The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

Their creativity puzzled her. Once, Paul called her into his room. When she arrived, he was standing near the window, the sun rendering him featureless. “Come here,” he said, his calm laced with venom. He asked her to hold his manhood while he urinated into a bedpan. She thought herself lucky considering the other possibilities. And when he ordered her to point its slit at her chest, she left the room splashed yellow and drawing flies. She counted her blessings, but still: how confusing.

She would stand around after she had set the table and listen to the family give, in unison, thanks to the long-haired man whose gaze always turned upward—probably because he couldn’t bear to see the havoc wreaked in his name.

reminded Essie of: children of everlasting tantrums, ripping and roaring insatiably; stomping through fields with boundless energy; finding everything curious and funny; demanding mother’s teat; falling, finally, into rest only if gently swayed.

It was worse when the cruelty came from other women. It shouldn’t have been; after all, women were people, too. But it was. When women did it, it was like being stabbed with two knives instead of one. Two knives, one in the back and the other in a place that couldn’t be seen, only felt.

She had not yet arrived at her name, which is to say that she had not grown enough to be given a name since names came from how your soul manifested, and that couldn’t be known until it was time to transition from girl to whatever it was you chose to be after. But everyone had to begin there: girl. Girl was the alpha. Even in the womb, the healers had said, the start was there before anything might change. Circles came before lines; that was what had to be honored. When the babies arrived, they were girls irrespective of whatever peace blossomed between the legs. Girls until after the ceremony where you could then choose: woman, man, free, or all.

Women, most women, did it differently. Privacy allowed them the power to be cruel but regarded as kind, to be strong and be thought delicate.

She did not know that they would devour not just her own people but would wolf down many other tribes as well. Friendly tribe or hostile tribe, these greedy people would not discriminate, could not, in fact, discriminate. To them, her people were all living pieces of ore: fuel for engines of the most ungodly kind but, bafflingly, in the name of a god that they claimed was peaceful. A lamb, they said. She could not know that was merely a costume.

You sought the nature of something that occurred by accident so has no nature at all. Things without a nature always seek one, you see, and can only obtain one through plunder and then consumption. They have a name. They all have a name: Separation.

The difficult part was in realizing that all abandoned children seek vengeance. And most will have it.

They, the ghost cannibals, had burned everything: Semjula’s canes, Mother’s drums, Father’s blankets. The royal jewels and metals from the tips of spears they stole: adorned themselves in profane ways with them, carried them in their mouths, intended to melt pieces down to use as teeth. Gaudy displays of ignorance, no respect for the age of the items, how they had been passed down for hundreds of years from mother to son, father to daughter, each holding a piece of those who held them, blue, red, gentle, strong, shimmering once, but now stripped of their luster, debased in the grimy hands of thieves, victorious criminals who had crafted great vessels, traveled from the distant universe, but didn’t have the good sense to wash their hands before they ate. Shameless.

“My son, some people’s hearts, they just . . .” He pressed Kosii’s hands against his chest. “They just beat the wrong way.”

“What it feel like,” Adam asked quietly, knowing full well the answer would never satisfy. “To have each other?” Samuel winced, but Isaiah broadened his chest. “Like it supposed to,” Isaiah said. Samuel shifted his foot back and forth on the ground, creating an arc in the dust. “But you not afraid they might tear you apart?” Adam could find no more delicate way to say it and thought they might appreciate his direct approach because it acknowledged their bond as a fact rather than a problem.

The cosmos is on your side. It will be all of you or none of you; this is immutable. The cure is outside of our knowledge, but that does not mean that there is no cure. Do not be afraid of the dark. For that is what you are.

It seemed that it had always fallen upon the women to be the head or the heart, to throw the first spear, to shoot the first arrow, to clear the first path, to live the first life.

Thus no woman should ever be unarmed. As long as she had teeth, she had a weapon, and the toothless could find a pointy enough stick or sharp enough rock to bear witness.

It is difficult to withstand the touch of a people who only bring their hands together to sow suffering who treat the menace that they create like it is not their creation.