It was evening and a thunderstorm was fast approaching. I was standing in the back doorway watching it come when, right before my eyes, a large eagle landed on a sparrow in my mother’s garden. The eagle slammed the sparrow to the ground and flew off with it. Three brown bloody feathers fell from the sparrow’s body. They landed between my mother’s tomatoes. Thunder rumbled as I went and picked up one of the feathers. I rubbed the blood between my fingers. I don’t know why I did this.

It was sticky. And its coppery smell was pungent in my nostrils, as if I were awash in it. I tilted my head, for some reason, listening, sensing. Something’s happening here, I thought. The sky darkened. The wind picked up. It brought… another smell. A strange smell that I have since come to recognize but will never be able to describe.

The more I inhaled that smell, the more something began to happen in my head. I considered running inside but I didn’t want to bring whatever it was into the house. Then I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. There was a humming, then pain. I shut my eyes.

There were doors in my head, doors made of steel and wood and stone. The pain was from those doors cracking open. Hot air wafted through them. My body felt odd, like every move I made would break something. I fell to my knees and retched. Every muscle in my body seized up. Then I stopped existing. I recall nothing. Not even darkness.

It was awful.

Next thing I knew, I was stuck high in the giant iroko tree that grew in the center of town. I was naked. It was raining. Humiliation and confusion were the staples of my childhood. Is it a wonder that anger was never far behind?

I held my breath to keep from sobbing with shock and fear. The large branch I grasped was slippery. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just spontaneously died and returned to life. But that didn’t matter at the moment. How was I going to get down?