Chapter Two
600 Words
The Drum That Changed Its Voice
The village drum had many voices.
It announced festivals, births, marriages, and funerals.
That afternoon, its voice was wrong.
Ama was playing ampe with other children when the sound rolled across the village—slow, heavy, unfamiliar. Women froze. Men dropped their tools. Birds scattered into the sky as if chased by an unseen hand.
Ama felt fear before she understood it.
She saw her mother’s basket abandoned near the market path. Smoked fish lay spilled like forgotten dreams, dust clinging to their silver skins. Her mother never left her basket like that. Never.
Ama ran.
A crowd had gathered near the old baobab tree—the ancient witness of the village’s joys and griefs. People whispered. Some cried openly. Others stared at the ground as if the earth itself had betrayed them.
And there, on the earth, lay her mother.
Still.
Too still.
Ama pushed through the bodies. “Mama?” she called softly. Then louder. “Mama!”
No answer.
She shook her mother’s arm. It was cold.
In that moment, the world cracked.
Sorrow did not arrive loudly. It entered quietly and sat heavily on Ama’s chest.
She fell to her knees, her breath caught somewhere between her throat and her heart. The sky above her seemed suddenly too wide, too indifferent. She pressed her ear to her mother’s chest, listening desperately for a heartbeat she already knew was gone.
“Mama, wake up,” she whispered, as if sleep were the problem. “Please. I’m here.”
An old woman wailed, a sound so sharp it tore through the air. That cry unlocked the village’s grief. Women beat their chests. Men covered their faces with trembling hands. Someone pulled Ama back, but she clung to her mother’s cloth, refusing to let go.
“She has gone,” a voice said gently. “Ama, child… your mother has gone to the ancestors.”
The words made no sense. Gone where? Her mother had not said goodbye. She had promised to bring roasted groundnuts home. She had braided Ama’s hair that morning, humming an old song about rivers that never dry.
Ama screamed then—a raw, broken sound that did not sound like it came from a child. It came from somewhere deeper, older, a place where pain had no language.
The drum sounded again, slower now, confirming what everyone already knew. Its voice carried sorrow from compound to compound, from farm to farm. By evening, the entire village would know that Akosua, the woman with the warm laughter and patient hands, was no more.
Ama was led home between two women. Her feet dragged on the red earth. She did not cry anymore. Her tears had run out too quickly, like a stream swallowed by dry season. Inside her, something had gone numb.
Her mother’s room smelled of smoke and shea butter. Ama sat on the mat, staring at the calabash her mother used every morning. Everything was the same—yet nothing was.
As night fell, mourners arrived with lanterns and quiet voices. The elders spoke in low tones. Someone covered the mirrors. Someone else lit a fire that would burn until dawn. Ama sat in a corner, small and silent, holding her knees to her chest.
She listened to the drum through the night.
Each beat felt like a question with no answer.
By morning, Ama would be called an orphan.
But that night, she was just a child waiting for her mother to come home—
and learning, for the first time, that some waits last forever.
- Writer
