Mami Wata's Debt

Tonye Briggs had been born on the night of a full moon, in a canoe, in the middle of a storm, and her father had never forgiven the sea for it.

She knew this about him the way she knew the creek. Not in words. In a thousand small things: the way he spat three times into the water before every fishing trip, the way he refused to let her swim past the mangrove roots, the way he stood at the window on moonlit nights with his hand pressed flat to the glass as if the sky might lean through.

"Papa," she said, on the evening of her twenty-first birthday. "Why do you hate the moon?"

"I don't hate it."

"You close the shutters."

"I like the dark."

"You are lying, Papa."

He did not answer. He was mending a net on the porch of their stilt house, his big brown hands working the cord. Below them, the creek lay quiet and green, threaded with mist. Frogs sang in the mangroves. Across the water, in the village of Okrika, someone was cooking fish and the smell drifted over, smoky and sweet.