Christy Alexander Hallberg is the author of the award-winning novel ‘Searching for Jimmy Page’ (Livingston Press, 2021) and host of Rock is Lit, the first and only podcast devoted to rock novels, from Pantheon Podcast Network. She is a Teaching Professor of English at East Carolina University and serves as Senior Associate Editor of ‘North Carolina Literary Review’. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in many journals, including ‘storySouth’, ‘Still: The Journal’, ‘Fiction Southeast’, and ‘Eclectica’. Find her at christyalexanderhallberg.com and on Twitter/Instagram/YouTube @ChristyHallberg.

The night your mother swallowed the moon, the rains finally came—first in whispers, embryonic and ethereal, then with thunder, like Esu, the shapeshifter, enforcer of natural and divine laws, paradoxical and sly.

When you first lay with me you told me stories of this orisha of your Nigerian heritage, stories sprinkled like moondust from your plum lips to my ivory ears on an arid summer’s eve a fortnight ago, the air prickly and thick beneath a graceless sky.

You have never been to Nigeria, but your mother carried her religion in her belly with your sleeping soul like a curse when she came to the haunted hills of Appalachia, another land of myth and magic, a land now an empty womb, barren and begging for the rain that finally came the night your mother swallowed the moon.

Esu carries the sacrifices people make to the gods up to the spirit world, you told me when you lay with me a fortnight ago.

What sacrifices? I asked, my hand finding your waiting body, naked on the dusty ground, so new, so wanting, a continent to be discovered.

The kind that bring rain, you said, like a dream, like song.

The night your mother swallowed the moon, she sang of water, her tinny voice in sync with the dead man’s on the scratchy record playing on the stereo—Fela Kuti, you told me, a prophet from your mother’s beloved Nigeria, delivering oracles that championed the poor and drew the ire of the government in syncopated rhythm, in downbeats and eighth notes and upstrokes and backbeat, her voice and his wedded in a call and response.

Water, you no get enemy

Water, you no get enemy

We stood in the doorway of her second-floor bedroom in the haunted hills of Appalachia and watched her lithe body shimmy beneath her gossamer shift, her face, a craggy roadmap of buried truths and lost legends, bathed in moonlight, her window open, like an invitation, an incantation.

Water, you no get enemy

Water, you no get enemy

Before she swallowed the moon, your mother told us the story of the arid afternoon when more than a thousand soldiers stormed the home of Fela Kuti, the air prickly and thick beneath a graceless sky, when he was stripped naked and beaten, his bones broken, his flesh bloodied and bruised, when soldiers wrapped their feral hands around the arms of his regal mother and threw her like detritus after a storm from a second-floor window, how after Iku led her to the spirit world to take her place among the ancestors, her prophet son and his disciples carried her coffin to the gate of the Dodan barracks, delivering death to their doorstep like a harbinger.

Water, you no get enemy

Water, you no get enemy

After your mother told us the story of Fela Kuti, I clasped your hand, just as I’d done a fortnight ago, after I conjured you from the dust of my desire, when I watched you swirl into being, first in whispers, embryonic and ethereal, then with thunder, your story foretold like the sins of your ancestors, like the savagery of fire, like the coming of rain.

What of your ancestors? I whispered to you while your mother sang of water.

What of yours? you said to me while your mother sang of fire.

Before your mother swallowed the moon, she sang of water and fire and her father, a soldier who stormed the home of Fela Kuti on an arid afternoon, the air prickly and thick beneath a graceless sky, and stripped him naked and broke his bones and bloodied and bruised his flesh, then wrapped his feral hands around the arms of the prophet’s regal mother and threw her like detritus after a storm from a second-floor window then burned the home of Fela Kuti to the fabled Nigerian ground.

Nothing without water

Nothing without water

Your mother carried this legacy in her belly with your sleeping soul when she came to the hills of Appalachia, this land, haunted by the sins of our ancestors, an empty womb, barren and begging for the rain that has not come for many fortnights since before I first lay with you.

Nothing without water

Nothing without water

The moment before your mother swallowed the moon, you reached for her, grazed her gilded shoulders with your fingertips, whispered to her with your plum lips, an invitation, an incantation, like a dream, like song. We stood by the open window and watched as she threw her head back and opened her mouth and drank in the moon, light coursing through her veins like ancient rivers of fire.

Water, you no get enemy

Water, you no get enemy

Then, the moon rippling in her dusty womb in syncopated rhythm, in downbeats and eighth notes and upstrokes and backbeat, your mother leapt with gossamer grace into the night and flew to the spirit world to take her place among the ancestors, while Esu brought the rain and thunder, and you and I, our bodies prickly and thick beneath a grateful sky, clasped hands like continents to be discovered and sang of water in the house with Fela Kuti.