Murder at Boutique Isabella

I was four years old when a man broke into our home. He came up behind my mother, put a knife to her throat, and told her not to make a sound. For twenty minutes the man stayed in the house and I remained sound asleep not more than ten feet away. Most of my memories from that night are bits and pieces picked up from eavesdropping but I remember my father being out of town for a military conference. We had a tradition, every time he was away he’d bring me a gift, big enough to show how much he missed me, I’d say. Usually, they were dolls and candy bars, however, that morning my father had prepared a different kind of gift. It didn’t come in a box or colorful paper. It came with bells attached at the ankles of an old woman who seemed more ancestral than living. She spoke an unfamiliar language, old and untainted, like what I imagine most languages would have been without the weight of colonial powers. The ceremony itself didn’t last long. We stood in the middle of a stuffy dark room and lit a candle. With the flame in hand, she walked around me taking exactly three steps and bending down to outline which shape my shadow had taken. By the end, I stood in the center of an intricate chalk-lined sequence of movements that were so fluid they almost resembled waves.  

The next morning I could hear them. Cluttered shrill whispers of monologues rushed through my head like a swarm of bees. They would swallow me whole during the day but grow eerily silent at night. The thick curtains kept my room pitch black and shadows (as I quickly found out) couldn’t speak in complete darkness. The alternation of chaos and silence tore my mind apart to the point of convincing my mother I had become possessed. Pastors came and went, but all I saw was my father’s cold gaze in the back of every room. Like a scientist observing his experiment, he said nothing. Eventually, I learned to control them, to count until I could recognize my voice in the clamor. It was a grueling task and when I finally got better, we gradually grew into the perfect family.

My parents had a loving marriage and were well off so the rest of my childhood went on with all the relevant milestones, though they never seemed to go quite right. The first disaster came at my eleventh birthday party. My mother decorated the whole house with bright balloons and filled the garden with all my friends and cousins. There was even an inflated castle and ice cream, truly a celebration unlike any other. But, the balloons were too bright and the castle squeaked every time my slightly larger-than-average cousin, Jack, jumped on it.    

“Kesi, do you like your party?”

My mother was a beautiful woman, tall with dark skin and dimples that shook even the deepest valleys with envy. Her smile was beautiful, but rarely genuine, at least not after the break-in. I allowed my eyes to travel from her face and down past her feet, where her shadow spoke the words she couldn’t. 

I hope she likes it. Will she smile? Maybe it was a bad idea to invite Jack, she doesn’t seem to like him much. What if I ruined her birthday? 

“I like it, Ma. Don’t worry I don’t hate Jack, he’s just loud.”

“What did you say?” Her face scrunched in discomfort.

“You’re a good mother, don’t worry.” 

I tried my best to smile the way she would. With all my teeth and my eyes almost squeezed shut by the fat of my cheeks. Though, my smile didn’t reassure her as hers did for others. Instead, it drained the color from her face and widened her eyes past their limits. My youth shielded me from the reality of my situation. It made me believe my smile was what caused my mother to look at me in such a way. So, I decided to smile less. However, youth is short and the truth is horribly persistent.

She locked herself in her room after the party (a habit she picked up from the break-in). My father sat outside the door for days, rotating from loud and agitated knocking to whispers of memories from a time before me. On the second day, she opened the door and he wrapped her in a hug so desperate and gentle you’d think she’d crumble if he held her too tight.

That night, after putting my mother to bed, my father found me by the stairs pretending not to listen. He pulled me into a side hug and we sat on the stairs watching passing headlights through the kitchen window. The light was dim and cool making his already sharp features look starved.

“How did you know?” He finally spoke.

“Know what?”

“What your mother was thinking.”

“Her shadow told me,” I replied.

I didn’t understand why my response shocked my father so much. He was the one who gave me this curse. I rested my head on his shoulder and watched my shadow follow along, though the space next to it remained empty. 

“I can’t hear yours. You don’t have a shadow,” I continued.

His breath hitched but otherwise said nothing and we lapsed into a comfortable silence. I loved these moments. Because my father didn’t have a shadow, it was always quiet around him. No stray thoughts, he allowed me to feel normal. I found myself curious about what others thought for once. These moments were always short lived though. My mother’s voice came from upstairs calling for him and with a firm squeeze of my shoulder, he got up to go to her. 

“We have to protect this family, Kesi. We failed your mother once. It’s up to us to keep her safe, especially from men like me.” 

That was the last conversation I had with my father about my affliction. Actually, that was the last conversation I had with my father. Up until that moment, I knew my father only as a father. I knew very little of the man he was outside of our family, of the soldiers whose stories of valor and sacrifice were second to none. I discovered a different kind of loneliness that night. The kind of a child doomed to hold a crumbling family together. My father had created me as a weapon to protect the woman he loved and I quickly realized that I wasn’t someone he deemed worthy of protecting. So we moved on. Tiptoeing around my mother as the perfect loving family, I started to keep the things I heard to myself. Sometimes when I’d find myself lost and couldn’t tell where the shadows ended and I began, I’d go quiet. So perfectly silent that it would overpower all the voices in the world, but it quickly became a habit. 

I made my first friend the summer I turned sixteen, his name was Mr. Kami. We had both gotten in trouble for laughing when the pastor asked for donations and on the walk back he offered me some mandazi. He owned a shop at the center of a crossroad that had a bright yellow bench with his wife’s name painted across the back in bold letters, “Isabella”. Mr. Kami was an anomaly. An honest man whose shadow matched his words so perfectly that there was a slight echo whenever he spoke. It was smooth and melodic, a lullaby in the constant chaos. So I found myself walking to his shop whenever I could and watching him work. He knew everybody. He’d greet each customer with small anecdotes about their lives and a made-up sale that had them going home with way more than they’d paid for. At times I wondered how he made any profit but he didn’t seem too concerned. As weeks went by, he started to let me watch the shop whenever he had a few errands to run. It was an easy job, I cleaned the floor and made sure kids didn’t run off with candy, but Fridays were quite the challenge. At around midday, a group of twelve boys, around eighteen years old, would meet at the boutique for Ice and mandazi. They were loud and overly friendly like most groups of boys were and they always tried to include me in their banter. 

“Hey, Kesi. Mr. Kami got you working in this heat?” The ring leader said.

Victor was a tall boy who smelled overwhelmingly like paint and sweat, but he always smiled at me. And what a beautiful smile it was. He would ask me how my day was and update me about the various shows he watched or the recent football match he’d won. I liked to believe he was my second friend.

“He likes to milk every drop of youthful energy out of me,” I replied

“Ah, so that’s why you look so old.”

He barely dodged the chunk of ice I aimed at his face before he ran off with his friends in a chorus of laughter and playful shoving. I wondered what it was like to have so many people happy to be around you. To have someone put their arm around you and trust that you’d be able to hold their weight. In a way, I was jealous of Victor. 

On Saturdays, Mr. Kami would have me close up the shop. He’d take his wife dancing, like he’d done every week since they were seventeen. I liked the shop during the day when the sun sat perfectly centered in the sky and the shadows shrunk to a whisper, conversations became a lot easier to hold. At nigh, the street lamps grew shadows to twice the owner’s size, projecting every passerby’s inner thoughts like a megaphone. I’d keep my head down and hum Beyoncé’s, single ladies. The song was three minutes and three seconds long, the exact distance to my front door.

“Beyoncé? I would’ve thought you were more of a Rihanna person.”

I stopped. I knew that voice and it was because I knew it that my head refused to look up. Don’t get me wrong, I was used to knowing every bitter thought people had about me but I wasn’t ready for his. All it would take was one look at his shadow, and i’d spent weeks avoiding any possibility of seeing it. I was enjoying the fantasy I’d built with him and I wasn’t brave enough to face reality. So, I closed my eyes and refused to look.

“Hello? Are you ignoring me? Is it because I called you old?”

With each question, he grew closer until I felt the itch of an incoming touch and braced myself. When a rough hand gently tilted my head up, I opened my eyes and there he was, wearing the same smile he’d left the shop with that morning. I would like to blame my silence on my shyness, but what shocked me was the quiet that followed his words. There weren’t any horsed whispers of brutal honesty. It’s true that people didn’t always lie but even then their shadows would echo their words like Mr. Kami’s did. My eyes trailed down his body and to his feet where they stood firmly on an evenly dusty gray pavement. He didn’t have a shadow.

“You okay?” He asked.

“Yeah, I just thought you were a robber,” I attempted to lie.

Victor shook his head in amusement and slid his hand from my chin until his arm was safely around my shoulder with a grace I didn’t know my countrymen possessed.

“Let me walk you home then, no robber will get through me.”

He punctuated his statement by flexing the bicep that wasn’t around me, and I found myself laughing. We chatted the whole way back, well he did most of the talking and I smiled along like an idiot, but he didn’t seem to mind. He told me how he painted houses with his friends on weekdays to fund their football team. He boasted about their skills and even invited me to watch one of their games. I had never been invited to things before. When we arrived home he waved at me from across the street until I entered, it was a scene I’d only ever imagined to exist in movies.

After that night, Victor made sure to walk me home after my evening shifts. Some days he’d come with a football and we would pass it around on the empty road. I was horrible, but he said it was nice practice since that’s how his opponents played. He never took things seriously, everything had a sarcastic response but it matched my inner monologue perfectly. Being with Victor was exciting, for the first time I was getting to know someone the right way, without the cheat codes. One night he came to me after a bad day, and I suddenly found myself making up stories to make him smile the way his stories did me. I didn’t have many experiences to pull from so my stories weren’t as good, but he smiled regardless. He hugged me and watched me disappear into the house. The scene that awaited me was nothing short of a cliché. My father sat in his respective seat by the window and my mother was in the kitchen listening to radio dramas.

“Who was that?” He asked.

“A friend.” 

My father wasn’t the type to interfere with my life, at most he was a silent observer.

“Be smart, Kesi, don’t get distracted.”

“I am smart.”

“The world is smarter. Boys like that are dangerous.”

“You’re not at war anymore. You don’t have to be scared of everything.”

“War is not the only place people get hurt, Kesi.”

By the end of our conversation, we stood face to face. My father was a cautious man, constantly looking over his shoulder for a threat. He brought a heaviness to every room he entered which caused people to panic and send their thoughts into chaos. He wasn’t always like that, at least that’s what my mother said, he’d changed after the break-in. It never made sense to me, how wanting to protect your family could make you suddenly forget to love them. My mother’s shuffled footsteps broke our stare and like that we slid into our respective characters. My father the doting husband and me the child with the unexplainable chip on their shoulder.

My room felt too small that night, I’d outgrown my skin and couldn’t stop pacing, so I thought about Victor and the peace he brought me. The decision was simple, I cracked open my window and climbed down. I didn’t know where Victor lived, so I headed to the only place I knew. It was too late for the shop to be open, but I still hoped to see someone. Anyone. I wasn’t a lucky person, that’s a fact, but when I turned the corner and saw a broad back hunched over the shop’s front door it felt nothing short of destiny. It was rare to see Victor without a smile, his face set flat and empty like my father did when he was alone with his thoughts. I whistled and he turned to look at me. When the recognition set in, he smiled and it pulled me in like a siren.

“Mr. Kami forgot something.” He explained.

“I didn’t ask.”

We stood in silence for a while, just staring at each other. He seemed tired, his clothes were wrinkled and the light from the streetlamp made the sweat on his brow glisten.

“I’m not running away, I just took a walk,” I blurted when the silence dragged.

“I didn’t ask.” 

I nodded a bit embarrassed. He sat on the bench and patted the spot next to him for me to sit. Like usual he filled me in on his day. He told me jokes he heard on the field and soon enough we were laughing and shoving each other. Victor had a gift, a way of making even the heaviest thoughts seem feather-light. When we ran out of conversation we just looked at the stars until I felt Victor’s head land on my shoulder. My heart began to beat like it was trying to escape, but I had to remain calm. I’d watched enough movies to know how fragile moments like these could be. I sat stiff as a rock until the chilled summer night got the best of me. Gently moving Victor’s head from my shoulder, I grabbed the keys from his pocket. Mr. Kami always kept a blanket in the back by the freezer for nights like these. 

The light from the freezer cast a blue light through the shop just bright enough for me to see slight shapes. It was easy enough to find the blanket, but the creaking of Mr.Kami’s office door stopped me in my tracks. He always made sure to lock that door, even when he left me in charge. Nerves bundled in the back of my throat as I approached the open door and pushed it all the way open. Mr. Kami was sitting in his chair with his head bowed on his table as if he had fallen asleep mid-work.

“You might wanna head home before Isabella comes to get you herself.”

I joked as I approached his chair. I called his name and with a final shove, he fell from his chair and hit the ground with a deafening thud. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot as he lay on the ground staring up at me. Before that, the last time I’d seen a dead person was at my grandma’s funeral when I was ten. She looked asleep as if all I had to do was call her name and she’d wake up, but Mr. Kami didn’t look asleep. He looked trapped, stuck in whatever agony his final moments brought and I found myself stuck with him. The closing of the office door brought me back to my senses.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Victor said.

His voice was different, curt, and decisive. Dread ran through my veins like lava. I refused to believe it. I pointed to Mr. Kami and desperately tried to string together a sentence but all that I could come up with were a few whimpers. He walked over to me the same way he always had, but now I could see that his quiet strides weren’t those of an athlete but a hunter. I flinched at his approach and he doubled in size right before my eyes. Had he always been so large? How could I have not seen it?

“He tried to separate us, Kesi. He told me I wasn’t good for you. I couldn’t let him take you away from me. You understand right?”

He had backed me into a corner, his hand reached out to touch my chin and I shivered in disgust. He took back his hand and stared at me. His eyes searched as I stood frozen, they traveled from every feature of my face until he finally settled back to my eyes. He nodded as if he’d finally come to a decision, and I knew I had to run. I dove under his arm and made for the exit, but he was faster. He grabbed a fist full of my braids and yanked me back to him.

“Don’t make me do this.” He whispered in my ear.

I channeled every self-defense lesson my father taught me and slammed my head back into his face. The impact rattled my brain, but I didn’t stay long enough for my vision to clear. I made for the door again, but his grip was still strong in my hair. I pulled until my short hair slipped through the extensions and I hit the ground. In an instant, he was on top of me with both his hands around my neck. My father had prepared me for moments like these but he never taught me how to defend myself when the enemy was a friend.

Pressure began to build in my head from the lack of oxygen, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His focused gaze, which I had always liked since it seemed as though nothing or no one else was deserving in his eyes, was suddenly frightening. How could I have missed it? I had deluded myself into thinking it might be love and my only friend paid the price for my foolishness. I moved my eyes to Mr. Kami, but all I could see were his feet from where he fell behind the desk. I couldn’t let myself die there, I had to tell his wife what happened. 

I kept my left hand clawing at Victor to distract from the other reaching for the keys I’d put in my pocket. I curled my fist around them, leaving the longest one to stick out, and used the remaining strength I had to aim the tip straight to his temple. He yelled out and released his grip from my neck long enough for me to catch my breath, but I had no time to rejoice. I brought my knees in, planted my feet on his chest, and shoved him. The back of his head hit the edge of the desk with a sickening crack and he landed by Mr. Kami’s feet. I didn’t stay long enough to see what I’d done. I took off and didn’t stop until I slammed into my front door. I knocked loud and consistent until my father finally opened. He was standing in his robe, his large frame taking up most of the door. He was big, way bigger than Victor. That realization was enough to drain the adrenaline from my body and I collapsed into his arms.

“What happened?” He asked.

All I could do was whisper Mr. Kami’s name over and over. He walked me to the kitchen and handed me a cup of water before running out the door. I stood there staring at the corner my father had disappeared around and allowed my sobs to dwindle into hiccups. I noticed how the light from the kitchen window made the shadows in the room slant. The knives and forks stuck up from the drying rack and stretched off the counter to halfway across the floor. The faucet lost its curve and shot in a straight line, and right there in the middle of the floor, was a floating shadow of a cup. I didn’t hear my father come back, nor did I look up when I heard him. He walked around the kitchen table and I watched the shadows wrap around him fluidly, the same way a river moved around debris. Over, under, and around but never integrating. He came and stood beside me.“Is Victor dead?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t mean to,” the knot in my neck made it hard to speak but I had to tell him. “He wouldn’t let go. I didn’t mean to, I swear.”

“You did what you had to do. You protected yourself.” 

His tone was close to what other parents would use to congratulate their children on their graduation. I couldn’t respond. The room was too quiet.

“Can you see them?” I asked.

“What?”

“Our shadows.”

I had felt it earlier, a shift in weight ever so subtle that I couldn't tell if it was from a loss or a gain. 

“What kind of question is that? Of course, I can.”

His warm hand wrapped around mine that was desperately clutching the cup. He moved them around as if to prove it to me but all I could see was the glass moving side to side, the way we should’ve been.

“I don’t have one anymore,” I said.

The tightening of my throat came as a surprise. I had never considered the possibility of losing my shadow. I’d thought about what it meant for Victor and my father to have no shadow, but I figured they had to have been born that way. It never crossed my mind that they’d once had shadows too.

We looked at each other, my father’s hand still firmly wrapped around mine. It wasn’t as comforting as it once was, this silence came at too high of a price. My mother came down the stairs, complaining about being left alone, and instantly dropped my hand and we both looked up with carefully rehearsed smiles. It had become too easy to lie to her. I watched her feet descend the stairs, her shadow stretching behind her in zigzags. 

Looks like they’ve finally made up. They’re too much alike for their own good.

The shriek of her thoughts filled the room the same way they always have, and my heart ached. That morning my father went to the police to report the deaths. He took me with him as a way to teach me responsibility, or so he said. I believe he just wanted to show off. He was enjoying it, he put his arm around me tighter than usual and he smiled with all his teeth as he introduced me to the whole police force. He took the blame for everything. He said he walked in and saw Victor attack Mr. Kami and when Victor turned to attack him as well, he fought back. Of course, being the decorated soldier that he was, nobody doubted his story and even if they had, the only other witness was me.

It’s been a week. I watched Victor’s mother bury her son alone while a few feet away, what seems like the whole town wept for Mr. Kami.

“We must protect our family from this, Kesi,” 

Father said with a heavy grip on my neck and walked over to hug Isabella. She walked over to me when they were done and gave me the same hug, warm and reassuring, the way Mr. Kami’s had been.

Poor thing. She loved him so much.

Her shadow whispered and I broke down. Throughout this whole mess I haven’t shed a single tear, mostly because I don’t know what to cry about first, but her words were too heavy. After the funeral, everyone shared their favorite memory of Mr. Kami but all I could do was watch their shadows. It became a compulsion these last few days, checking the bottom of every stranger’s feet. I have to be sure. My father gave me this gift as a shield to protect my family, but instead I chose to see it as a curse. I’ve been naïve, standing confidently on the wrong side of the front lines and confidently declaring the other my enemy. Its not the whispers of shadows I should’ve feared but the silence of the ones without. The goodbyes for the funeral took an hour and at the end my father and I walked home, shadowless, in an unsuspecting town.