Song Bird

They called her dawa dawa for a reason.

They said she never walked. Instead, she seemed to glide as if she was being pushed by air. 

When her age group gathered by the river banks to play and work, she would leave her pot behind to wade into the deeper water. If you looked ahead, you would find her disappearing into the mists formed by the rushing waters. 

They said she was ama mirin, a host for a strange entity. On the day of her birth, the river had breached its banks, swelling and breaking and destroying the stilt houses of the fishermen. They said it was her who did it. They said she was announcing her arrival. 

Wherever her name was called, it was in hushed tones. Women never looked her in the eyes while men could never look away. When she walked, her beads would tinkle softly as the layers met between each stride. She never stumbled. She never faltered. She never spoke above a whisper.

They said her eyes were strange. So they marked as wuno. In their hearts, they feared for who could have eyes the colour of the sky? The medicine men, when shaking their cowries would ask the ancestors to show them where she came from. For their questions, they got no answers. She was their mystery. Their own shared enigma. 

She lived alone, far from the village and beside the river. They could never openly cast her out. She was one of them. They knew her father and they knew her mother. But they wondered- how she did not look like either of them. Who was this girl who belonged to them and yet, was so foreign? 

They said she was a stranger, a wanderer among men. They would point to the back of her hands, at the mark of the sojourner the medicine men had burned into them. "The child who insists on being born again and again must be branded for his deceit," the elders had declared. So they marked her and when she came of age, shunned her. 

They liked to tell stories about her to the other villages. They liked to say that the goddess of the waterways lived amongst them. 

"Her hair floats like cloth on water," Nana Brene boasted to her friends from Wannepon. 

"When she calls to the river, it answers her," Mma Forwa declared to the chief of Eshimo. 

Each of them had something to say about her. Outside the village, they sang her praises. But in their hearts, they feared- they feared that their words were true. 

They called Enayi of the River by many names. Dawa dawa. Ama mirin. Wuno. 

But they never called her by her name. 

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Dawa daw - fictional word meaning Bird

Ama Mirin- fictional word meaning Human host for an otherworldly entity

Wuno - fictional word meaning Odd