‘You are angering the spirits! You are born to this life. You have no choice in the matter.’

Toni awoke to the sound of her grandmother's harsh voice admonishing her mother in the next room. Her heart began racing. The two women were fighting all the time these days. Toni often heard them arguing at night in her grandmother’s room when they thought she was sleeping.

‘I’m telling you, Mother, I don’t want this kind of life! Let it finish with you,’ her mother cried.

‘Do you think I have a choice in the matter?’ her grandmother responded grimly. ‘You don’t choose the spirits. They choose you. You are chosen.’

‘Like you are chosen, Mother?’ The contempt in her mother’s voice was followed by a sound of a stinging slap, then a sob—her mother’s.

‘I fed you and clothed you with my craft after that no good father of yours left me high and dry. I took you in with that child of yours when you had nowhere else to go, even after you spurned me and rejected me.’ Toni could almost see her grandmother’s bony finger thrust in her mother’s face in cold anger. ‘Don’t you dare use that tone with me. I won’t take it. Not from you.’

Toni bit her lips to stop herself from crying. She’d decided some time ago that she wouldn’t cry. She’d had accepted the life of being an outsider and an outcast. She was now old enough to understand the shame and the stigma of being a shaman’s granddaughter. She had no friends at the tent school that had been set up temporarily in the village. Any friends she did make did not last a week. As soon as their mothers found out Toni was the local shaman’s granddaughter she was no longer welcome in their home, and their daughters were warned on the pain of punishment to stay away from her. Soon Toni learned to stay by herself away from everyone.

She did not understand why they paid grand sums to engage her grandmother’s services all the time, and then shunned her and her family. They came knocking on her grandmother’s door when their children were sick. They came when their husbands needed a job. They came when they started a business. They came when their spinster daughters needed to get married quick. They came when they needed the spirits’ favour. Her grandmother lived well. The village people kept her in business because she was good at her craft.

Her grandmother never showed her much affection. Toni didn’t mind. Her grandmother spooked her. Some months ago Toni had stealthily followed her to the backyard barn behind the house. Her curiosity had been aroused by the little table of food that her grandmother took into the barn every day before sunset and collected early the next morning. The food was gone every time, wiped clean. They raised no animals. They were eaten for food long ago. The barn was empty. It was now used as a shed. But somebody was eating the food. Who was her grandmother hiding?

Toni hid herself in the barn the next day, and watched her grandmother tottering in with the little table carrying an assortment of dishes. She placed the table on the stack of hay, just below the little opening in the mud wall, which served as a window. She then bowed several times, rubbing her hands together towards the table, muttering something, then left. Toni stayed behind and waited, expecting someone to crawl in, or to come out from his hiding place and eat the food. Then she stifled a scream that rose to her throat when she heard a swishing sound of something sliding and slithering in.

She turned to see the biggest snake she’d ever seen! It was twisting through the small window above the hay stacks, its forked tongue flickering in and out. Its black skin with silver patterns seemed to glow. Toni watched in horror as it slowly coiled into a sitting position and sniffed at the table as if approving it. It then began to eat out of each bowl at a leisurely pace. When it swallowed a whole boiled trotter of a pig, Toni let out a horrified gasp, then watched as the serpent stopped, then turned with a lightening speed and fixed its yellow eyes on her.

She wet herself. Her legs became jelly.

Her mother came running at the weak whimpering sound of her child that only a mother would pick up. She found her daughter crawling out of the barn backwards. Toni had been delirious, and she’d thrown up all over herself. By then the snake was gone. It had finished the meal. Her mother picked her up and carried her to the kitchen. She bathed her and changed her soiled clothes and put her in bed.

Her grandmother scolded her afterwards. ‘Never, never go into the barn. Do not provoke the spirits.’ Toni thought with fright that her grandmother’s eyes looked like the serpent’s eyes.

‘Mother, please!’ Her mother stopped her with a cold look. ‘Toni is a child! Your damned snake is disgusting enough to make anyone puke.’

After the snake affair Toni began waking up at night with nightmares. Often the snake would feature in it, with its evil eyes regarding her malevolently and its fangs dripping venom. Toni sometimes thought someone was trying to strangle her in her sleep. Thankfully, she would wake up from the numbing paralysis, but never soon enough. Her mother would often hold her under the blanket so that she would feel safe enough to go back to sleep. Only later Toni realised the spirits had been tormenting her mother long before then.