She fell and fell. It felt as if she fell for days. Maybe time in a full place was not only different from time in the physical world but had a way of stopping and starting and slowing at certain moments. Maybe. Maybe this was the case now because Sunny saw everything around her clearly. Hundreds of red beads and several large bronze chittim fell with her. She could see Ekwensu’s body, the black filaments breaking off now, stiffening like threads of pencil lead, the wet dried leaves beginning to fall apart and crumble on their own. She heard Ekwensu’s spirit music falling out of rhythm one beat at a time, one note at a time.

“Eeeeeeeeee!” The screams of Ekwensu made Sunny’s eardrums vibrate, but even worse, the noise was physical. Like a thousand pins poking into her skin. And the mask that fell with Sunny was looking right at her. Only one of the faces faced her. The surprised face. Its eyes burrowed into hers. Its black O-shaped mouth was impossibly wide with shock. And the knob on its head glowed an angry red as it let out white smoke. Then Sunny hit the floor and her glasses flew off. She was pelted with red beads as the mask landed on top of her, and both air and sense were knocked from her body.

Sunny’s father belonged to the local secret masquerade society. She’d never thought twice about this until now. At certain times of the year, her father would go meet with “his people” and come back late at night. And during celebrations like the New Yam Festival, he’d be gone, too. Usually, his disappearance coincided with when the masquerades would parade down the road. “None of your business,” her father had snapped when she was five years old and had asked him about what it was like to dress up as a masquerade.

“Well, maybe next time I see one, I will snatch its mask off,” she’d said defiantly.

Her father had looked at her with the most serious expression she’d ever seen him make and said, “Never unmask a masquerade. You hear me? That is an abomination!”

So Sunny had learned this long before she knew a thing about Leopard society. The fact that unmasking a masquerade was forbidden was common lore among Nigerians. So after all that she’d become and all the deep African juju she’d learned while spiritually crippled, she’d defeated Ekwensu with brute physical strength and local knowledge she’d possessed since she was a little girl. She smiled, a laugh on her lips.

There was no house, no mask, and no crumbling masquerade around her. She lay on her back in a field. A field of grass. “Grass.” It was a fresh light green, and it wriggled playfully beneath her. The sky above was no longer broken open and dropping angry rain. Instead, the sun shone. She sat up, a hand pressed on the soft but firm squishy blades of “spirit grass.” And in the bright light, she could see everything clearly despite the fact that she wasn’t wearing her glasses.