Some of these abstract drawings reminded Sunny of the Nsibidi she was learning to read. Not that they looked the same, but they carried a similar energy. His drawings didn’t literally move as the Nsibidi in her book did, but they seemed to move. The trees seemed to blow, the insects on the branches seemed to walk.

Then last month, he’d drawn what she’d been dreaming about since a week after facing Ekwensu. The city of smoke. It was a good drawing. Their mother had thought it was so beautiful she’d had it framed. Sunny had to look at that image on the family room wall every day now whenever she wanted to watch TV or exit the house. The dreams themselves were horrible enough.

They were worse than the vision of the world ending. The dreams were what happened as it ended. A city of smoke that rippled as it burned, that looked almost like another world entirely. It was like seeing through the eyes of a god. The first time she’d had the dream, she’d woken up, run to the bathroom in the dark, and vomited into the toilet. The second time, a week later, she’d fallen sick hours afterward and been unable to leave the house for two days while fighting a horrible case of malaria. The third time, she woke crying uncontrollably. She’d told no one about the dreams. Not even Sugar Cream. Yet her non-Leopard brother was drawing it, and her mother had framed and hung it on the family room wall.

“Hey,” she grunted, walking quickly past Ugonna to the refrigerator.

“Good afternoon,” he said, not taking his eyes from what he was drawing.

She opened the fridge, her belly growling horribly. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, had forgotten her lunch, hadn’t had enough money to buy a snack during lunch, didn’t feel like asking Orlu yet again; essentially, she hadn’t eaten since the pepper soup Sugar Cream had given her last night after the attack. She brought out three ripe plantain.

“Is Chukwu still in his Jeep?” Ugonna asked.

“Yeah.”

“His head is so big,” Ugonna said. “I don’t know why Mummy and Daddy had to buy him that! He’s staying in the government hostel, how’s that even going to look?”

“Dad tried,” Sunny said with a shrug. Chukwu was going to make a big splash at the university. Not only had he been one of the top students in his graduating class, he was the best soccer player in the area. Still, his father wanted his oldest son to really experience university life. Thus, instead of having Chukwu stay in one of the cushier private student hostels off campus, he’d insisted Chukwu stay at the more stripped-down government-owned hostels on campus. He’d have to stay in one large room with five other students. Chukwu had angrily protested, but he finally shut up when he learned that their mother had bought him the used Jeep.

Ugonna chuckled. Sunny did, too. She slit the black-yellow plantain skins and peeled them off. Then she sliced the plantain up into thin, round, slightly diagonal pieces and put them into a large bowl. She fired up a deep pan of hot oil and then dumped the plantain into it to fry. As she did all this, she resisted the urge to look at what her brother was drawing. Yet again she wondered how it was that he’d drawn that horrible burning city. He wasn’t a Leopard Person. Was someone working some sort of juju on her? On her family?