Hera Oyomba By Otieno | Jamboka

“Mother,” she said, “teach me to remember.”

The chief’s eyes went wide as the water-woman reached down and placed a cold finger on his lips. He stopped breathing. Not from fear—from the sudden, absolute certainty that he had never been alive at all, only a thought that the river had once dreamed and was now waking from.

“That was before I was born,” he said. HERA OYOMBA BY OTIENO JAMBOKA

Hera did not look up. “The river speaks to me. There is a difference.”

Odembo found his father’s body an hour later, curled like a fetus at the edge of the lake. The leather pouch lay empty beside him. And Hera Oyomba was gone, leaving only footprints that filled with water as soon as they were made. “Mother,” she said, “teach me to remember

The chief laughed, a sound like stones grinding. “I think the river is a woman. And women forget.”

They called her a widow of two husbands, but that was a lie. The first husband had drowned in the river before the wedding night, dragged down by a crocodile with eyes like a prophet. The second had walked into the forest during a lunar eclipse and returned as a hyena that laughed at his own funeral. So Hera lived alone at the edge of the village, in a hut whose walls breathed in and out with the rhythm of forgotten songs. “That was before I was born,” he said

The young man’s face did not change. He had been taught that history was a snake you stepped over on the way to the market.