Sunny just held up a hand. Enough. Enough. Enough. “I’m going to Sugar Cream’s. I’ll see you later.”

18

CLOUDY SKIES

The next morning was a Sunday and Sunny was glad. She hadn’t slept at all. Every time she started to drift off, she remembered that her spirit face was missing and she’d wake up. “Sleep is the cousin of death,” she’d once heard, and the saying came back to her now. She didn’t want to meet death without Anyanwu.

So, all night, she stared at her ceiling. Thinking and thinking. Where could Anyanwu be? What if she met Ekwensu? Where did one’s spirit face go? Did it actually “go” places like a thing with a physical body? Did it return to the wilderness, where it could lose itself in the ebb and flow of spirit? Or did it just wink out of existence like a puff of smoke? All of these possibilities made her feel ill with worry and self-pity.

She’d only been a Leopard Person for a little less than two years. Prior to that, she’d had no such relationship with the spiritual existence that was her spirit face. It shouldn’t have been so devastating to return to the oneness of Lambdom. Nevertheless, if there was any evidence that she’d become a full-fledged Leopard girl, it was the fact that this was not the case. She felt the absence of Anyanwu so profoundly that she experienced moments of complete and total despair.

She lay in bed staring at the window watching the sun come up. She saw her wasp artist zoom out of its nest and out through the part of the screen she’d left open. She heard the morning activity of nearby neighbors. And she heard all this alone, as less than herself. While staring out the window, she had an idea. It made complete sense.

She rolled out of bed, glancing at the Leopard Knocks Daily newspaper on it. She considered reading through it for any possible news about Ekwensu or even more oil spills in the Niger Delta. Instead, she let it fall to the floor and went to her desktop computer. She put on her headphones and clicked on one of her favorite links, titled Six Hours of Mozart, and turned up the volume. The music washed over her and she closed her eyes, conjuring up an image in her mind of a ballerina she especially liked named Michaela DePrince.

She imagined her in a grassy field wearing jean shorts, a white T-shirt, and black pointe shoes. As the music danced, so did Michaela, leaping, stretching, and swaying. Sunny smiled as she sat back in her chair, feeling more relaxed than she’d felt since before the lake beast incident. She called Anyanwu to come and enjoy. She called and called. And then she opened her eyes, her joy gone. She slumped in her chair. She pulled off her headphones. She crawled back into her bed and got under the sheets. She didn’t sleep.

She spent the day hanging around her mother, who was cooking her favorite red stew. She helped slice onions, ginger, and garlic, and blended tomatoes and bell peppers while her mother chopped and baked chicken and smoked turkey. As the stew boiled, she sat at the table and stared into space while her mother watched a Nollywood movie.