PodCastle

* Author : Alicia Cole
* Narrator : Rajan Khanna
* Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
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Originally appeared in Demeter’s Spicebox #3, on Delinquent’s Spice, edited by Nin Harris.


Rated PG
Flower of Flowers, Bird of Birds
by Alicia Cole
Where the ylang-ylang trees twist scented like slumber, in the village of my grandmothers, strange birds nest. With long grey necks sinuous as river serpents, they rattle their beaks at women washing in the estuary. To steal such a bird’s eggs, it is said, will curry the favor of Mulangu. This lure, and the sweetness of the fowl when roasted, has led to a gradual decline of the race. Though once proud, surrounded by sharp-beaked sentinels, the king bird has grown sorrowful and lazy with his people’s deterioration and no longer snatches at thieves’ eyes. In my grandmother’s day, only a strong ghali-ghuchi woman would harvest the eggs without fear. After many seasons of loss, even my mother could succeed at such a task.

I love my mother as the perfume of our islands loves the sweet sea breeze, but she herself has told me – her gifts are weak tea poured from a cracked teapot. The teapot, perhaps, which her mother’s mother acquired abroad on a desert night, enamored of the stars and a traveler’s curling beard. She traveled broadly, trading her charms along with minor enchantments, healing herbs. The salt merchant’s son asked only for a kiss and a curling pod of vanilla bean to match his beard. Or so I have been told. I hold the teapot in my hands each morning to pour our tea, trace the leaf my ancestress swore on for fertility, and cradle the brown clay. All things, the women of my line say, can be made from mud. Even children.
A simple spell, really, the spell of making. Take a lump of clay from the estuary, mix in a pinch of sand from a tidal pool. Make use of a cardamom pod and some ylang-ylang flower. Say the proper words. Do not say them inland, however. There are few in the Comoros who keep to the old traditions. My family is one of those remaining. Everything her mother taught her, my mother taught to me. That is the way of our family, as steady as the passing of the seasons. Mother to daughter the knowledge is passed. Mother to daughter.
And so to the story of how my mother made me.

My mother, childless, could never learn the spell of making. Though my grandmother cupped her hands steady over the clay, coaxed the certain words from her lips, the spark of magic was dim. When her luck was right and the breeze true, my mother could make a mangrove leaf dance in the wind. She could make the shape of a cormorant with her hands. But a ghali-ghuchi woman she was not.
“When the tide is low and the moon is at the horizon,” my grandmother told her steadily, “That is the time. The king bird, so sad, will cover his head with his wing. He will ignore you traipsing in his kingdom, the moon rising like a giant egg over his shaded head.” My mother, listening, fingered the crack in the old teapot. “In the nest at the base of the ylang-ylang tree, you will find three eggs. Avoid the egg that is golden and the egg that is pure white. The small grey egg, the egg that looks sour and wants you to ignore it, that is the egg for growing.”
Grandmother stood amidst the drying herbs, a white scarf cinched neatly around her head. “Bring that egg to me, daughter,