Echoes of a Wild Girl's Drum
Some girls don't stay dead.
I was seven when they tied me to the stake.
They wanted me to burn, burn, burn like N ngi. I threw blackjack petals in her ashes, but not even the strongest herbs can make dead mothers come back. Nobody threw blackjack petals for me, but when my turn came, a boy broke rhythm for me instead - the village drummer, the Commander's ward - and he was scarred for it.
So I ran. Into the forest, into the dark. I learned to sleep where nothing could find me and eat what the forest gave and trust tree kangaroos and cuscuses before people. I forgot almost everything - except the boy who cut me loose from the stake. Except the tree where we carved a spiral with hair and blood and a poem nobody knows. Except the night we climbed so high the whole sky cracked open and I told him there were a million hundred stars. Except our beat - tap boom tap, tap boom boom tap - that belongs to no one else in the world. He was the only thing I kept.
Women burn in this village. They burn for sick children. For failed crops. For the herbs they keep. Some are tired. Some are angry. Some pass secrets. But I didn't decide to come back. Something small needed me to.
And now they know: the witch's daughter didn't die twelve summers ago.
I know the sound the drum makes before whispers spread like fire.
The air already smells like smoke.
Only now the boy who once broke the rhythm is a man.
And I am no longer seven years old.
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