edited by Amanda Helms
Content note (click for details)
This story contains references to child endangerment.Beads of sweat trailed down Olaedo’s body, drenching the goat fodder where she lay sprawled. She had bitten hard into the pad of leather clenched between her teeth; her incisors now grazed against each other. Her goats just stared at her. Silent. Olaedo pushed, harder, her body quivering under the screams she was stifling. This was her third pregnancy. With the previous ones, she’d had the midwives dabbing her with a cold towel. This time, hidden away in a barn, a candle dying out beside her, all she had was her strength. With a deep inhale, she pushed again, and when she felt a head tearing through, she looked over, making sure the child slipped gently onto the fodder. And as she had feared, the other came pushing, too. Olaedo had felt it for months, writhing and kicking inside her. Every night, she had prayed to Ala, to her mothers, to take it away. They did not. The second child slipped out, wet and bloodied, next to its sibling. Sedated by the pinch of snakeweed she’d taken every day for the past week, the twins slept still as a lake. The little ones looked like Olaedo’s mother, and all her brothers, and all her sisters. If their eyes had been open, this is how Olaedo would describe them: owl eyes, bronze eyes, sailing eyes.
Olaedo cut the children’s cords. With a cloth, she strapped them to her chest. At first, she staggered again and again. Then she ran.
Outside the barn, the moon stole behind clouds, and the stars had forgotten what it meant to shine. For the darkness, Olaedo was thankful. She made for the main hut, the one she shared with Nnadi, and found him bent over a fire, breaking palm kernels. In the firelight, the man’s skin was the sheen of tarnished trinkets. He did not see her, not until the light from the flames caught her shadow.
“I woke, and you were gone.” Nnadi stood, his eyes going to the bundle on her chest.
Olaedo pulled at the cloth, revealing the faces of the little ones. “It is time.” Her voice was a thing unbowed. A river unparched in drought. “We must hurry.”
“You should have woken me.” Nnadi’s eyes did not stray from the children.
“There was no time.” Olaedo let her impatience bleed into the words. “You would have slowed me down.”
Nnadi was one to cuddle, to linger. There was no room for it. There was no time.
Olaedo unbundled one of the twins. She undid her woolen scarf and swaddled the infant in it. Then, she placed the child in Nnadi’s hands. The man just stared down at it. A tremble came finding his hands. This was the first of his children he had held. He did not touch the others. They did not let him. The infant nuzzled into him, and warmth found the corners of Nnadi’s body. It was like holding light.
“We have to go.”
Olaedo turned to leave, and in the darkness, she found Azuka. The woman was still––a shadow on an ill-lit street.
“Azu—Azuka—” Nnadi stepped forward, shielding Olaedo with his towering frame. It was too late. Azuka had already seen.
“I heard—I heard noises.” Azuka was a liar. Everyone knew this. She once spread word she’d seen Kalu, the pot maker, holding back rain. At the time, the village had been besieged by famine. The riverbeds broke and crackled under the sun. The leaves wilted down the trees. People were erratic with hunger, and Azuka’s lies had taken root with ease. Kalu was strung up that day.
Olaedo and Nnadi lived on the outskirts of the village. No one could have heard a thing unless they wanted to. After Olaedo’s second pregnancy, they had moved there and steered clear of everyone. But Azuka was a mango fly, ever prying, ever hovering.
Azuka’s eyes darted from the child in Nnadi’s arm before straining to catch the bundle strapped to Olaedo’s chest.
“Gods. Not again!” She cupped the words as tears fled down her face.
“Azuka!” Nnadi tried to hush the woman.
It was pointless. The woman’s voice found the night wind and kited, higher, higher.
Olaedo hated it. The crying, the mourning. She hated being treated like tragedy made an eternal abode of her home. For all her misfortunes, Olaedo had wept for herself. She had wept for days on end. It was enough. There would be no more weeping in her house.
“I have to tell the elders.” Azuka wiped her running nose, nodding and agreeing with herself.
“Azuka, please, listen to me.” Nnadi tried to reach for her. The woman drew back. “We—we are leaving the village. No one needs to know.”
“Where are you going?” Azuka seemed to mellow.
Nnadi trailed on as he explained the details of their departure. Once they completed the crossing ritual, they would all be safe, and the rest of the village would never know. Azuka became rather calm, listening with a sincerity. A keenness. Olaedo hated that too.
When Nnadi was done, Azuka reached for him, gently squeezing his arm. She had initially gone for his hands, but the baby slept in them.
“I can help—”
This is how it happened: Azuka was standing. Azuka was falling. Azuka was breathing. Azuka was wrestling air. Nnadi did not see it happen. There was no seeing of it. Olaedo became night and befell her cousin like a curse. In her hand, a blade. And the blade came cutting. Blood splashed across Nnadi’s face. The man inhaled once. Blood splashed across Olaedo’s face. There was nothing to inhale. Olaedo slew her cousin with the blade that cut her children’s cords.
Azuka did not die screaming. For that, Olaedo was thankful. The woman had collapsed to her knees, her hands reaching for the gash, her hands gathering her blood like harvest. Olaedo watched her––a child watching a grasshopper struggle in a puddle. In her dying, Azuka made to speak and failed, the words flooding back into her lungs. Whatever those words were, Olaedo knew they would be lies.
“Olaedo.” Nnadi’s voice was afraid. “What—what have you done?”
“I have lost…” Olaedo stopped, exhaling for the first time that night. “…I will not do it again.”
“She had children too.”
Olaedo said nothing.
“She was your blood.”
“And now she is dead.”
She turned to face Nnadi. In her eyes, Nnadi found her. This was her, the woman she had always been, the woman he married. Ardent, true, raging.
Nnadi made to kneel to the body. He was unsure where to begin, not with the child in his hands.
“Leave it,” Olaedo called from behind him. “It will not be the first body I have buried.”
And so they ran through the cornfields, past the giant Udala tree. When Olaedo was born, her mother buried her placenta at the foot of the Udala tree. Just as her grandmother had done. Just like all the mothers before her had done. Olaedo was never allowed to bury any of hers lest they curse the land.
“Wait.” Olaedo went back to the tree, her breath falling in short gasps. She knelt to its roots, resting her head against its trunk. It was the first time in a long while she knew rest. Olaedo started to dig. She tore at the soil, debris stabbing her fingers. She clawed and clawed, stones bruising her knuckles. Nnadi knelt to help, balancing the child in one arm. Olaedo did not let him. This was her digging.
“They never let me bury the others.”
Olaedo stopped. From her clothes, she retrieved a bundle wrapped in pawpaw leaves. She had collected it right before she left the barn.
“They called me sacrilege.”
Gently, she placed the bundle in the hole and pushed the sand back over it.
“Where are they to stop me now?”
This time, when Nnadi helped her, she let him. His hands followed the motion of her hands like water finding water. Nnadi had always followed Olaedo everywhere. When they were children, he followed her to watch the spirits dance in the warm streams. He followed her to the neighboring village to steal a goat. He followed her to the heights of the Iroko trees to catch stars. And when she yelled and tried to wrestle him away, he would knock her to the ground, rather gently, again and again. So Olaedo let him wander after her. She soon found herself following him too. They got older, and she found she wanted to wrestle him in other ways. There was something about the curve of his buttocks. When Nnadi caught her watching him, Olaedo would not look away. Nnadi would kick sand in her direction, and she would lunge at him, mostly at his buttocks.
When she came of age, they readied Olaedo to join the other girls in the maiden dance. The dance was a ceremony. Young men would gather in the village square. To watch the girls sway and twirl. To find brides.
Olaedo’s mother had danced as her grandmother had done. As had all the mothers who came before her. Olaedo refused to dance.
“Why don’t they dance for me, like the birds do?”
This she had said. Then she went to her father’s farm and plucked the largest coconut. The next day, when the sun painted the waters, Olaedo found Nnadi and shoved the coconut into his hands. She betrothed him. The elders rebuked her. The elders scorned her. A woman does not betroth a man, they said. Olaedo did not care.
But the fight in Olaedo waned with the birth of the first twins. From the moment she took in, Olaedo was certain the pregnancy would kill her. She was convinced of it when two of her molars came loose. She had been swallowing pounded yam, and they just came tumbling out. Her hair was next. It left in painful tufts until she was bald. One morning, Olaedo woke up, and it was pitch black. But she’d heard the cock crow and welcome morning. Not many things frightened Olaedo. This did.
When the medicine man tried to line her eyes with rabbit feces, she slapped his hand away.
“You will never see again!” he had cursed.
“I will!” she spat back.
When her sight returned, in gratitude, Olaedo poured daily libations to the ancestors for a month.
Olaedo also spent the pregnancy hating Nnadi. She hated that he was happy and beautiful while she suffered. Her nose was the size of an avocado. The sight of him filled her with bile. She would stare daggers at the poor man until he fled from her sight. His scent physically made her nauseous too. Above all, she hated that she still wanted him to hold her each night.
When she went into labor and the children came, Olaedo was relieved to be alive. Then the midwives gasped and scattered back. Some ran out of the room screaming. Her relief faded away. Worry took its place. In between battling pangs of labor pain and fearing for her life, Olaedo had forgotten what it meant to birth twins. When one of the midwives spat the word mmụọ ọjọọ, demon, only then did it dawn on her.
Olaedo thought the children were ugly. Like the hairless sparrow hatchlings that nested in her mother’s mango tree. Their faces were red and puffy, like baby rodents hued together. They were ugly, but they were hers, and she would not part with a hair on their head. Not one strand. When they came for the children, they came with dirges and salt. Olaedo met them with bared teeth. The first priest who reached for the babies found a dagger in his shoulder. The second one found teeth where teeth should not be. But in the end, Olaedo was one woman. They took the children, and she screamed for ten days. It echoed through the village. Grief calling. The village folk thought the screaming would kill her. It did not.
When the second birth came, Olaedo met it silent. She did not touch the children. She did not look at them. When they took the little ones, she did not fight. Olaedo was tired.
People began to call her an adulterous witch. Like being just a witch was not enough. They said she had spawned with demons. The village had not seen the birth of twins in decades, so Olaedo was utterly alone in her misery. She did not speak for months. Her hair tangled and fallowed. She ate nothing, willing death to take her. And death came and found there was nothing to take.
Olaedo’s family abandoned her. Her father, her brothers, and all her sisters.
“You stray from us, and we stray from you.”
This is what they said. If her mother had been alive, Olaedo knew she’d never stray from her. Her husband’s kin were not ones for words. A line of powerful dibias, they were not ones to be crossed. They found Nnadi another woman to marry. Nnadi refused. They paid her dowry without him present. Nnadi refused. They moved her into the marital home he shared with Olaedo. Nnadi rained fire. And his kinsmen rained fire too. So Olaedo packed her things and left for the outskirts. And Nnadi followed her.
***
Nnadi and Olaedo stopped running when they came upon gravestones. It was the resting place of Nnadi’s ancestors. The children were starting to wake. The first child, the one strapped to Olaedo, yawned, stretching up against her. Even in the dimness of near dawn, Olaedo thought it was the most beautiful, most hallowed thing she would ever see.
She turned to find Nnadi gaping into the distance.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked in a hushed scream.
“Begin the ritual.”
“What—what if we went south, up Iteajali hill? What if—”
“Isi gini?” It wasn’t confusion etched into the creases on Olaedo’s forehead. It was apprehension. “There is no running from this. No village will welcome us. Our children will be slain on sight.”
“We do not know where this path leads.” Nnadi took two small steps back. “My father was the last of my kinfolk to make the crossing. We never saw him again.”
“We know it leads away from here. That is all that matters.”
In every generation, the path opened up to a traveler from the Ihedioha clan, wielders of fire. Nnadi belonged to that clan. A few travelers in times past had returned, spinning tales about a world of distant colors. Of fireflies trapped in glass. Of steel horses. Of blackened roads of tar. In this world, the houses were not of mud and raffia. In this world, they touched the sky. In this world, spirits did not roam amongst men. In this world, twins lived.
That was enough for Olaedo. When she took in the third time, the fight in her returned. And she hatched a plan to hijack the crossing ritual. Nnadi was not next in line; neither was he the most spiritually attuned member of his clan. So Olaedo helped him prepare. It took years of dedicated edification for one to make the crossing. Olaedo and Nnadi had months.
In the passing weeks, they performed the rites of rebirth, the rituals of the sojourner.
For to walk this path is to wade through fire.
Every first market day, Olaedo washed Nnadi in the hot streams of the Afor. His body burning through the waters reminded her of their childhood, how he’d follow her to splash in those very waters. Back then, the water did not scald.
The nights when the path spoke, Olaedo would balance a calabash of bat wings on Nnadi’s head and have him wander naked into the wilds. She silently prayed he did not get torn to shreds by night leopards.
Before the ones who died before you, be bare, take flight.
Between bathing in steaming waters and getting slashed by leopards, Nnadi’s nights became long, damp, and frightening. But Olaedo was there. She held onto him.
For the final rites, beneath the glow of a broken moon, Olaedo slew a goat, its body thrashing beneath her knee. She doused Nnadi in its blood and pushed him into the Orie depths. The fall could have killed him. It did not. Ancestors past had come walking through him, filling him with might. When Nnadi emerged from the stones, it was spirit fire that coursed through his bones.
Their plan hinged on Nnadi, and now he was wavering. Olaedo would make the crossing herself, but the crossing only ferried Nnadi’s kin.
Olaedo looked out into the distance. Pinpricks of light told her morning was coming. In no time, the sun would set the sky on fire.
It all fell to her now.
“If you have forgotten what awaits us come dawn, let me remind you.” She drew close to Nnadi, breathing in his air. “As they did the others, they will tear these ones from us and banish their lifeless bodies to the wastelands of Akacha. If we run to the ends of the earth, they will follow; they will not stop until our children are no more. Do you understand?” She peered into his eyes, their golden brown hue softened in the dark.
“Then we kill them!” Nnadi shot back. “We kill all of them!”
In the mountain wars, Nnadi had rained terror on the Ogidi raiders, ripping their bodies to bone and dust. An Ihedioha warrior, he was formidable. Olaedo knew this, the same way she knew it would not be enough.
“Nnadi.” Her hand went to his face, her fingers lost in his beard. “The village will rally against us. We would be outnumbered.”
“I—I cannot leave you here with these people.”
“I will be all right. I promise. I will be just one woman with one child.”
Olaedo caressed his arms with a tenderness. There was no time for it. There was no room for it. But if tenderness was what Nnadi needed to forge on, she would give it to him.
“And when they ask of me—”
“You went into the wilds and never came out,” Olaedo smiled. “Just like we agreed.”
Still, Nnadi lingered.
“What—what is it?” The words broke out of her. Olaedo did not have the luxury of breaking. “Tell me!”
“I cannot—I cannot live in a world where you do not exist.” Nnadi shook his head, his voice crumbling—the way it always did when his heart grew too heavy in his chest. His body wracked with tears.
“You can, you can. I promise.”
Olaedo wiped at his tears, but they came anyway. She brought her forehead to his, the babies, a space between them. A space too little, for his tears still found her cheeks.
“You must.” She squeezed out of his tight grip.
And Nnadi fell to his knees, the child steady in his hands. He began the crossing ritual, binding it to the bones of his ancestors.
“Ala, mother of my mothers,” Nnadi called to the winds. “Consume me with your spirit. Amadioha, the echo that is thunder, come, see the bones that bind us. Ikenga, forge me into steel, let me fell mountains. Anyanwu, light our path with fire and day. Ekwensu, be my shadow. Take us to a place far, a time, near.”
And they were gone, Nnadi and the child. Olaedo, alone on the gravestones, with nothing but the memory of them, cooed to the baby in her hands, who started to cry.
And Olaedo cried.
© 2025 by Somto Ihezue
3261 words
Author’s Note: The practice of killing twins was once a cultural tradition among certain ethnic groups in Nigeria, particularly among the Igbo and Efik communities. The birth of twins was often viewed as a bad omen, believed to bring misfortune or disaster to society. Twins were seen as unnatural beings, sometimes even regarded as evil. While the killing of twins still reportedly occurs in some remote areas, it is occasionally dismissed as mere folklore. Today, it is believed that the ritualistic killing of twins persists in some Nigerian communities.
Somto Ihezue (He/Him) is an Igbo writer, editor, and filmmaker. His works have appeared, and are forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Tor: Africa Risen, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, NIGHTMARE, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, PseudoPod, POETRY Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Flame Tree Press, Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, and others.
His work has been shortlisted and nominated for the British Fantasy Award (Sydney J. Bounds Awards), the Nommo Awards, the Afritondo Short Story Prize, the Utopia Awards, the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award.
Somto is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, and has received residencies, scholarships, and grants from Clarion West, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Voodoonauts, Horror Writers Association, Arts for All, and Milford SF. He is the assistant editor of the Publishing Taught Me anthology (SFWA & National Endowment for the Arts), and co-editor of Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology. He tweets at @somto_Ihezue, and find him on bluesky @somtoihezue.bsky.social. You can also visit his website at https://somtoihezue.com/
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