ISKOKI (2)

A novel, serialised. Part 2

3

SARKIN ALJAN SULEMAN

Drip…

Drip…

Roll…

Rolling down the inner thigh, warm, then slowly cooling, caking, going from a bright red to a dark brown.

There is something about blood, its smell, the life it is imbued with when it swells out of a prick in the skin, when it gushes angrily out of a slit throat, out of severed arteries and veins, when it trickles from a human. It is alive until it isn’t. It breathes as it flows, then ebbs, dies and begins to change form like the mortal body when breath leaves it, going cold, then turning stiff, then swelling and disintegrating.

I do not like the process of bloodshed. But once it has been initiated, I am intrigued, the movements, the pathways, the smell. I marvel at the very short life of blood outside the body.

Talatu, a slave belonging to one of Abdullahi’s neighbours has been rushed into Saude’s hut and I am fixated, not on the projectiles from her mouth but the blood between her legs.

Saude is calm. The slaves who have brought Talatu in are crying, begging Saude to do something, anything to stop breath from leaving her body, to bring her back to her miserable existence, because somehow, they think that being alive is better than not being alive. Well, I do not expect them to think deeply about the different states of being, especially not now that the only form of existence they know is slipping before their eyes.

Saude slips her right hand beneath Talatu’s neck and raises her upper body. She turns her on her side and rubs her back.

Talatu is not responding to any of her questions and slowly her eyes are rolling in, the black disappearing.

“What did she do? What did she take?” Saude asks the women. They are reluctant to speak. They look at each other, hands trembling.

“Will you say something?” Saude shouts.

The oldest of the women begins to speak.

“I don’t know. She mixed many things. She bled before but she did not lose the baby. Then she put something in to try to spoil the pregnancy. And then she started bleeding.”