Page 1 of Soul on Fire
Chapter One
Deep in the Forest, Ituri Province
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
The sickness cameout of the forest as it always did, suddenly and without warning. The first to die were the children.
The morning the village of Mutumoya began to die, filigreed beams of golden sunlight slipped through the soaring canopies of the limba, wenge, and agba trees, tumbling down the gray trunks to their tangled roots rising out of the damp and dark earth like an elephant had laid down to nap. The children played in the roots, climbing over and through the massive branches, playing hide and seek with the dangling vines and eating mango and kola nut dropped from birds and bats that roosted high above. Cries from the golden monkey echoed, a screech and hoot and whistle that mixed with the drone of the insects and the wind rustling through the bamboo, making the forest sing and drum and move as a living being. By the time the sun rose above the verdigris canopy, dew shivering on the palm fronds and the lemongrass and the moss had transformed into a wet heat so thick and dense the air was almost a river that had to be swam through.
Kiyonge was sluggish and clingy when he woke and crawled into his mother’s arms instead of running off to play. He rubbed at his eyes and laid his burning forehead against his mother’s neck. She sang to him softly as she gathered wood, stoked the fire, and ground the cassava she’d harvested the day before.
By afternoon, everything in Kiyonge ached: his eyes, his head, his back. His stomach. He whined, clinging to his mother, whimpering for her to make the pain go away. She did what she could, comforted him as best she could, and rocked him as she sang him to sleep. The fever would pass, as it had before and would again. In the morning, she’d find a Moabi tree and scrape the bark for him to chew. She wrapped Kiyonge in her arms and sang him to sleep.
When he cried throughout the night and his wails spread through their small village, the elders stayed awake until dawn, dread pooling deep in their bellies.
Kiyonge’s vomiting began before he woke. He vomited even when he had nothing in him, even after bringing up the cassava his mother had coaxed between his cracked lips and the water she’d squeezed into his mouth out of a cloth. He spasmed, vomiting air it seemed, and when he finally fell back, resting at last again in his mother’s arms, his face was slack and waxy. He seemed to be wearing a mask of himself: his face but not his face at the same time. He stared at nothing and never blinked, his eyelids frozen half-closed over eyeballs that seemed to strain out of his skull.
The village called for the healer, a woman who lived three villages away and down the river. It took three boys two days on their pirogue to get her and bring her back.
By the time she returned, Kiyonge’s eyes were bloodred and he’d stopped eating. Yet still he vomited, dark foul-smelling blood flecked with black, as if he’d eaten dirt, fistfuls of it. But he couldn’t have. He’d been in his mother’s arms since he first fell ill.
His body was nothing but a bruise, mottled with purple and fuchsia and yellow spots all over his ebony skin. His face, still frozen in its waxy sag, drooped further. His skin sagged next, until he looked like an old man trapped in a toddler’s body.
The tissues holding his skin to his muscles had dissolved. His flesh hung from his bones, loose as a palm frond wavering in the breeze. His face appeared detached from his skull, as if it could slide off at any moment.
Hours passed, Kiyonge still vomiting. The color shifted, turned from a sticky midnight-crimson to a vibrant bright-red blood, still flecked with black: arterial blood from a hemorrhage mixed with the partially-digested blood from his bleeding stomach and intestines. He stank, his ruined body, the air around him. He was like a corpse unburied, terrifying to see, and like dead things left in the forest too long, something to cover the nose and turn away from.
The healer did what she could and tried to comfort Kiyonge and his mother. She brewed tea from the rauwolfia leaf and cut into Kiyonge’s skin to help his body bleed out the bad blood. She kept Kiyonge in his hut and burned a giant fire in the middle to billow clouds of pungent smoke over him as she chanted in between each bloodletting.
Kiyonge’s mother let his blood run over her. She’d never let go of her child.
They couldn’t know their Kiyonge wasn’t Kiyonge anymore. The sickness had consumed him, turned almost every cell in his body into a quivering mass of virus. He was saturated with the sickness, the virus ravaging its way through Kiyonge as it burned him from the inside out, until there was nothing more of Kiyonge to destroy.
The virus needed a new host to survive. But to escape Kiyonge, it must destroy Kiyonge.
It escaped by liquefaction.
Bruises on Kiyonge’s skin were landmarks for bruises within, hemorrhages on his organs and deep inside his body. Everything inside of him bled: his brain, his liver, his lungs. Clots tried to form but only cut off oxygen to his starving organs, including his brain. In that moment, the essence of Kiyonge perished.
All that remained was the virus, seeking escape from the dying host and seeping out of his body through every orifice. Blood leaked from Kiyonge’s eyes, streamed out of his nose, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and bubbled under his fingernails. It seeped from between his legs as Kiyonge’s intestines died. They sloughed out of him, ruined, dead organs mixed with bloody diarrhea.
His mother wiped away Kiyonge’s blood and then wiped the tears from her eyes. The healer bled him once more as the fire crackled beside them and smoke swirled through the air. She would remain strong. She had to, for her son.
The village buried Kiyonge the next afternoon.
The healer helped wrap the boy and kissed his bloody head. She blessed each mother in the village as they kissed the boy’s forehead as well. It was a goodbye and a ward, a prayer to keep whatever struck Kiyonge away from their own children.
That afternoon, three more children turned listless and clung to their mothers.
Kiyonge’s mother’s head began to ache.
* * *
Chapter Two
UN Refugee Camp outside Sake
The Congo
