Little Bee

Under the jungle it was so dark we could not see our own hands, and we held on to each other very close so we would not get separated. All around us now we could hear the noises of the jungle animals moving in the undergrowth, and of course they were very small animals, just rats and shrews and jungle pigs, but in the dark they became huge for us, as big as our fear and growing with it. We did not feel like pretending we had a refrigerator or a washing machine. It did not seem like the kind of night where such appliances would help.

I started to cry because the darkness was complete and I did not think it would ever end. But Nkiruka, she held me close and she rocked me and she whispered to me, Do not be sad, little sister. What is my name? And through my sobs I said, Your name is Nkiruka. And my sister rubbed my head and she said, Yes, that is right. My name means “the future is bright.” See? Would our mother and our father have given me this name if it was not true? As long as you are with me, little sister, the darkness will not last forever. I stopped crying then, and I fell asleep with my head on my sister’s shoulder.

I woke up before Nkiruka. I was cold, and it was dawn. The jungle birds were waking up and there was a pale light all around us, a thin gray-green light. All around us there were low fern plants and ground creepers, and the leaves were dripping with the dew. I stood up and took a few steps forward, because it seemed to me that the light was brighter in that direction. I pushed aside a low branch, and that is when I saw it. There was a very old jeep in the undergrowth. Its tires had rotted away to nothing and the creepers and the ferns were growing out through the arches of its wheels. The black plastic seats were tattered and the short rusty springs were poking out through them. Fungus was growing on the doors. The jeep was pointed away from me, and I walked closer.

I saw that the jungle and the jeep had grown together, so that there was no telling where the one ended and the other began-whether the jungle grew out of the jeep or the jeep grew out of the jungle. The foot wells of the jeep were filled with the rotted leaves of many seasons, and all the jeep’s metal had become the same dark color as the fallen leaves and the earth. Lying across the front seats there was the skeleton of a man. At first I did not see it because the skeleton was dressed in clothes the same color as the leaves, but the clothes were so torn and ragged that the white bones shone through them in the early-morning light. It looked as if the skeleton had become tired from driving and he had laid himself down across the two front seats to sleep. His skull lay on the dashboard, a little way apart from the rest of the skeleton. He was looking up at a small bright patch of sky, high above us through a gap in the forest canopy. I know this because the skull was wearing sunglasses and the sky was reflected in one of the lenses. A snail had crawled across this lens and eaten all the green mold and dirt off it, and it was in the glistening trail of this creature that the glass reflected the sky. Now the snail was halfway along one arm of the sunglasses. I went closer to look. The sunglasses had thin gold frames. On the corner of the lens that reflected the sky, the snail had crawled across the place where the glasses said Ray-Ban. I supposed that this had been the man’s name, because I was young and my troubles had still not found me and I did not yet understand that there could be reasons for wearing a name that was not one’s own.

I stood and looked down at Ray-Ban’s skull for a long time, watching my own face reflected in his sunglasses. I saw myself fixed in the landscape of my country: a young girl with tall dark trees and a small patch of sunlight. I stared for a long time, and the skull did not turn away and neither did I, and I understood that this is how it would always be for me.

After a few minutes I walked back to my sister. The branches closed behind me. I did not understand why the jeep was there. I did not know that there had been a war in my country nearly thirty years before. The war, the roads, the orders-everything that had brought the jeep to that place had been overgrown by the jungle. I was eight years old and I thought that the jeep had grown up out of the ground, like the ferns and the tall trees all around us. I thought it had grown up quite naturally from a seed in the red soil of my country, as native as cassava.

I knew that I did not want my sister to see it.

I followed my steps back to the place where Nkiruka was still sleeping. I stroked her cheek. Wake up, I said. The day has returned. We can find the way home now. Nkiruka smiled at me and sat up. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. There, she said. Didn’t I tell you that the darkness would not last forever?

“Is everything alright?” said Sarah.