building of a church. It is not a grand affair, but I began these plans with a vision for a house of worship that would double as the village’s school. The Europeans of my party are always out, either chasing coin or bludgeoning locals into the enterprise. A coarser bunch it is difficult to imagine. An odour of avarice and tobacco hangs perpetually in the air around them. One of them, in a drunken fit, sought to steal a maiden at dusk, and it was only my swift intervention that kept the village from falling upon the man with their clubs. Whichever parent named the man David may have presaged somehow his future. Maybe it is this type of man the flesh trade entices and employs. Maybe it is the trade in flesh that makes a man this way. We are all born with the capacity to sin. We are all born wilful creatures. It is that thing exactly that makes our choice to walk in God’s will a testament to His glory. But spend enough time in the company of these traders, spend enough time loading and unloading your ships with human chattel, spend enough time trading life for coin, and the heart becomes nought but carrion for the hyenas.

Solomon persists in being a source of quiet cheer. I see in him the same appreciation for the natural world that attended my own youth. He took me to a large tree the other day around which a gaggle of children played. He then proceeded to lift several of the rocks at its base only to cast them down with all his strength, breaking them cleanly in half and revealing the iridescent rings inside. Such wonders compose the innards of things. He is taking to heart my lessons, it seems. As dusk set, I taught him about his namesake, about how King Solomon was the builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem and how, as a result of his wisdom, he possessed wealth and power beyond all previous rulers. One night, he asked me about my own name, and I told him of the New Testament apostle Nathaniel, mentioned in the Gospel of John. A few days later, he excitedly pointed me to 1 Chronicles 2:14, which mentions another Nathaniel, this one a son of Jesse and brother to the future King David. Then he asked me if I and David, whom I mentioned earlier, were brothers. In reply, I quoted from 1 Corinthians chapter 12:

For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

God hath tempered the body together.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.

I suspect the Lord delivered to me this answer as much for my own hearing as for Solomon’s.

My thoughts rest on hyenas because the hyena men have returned. I do not know from where. A spectral sight, their silhouettes lined the horizon as they approached, shimmering into corporeality like a mirage made real. The handlers are always smiling, joking. And I will admit, oddly enough, to a kernel of envy. They converse with the villagers—well, what villagers will venture out of their homes to greet them—in their native language. Solomon told me they were debt collectors, but I cannot quite understand their system of commerce. I can never tell what is collected and what is owed.

My protective instincts rage whenever I see the children gather around one of the hyena men. But each time, the gathering is the same: the hyena men will sit on stools (sometimes they stand), and they will untie a rope from around the mouth of the hyena and through a whistle get the beast to open its mouth wide, as though it were yawning. Then the handler sticks his arm along the hyena’s jaw such that were that jaw to shut, the man would swiftly bleed to death. And he holds his arm there for longer than is prudent, only to take his arm back out to cheers from the crowd. Some of the more daring hyena men will stick their heads in their beast’s jaw. I’ve yet to see a handler decapitated, but it is only a matter of time.

So many of the folktales I have heard throughout this part of the Queen’s dominion make of the hyena a central character. An ambiguous creature, even the female hyenas have something approaching the genitals of the male. In some tales the hyena is a shape-shifter and in others a trickster. But Solomon harbours no fear of them. Indeed, when I chance a look at him as the hyena men are first arriving and he does not know I am watching him, a look of sadness will fill his eyes. As though someone has been wronged. Several times, I’ve found myself on the precipice of asking why he pities the hyena men, whether it is to do with the nature of their souls, but I’ve yet to work up the courage.

I think they are travelling storytellers. The cowrie shells they wear are nowhere to be found here, and their pockets and sacks bulge with wood carvings and trinkets. Perhaps they are the village’s only contact with the outside world. Well, apart from us, my love.

We have grown close, Solomon and I, which is perhaps the lot of speaker and translator, particularly as regards the subject of our communiqués. When our school is finally built, I will have to enlist him as a docent. The youngest docent in this village!

Buoyed by my love for you,

Nathaniel

Theresa,

David’s body was found not far from the village outskirts. The villagers say it was good fortune to have identified his remains as we did, given the fact that Harmattan season is upon us. I will not say he deserved such a fate—no one does—I will only say that I pray he found the Lord’s mercy before his passing.

I was asked earlier today why I believe in God. And it was so elemental a question, so assumed a belief, that at first I struggled for an answer. You might as well ask why I believe in gravity or the movement of celestial bodies. When the sun is out, do you not believe in the heat you feel? There is my own experience, but I also trust the testimony of witnesses I hold in high esteem. I chuckled when I said that last part. But the woman with whom I conversed asked what I meant by gravity, and when I explained the concept to the best of my abilities, she remarked that the falling of things thrown or let go has nothing to do with belief. It is simply what happens. It is the ordering of the universe. She didn’t use those words, but here am I playing the role of translator. “What is belief?” she ended by asking me. She had a slightly dismissive tone when she said it. I took umbrage only to note the conspiratorial grin twisting at the edge of her lips.

Her words made me think of the unity that seems to underpin the personal philosophy of these villagers. Man and animal and nature, all working in unison for the perpetuation of human life. It is a functional enough status, and they seem content. But it is only because they do not know what it is they are missing. There are colours they have not yet seen, music they have not yet heard, the most delectable dishes they have not yet tasted. God is the key to unlocking entirely new dimensions of lived experience. How wondrous a feeling to learn that the sun you know so well here, the nearby river whose water nourishes your family, the spark of personality unique and cosmic in all of us, the interior and exterior majesty of Creation, the mild and forgiving clime, the timbre of a child’s laugh, that epiphanic moment of understanding the formerly incomprehensible, all of these things have an Author.

Solomon tells me that the hyenas are part of that aforementioned unity. He does not fear them because he believes them to be cleaners of a sort. When a mess has been made out on the savannah—when a lion has been careless in devouring its prey—the hyenas will come along and clean away the carnage. Solomon motioned like he was sweeping a broom. He makes the beasts sound like medicine. It is a callous way of interpreting David’s death, that he was a sickness to be cured by this most animal medicine, but the thought does vellicate the imagination.

Yours,

Nathaniel

My Dearest Theresa,

At night, when the winds howl and the heat is but a mite below unbearable, I close my eyes and pray, and in answer, I hear giggling.

Theresa,

I saw a horrid sight the other day. So horrid it has taken me this long to write you another letter.

The day was ending, and I know the time, as I had only recently finished with our lesson from Scripture. That eventide, we had read from James chapter 4. I am the only one with a full Bible, but over the past several months, I’ve had Solomon assist me in transcribing the New Testament on parchment for the villagers, each new addition according to the day’s sermon. I truly felt like I was making some progress in bringing the Good Word to these people. Then, from the distance, I heard a dread, sepulchral sound. The winds had not yet picked up, so it rang clear, and it became evident before long that I was hearing the clanging together of chains.

Some shapeless thing appeared to crest a nearby hill. Lit from behind by the sun, it looked like some sort of centipede or other many-legged creature. But, shading my eyes with my hand, I saw that it was indeed a caravan of people in all states of misery. Those that were clothed wore rags bloodied about the collar and torn. Most were naked, with not even a loincloth to hide their shame. They walked in pairs. First one pair, then the next, then the next, then yet another until I divined a total of twenty figures all joined together by a length of chain connected to collars around their necks. They were also manacled about the wrist, and the enclosures around their ankles echoed that horrid noise that first announced their passage. So loud and so clear was the sound of those chains that I almost did not hear the shouting and the laughter. At irregular intervals about the convoy were slavers, broad-brimmed hats over bearded faces, and in their hands, each held a rifle, while pistols hung at their waists. And one of them had in his scabbard a machete that spoke of recent use. The captives were so bound that if one of them were to fall, the whole lot of them would collapse and tangle themselves in a tumble down the hill. Tessa, the wretchedness of it all . . .

My Heart, I wanted so badly to arrest the entire procession, but strength fled me. No. That is not correct. Courage fled me. Am I not made of the same stuff as these horrid men? Is this what my congregation sees when they look at me? When they hear me? That I am like the father, very much a mystery to himself, who screams at his child, “I love you,” not realising that the medium has corrupted the message?

I must end this letter now, as I believe a fever is taking me. A less perceptive man would think the water was to blame or one of the meals the people here have been kind enough to cook. But I know in my heart that no one could look upon that sight, upon those slaves being led in so inhumane a manner, and not be felled immediately.

Pray for me, my love. And pray for the souls of those captured. Pray too, I beg you, for the souls of their captors. That God will unharden their hearts so that they may quit this enterprise.

“To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”

Yours as always,

Nathaniel

My Dear Theresa,

I have been bedridden for some time. And I fear, in my absence, the Devil has been at work in the village. Solomon, when he brings me food, also brings news of the villagers’ doings. There was recently a stillbirth, and when he told me this, I must confess to my shame that a grain of relief nestled at the bottom of my heart. I had not imagined the previous day’s wailing.

Solomon brought me food this morning, as I could not get up from bed. When he asked me why I was ill, I told him of what we saw last week, what everyone saw last week. But he told me a thing that has left my heart immensely unquiet.

He told me that last week, no one had touched that hill. There were no slavers. There were no slaves. But, rather, one of the hyenas had finally mauled its handler. Over this, he began to weep. I suspect the sight of those slaves was an appearance so horrid that the poor boy has simply blocked it from his memory.

The Harmattan winds blow, and when the sand and dust cease to swirl, there are fewer people here than before. The villagers think a vengeful spirit has descended upon them, but I fear a more terrestrial explanation. I fear that slavers are abducting members of my congregation, and every day before Solomon leaves, I advise him to exercise caution and to be vigilant.

“Of the Devil?” he asked me when I first offered my admonition.

I paused and waited for words. When none came, I said only yes.

Do you think it is neglect of my ecclesiastical duties that has led to this Bedlam? This turmoil? When the children were caught up in learning their catechisms, there was much flowering about the place. The weather smiled kindly upon us. The pathways were filled with laughter. My presence was welcomed. Even though we spoke different languages, I felt that when I communicated with the villagers, I was being understood. Only when I saw the hyena men did I taste disharmony here.

One morning (or evening; I have lost track of the moon’s movements), I asked Solomon to stay with me, hoping that his mere presence would loosen my tongue or shift some of the rocks clogging my throat and I would be able to speak the Word to him. Instead, when I found I still could not speak intelligibly (my words, when I speak, are confused), he told me of the hyena.

(By the way, Solomon has begun to dress like a proper Englishman. When I showed designs to the local seamstresses, they fashioned him proper Western dress so that when he visits me, he more and more resembles the denizens of London. I thought, when I first proposed the idea, that the sight of him in these habiliments would bring me joy, that it might be another piece of home, of Enlightened England, that I could bring here. But now I wish I had suggested a traditional habit instead. The boy is not meant to be a merchant but rather a messenger. I digress.)

Solomon spoke of the centrality of the hyena in their stories, indeed, in the stories of all of the area’s tribes. The hyena as trickster, the hyena as light-bringer, the hyena as dirty by choice, the hyena as dirty by duty. The picture one generates of the animal is that of a complex being. He, Solomon, told me that the hyena advances from behind a mask, and I don’t know why I thought immediately of the masks I have seen the tribesfolk wear during what I have taken to be their sacred ceremonies. The masks bear no resemblance to a hyena’s face, so perhaps the boy was only speaking in metaphor.

The boy continued by telling me that if Man resembles any animal at all, it is not the baboon, nor is it the lion, but the hyena. And it is the hyena that most resembles Man. It is not a thing divided. Rather, it contains all the variegated essence of Man, his contradictions, his confusions, all of it bottled into a single, cohesive whole. And this is why the hyena figures as the protagonist in so many stories. The hyena is how the storyteller is able to talk about Man. The hyena is us, you see.

As the boy spoke, and as his words dissolved into sounds I could not pull apart, I was forced to revise my opinion of the hyena men, who have been oddly absent from this place during much of the Harmattan season. It is not disharmony they represent but rather unity. Or, better said, unison. Is the hyena the mask, then, behind which the human advances? Does the entire manimal itself wear a mask? Perhaps their function is as simple as displaying what it can look like to live unschismed with something so incongruous from one’s own self.

Does this explain Solomon’s sadness at the hyena’s mauling of its handler? Was there a dementedness that had suddenly taken the manimal?

Has that dementedness infected me?

Forever yours,

Nathaniel

Theresa, whom I love with all of my soul,

The winds have ceased and taken with them my fever. After a little more than two months, I am able to walk unaided. I can hold my implement properly for more than a few minutes at a time. My words have also returned to me. But one thing remains of my illness. One lingering effect.

A smell. Like metal and rot. I am constantly apologising to the villagers for the smell, but out of politeness, they deny its existence. As a result of this new development, however, I have done much praying alone. Where I once broke bread with them together, I now force myself to eat in solitude. My lessons have become shorter; I no longer permit myself discursions, following wherever the Spirit would lead me. I fear that the longer I stay with these people, the harder it will be for them to deny the odour radiating from me.

I shouldn’t worry overmuch. The village’s population has declined. Some of the men have told of their brethren being brought to work on the construction of a new railway. This brings me joy, as it presages the arrival of Modernity here. With it will come electricity and vehicles and all manner of modern marvels.

Hopefully, this will mean that the slavers will leave us alone. (My use of the pronoun “us” is intentional.)

One of them, a brute of a man named John, came alone one morning to speak with the village elder and left the hut angrily only to return later with a basket, placing it square in the middle of the village. Sometime after he left, we all crept close to the thing and found in it a bushel of hands. Human hands severed from bodies. The bone was visible and the blood had long since dried. Still, I could not dispel the notion that those hands were freshly separated from their owners. A terrible silence hung over us for the remainder of the day. Even the hyenas had grown mute.

When John returned, the basket was still there. This time, when he left, several of the village’s hunters left with him. I don’t suspect we will ever see them again.

Tessa, I must confess. I feel complicit. The villagers treat me as they would any guest, that is to say with the utmost solicitousness. But I know they see my colour, and they see the colour of those who have visited such horrors upon them, and they see sameness. How can they look upon me and not see a cosmic separation? A schism? I who preach of God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the slavers who throw human bodies at monuments to Modernity with grotesque glee and gleeful grotesqueness. I save a soul and the body is subsequently subject to dismemberment. I thought that this place had visited madness upon me, but perhaps it is we who have visited madness upon it.

I must remember that these villagers are not the only audience for my ministry. The souls of my fellow countrymen are also at stake. I do not wish to say that these villagers are a distraction, but it is easy to become so consumed by the business of introducing the Lord to those who have never known Him that I forget I must also minister to those who have touched His grace and refused it. Please pray for John. I will do the same.

The other day, I caught Solomon wearing the clothes I had designed for him, petting one of the hyenas. The animal giggled. I drew closer to them and found that it was Solomon from whom the sound was issuing.

Tessa,

The smell has grown worse. It sits at the back of my throat, thickening into a taste on my tongue. I feel as though my flesh is rotting. When I look at it, my skin is untouched, except for slight burning from the sun. But when I am faced by any of the villagers, my head turns in shame, and I do not know if it is from the odour or from the fact of my race.

Do you remember when first I left seminary and we had embarked upon my tour of the North Country? The Word of God did not fall immediately upon open ears. Those ears were blocked by immediate and terrestrial sufferings, and it was only by ministering to the needs of my congregants that Christ’s teachings could worm their way into the heart, unharden it as God had done with Pharaoh. But more than open up the soul to God’s grace, I was able to provide solace. I felt that, in word and in deed, the Lord moved through me. I felt I was a proper vessel, and you could see His light shine through those sooty faces. Everywhere was there a reminder of God’s majesty. I could convince others of this truth, and it was such a gift. Tessa, you were there. You saw it. Please tell me it is not an imagined thing. Have I fabricated these memories of a time when I was a vital instrument of His will?

When I speak now, no matter the portion of Scripture from which I quote, I do not feel His presence. I do not feel His strength, the warmth of His love, flowing through me. My congregation remains stone-faced. And when confronted with their emotionless mien, what little language I have left leaves me.

What is worse, foreign interpretations of Scripture have entered my head such that I cannot tell what thoughts are mine and what thoughts are someone else’s. I do not know that I can explain more than this. I read from the book of Job in the quiet of my domicile, and where before I found instruction in Job’s long-suffering countenance, I now find apathy. And not only that but a revilement, far from pity but closer to contumely. What is proven by Job’s acquiescence to his fate? That God rewards those caught in the capricious wager between Him and the Devil? Would not the lesson be better demonstrated if Job persisted in his belief in a just God and yet were to live and die absent his treasured things? Let God kill his family. Let God devastate his holdings, his land, his animals. Let God remove from him all of his worldly possessions with no promise of their return. Would Job yet persist in his faith? Were there no ram in the bush for Abraham, would he have truly slain Isaac? Would not that be a better show of his devotion? “Prove to me that you love me” is so viciously human a sentiment.

These thoughts are alien to me, yet they carry the taste and scent of me. They feel as though they have come from me, and yet I know they have not. My faith has wavered in the past, but never like this. Always, there was God’s grace waiting for me. Now, my only constant is this smell, which no amount of washing can cause to leave me.

Pray for me, my heart.

Nathaniel

Theresa,

Were you to see this new aspect of my character, you would surely laugh. Either that or you would look upon me with horror.

I have taken myself and my odour of rot on periodic pilgrimages outside the village. Some mornings, I venture past the savannah into desert. I know that I am looking for God. It is only that my throat is parched during my promenades that keeps me from crying out, as our Saviour did, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” But they do clear my mind of principalities, those walks.

So understand that it was with the utmost clarity of mind that I happened upon a piece of metal half-buried in the sand, reflected sunlight winking at me like a beacon. When I lifted the thing from the ground, a chain rattled, and I knew instantly that I held in my hands a slave collar.

I fitted the thing around my neck. When I returned to the village, I had the chain’s funereal music to announce my arrival.

The villagers regarded me with countenances carved from stone. When Paul experienced his Damascene conversion, I am certain that his hair and his face and his clothing made him appear as a madman. But is he not now regarded as the most esteemed of Christ’s servants?

The basket that had been placed in the middle of the village is now empty. When I performed the Eucharist, I spoke the words “This is my body, which is broken for you,” and I truly did believe (as I do now) that, as Christ exists in all of us, He exists in what I have consumed. “This do in remembrance of me.”

Yours in eternity,

Nathaniel

My Theresa,

I drink from the same rivers as the animals now. Already, my back has hunched. My spoken words are reduced to mumblings. Only now have I discovered this new facet of humility. When I first came to this village, no matter my God-induced belief in the equal nature of souls, I bore prejudice. It was—no, is—the prejudice of my time and place. An unspoken thing, like gravity or the sun’s heat. An assumed fact. But if I am to properly instruct these people as to the humility the Lord asks of us, such instruction must be carried out with my body. My whole entire body. Solomon still wears the proper habit of an Englishman. There is not a speck of dirt, nor a fleck of dust, nor an inch of soiling on his vestments. He has exercised an incredible amount of care with them. He will make a fine man. If he can devote himself so completely to something as quotidian as clothing, then imagine the effort with which he will launch himself at the grander enterprise of Ministry. I hope someday you may somehow meet him.

Ever yours,

Nathaniel

Dearest Theresa,

Forgive me, my love, but I have deceived you. When I wrote to you that David did not deserve his fate, I spoke a lie.

One evening after nightly devotionals with the children, I sought his company, thinking that because the man happened to be in repose, he might be in a more accommodating posture to receive the teachings of our Lord. As the stars began to populate the sky, David spoke of a campaign he had been involved in prior to his joining our company. Riding with a detachment separate from the colonial armed forces, he and a party of five others set out across a stretch of territory north of our current location, where desert forms a majority of the terrain. The industrial backdrop of their movement was the building of a railroad meant to traverse much of the desert, connecting imperial holdings and therefore ferrying war supplies—munitions as well as food—between stations. David and his group were charged with clearing the land to make way for the rail, and to hear the sanitised language of their commands is to think that this meant merely crushing rock formations or cutting through bush. But it soon became evident to me, as I’m sure it was immediately evident to them, that local villages were just as much a part of the mandate as valley vegetation.

Each watering hole they came across meant there lay a community nearby. The brusque words of warning from David and his scouts were of course mere preamble to the eventual bloodletting. It was like this in village after village, most residents scattering to nearby communes so that the entire populace was pushed farther and farther east.

One evening, David’s group was set upon by local bandits armed with machetes. He describes them as having appeared out of the night itself, descending swiftly from the air like demons to hack away at white meat, which David claims they would subsequently ingest as part of their culture. (Even without knowing the name of this tribe, I know this to be a falsehood. But I did not interrupt his story.) David did not have to bury any comrades after repelling the attack, but two of his men were too wounded to fight afterwards. Nonetheless, they rode onwards.

Several days later, they arrived at what appeared to be a small town. Larger than any of the villages they had come across and the origin, they surmised, of the group that had attacked them.

David had the idea of appealing to the town’s leaders with the promise of monetary compensation for the rights to their land so that the railway’s construction might advance nearby. None of their crops would be disturbed; indeed, the presence of labourers would mean a new market for their produce, so they stood to make even more money. Several refugees from villages David had previously “visited” made their misgivings known to the leaders, but David guessed (correctly) that they would be too blinded by the promise of wealth beyond imagining to see clearly what the Scotsman intended. Unbeknownst to most of the villagers, David and his group had sought out and recruited collaborators from within the town, telling them that the promised riches were in fact their bequest, that their portions of the pie would be much larger for not having to share them with others.

The town leaders, ignorant of these developments, invited David and his company to a lavish dinner and showered upon them gift after gift. The way David described it, this appeared to be more than simple hospitality. This was gift giving in anticipation of reward.

As the dinner attendees were sated, two members of the leader’s honour guard seized the leader and, there before the gathering, slit his throat. The aforementioned collaborators rose from their seats and proceeded to brutally gut the rest of the guests, both men and women. Another man entered, bringing to David and his scouts their guns, and the white men then made their way through every dwelling, firing upon whomever they found inside, irrespective of sex, irrespective of age. Not satisfied that they had murdered everyone, the group set fire to every dwelling, as well as the local library and temple. “In case any had hid too well,” David said, by way of explanation.

“Did you find the men who attacked you?” I asked him.

“Would it matter if we had?” he replied.

And therein lay the heart of the matter. I was wrong to suspect a delight in him at the butchery. I don’t know that he was even searching for it, hoping that in each scream, in each cry for help, would lie the source of his pleasure. Hoping that the burning flesh would please him, praying that the feel of the reddened soil beneath his boots would arouse in him some . . . I do not know the word.

No. There was about his person a blunt affect. I would dare to say an anhedonia. He had shut out the light in their eyes, the light of that entire place, and by the time the fires had ended, after two whole days of burning, the place had been plunged into darkness.

I closed my eyes as David finished his tale and turned my face to the moon. Behind my eyelids, the sky was a dark green, and this mammal continued to talk.

Tessa, I knew then that I must destroy him.

Theresa,

I felt it. I felt God’s love. I felt His warmth.

In the heat of the midday sun, I lay keening, in much distress. Solomon put his hand to my forehead and stroked grace and mercy into my skin. And when I looked into his eyes, I saw the Lord. His blessed assurance, a drink of water after forty days in the wilderness.

Tomorrow, Solomon will wear his uniform and we will go to the waterfalls.

Go with God, my love.

Nathaniel

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Christina Orlando

Tochi Onyebuchi is the award-winning author of Goliath; Riot Baby, winner of the World Fantasy Award and a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards; the Beasts Made of Night series; the War Girls series; Marvel’s Black Panther: Legends limited series; and the nonfiction book (S)kinfolk.