The Fishermen

Chapter 11: The Spiders

THE SPIDERS

When a mother is hungry, she says:

“Roast something for my children that they may eat.”

ASHANTI PROVERB

Spiders were beasts of grief:

Creatures whom the Igbo believes nest in the houses of the aggrieved, spinning more webs and weaving noiselessly, achingly, until their yarns bulged and covered vast spaces. They appeared as one of the many things that changed in this world after my brothers died. In the first week after their deaths, I went about with the feeling that a fabric awning or an umbrella under which we’d sheltered all along was torn apart, leaving me exposed. I began to remember my brothers, to think of minute details of their lives, as if through the telescope of hindsight that magnified every detail, every little act, every event. But it was not my world alone that was changed after the incidents. We all — Father, Mother, Obembe, me, David and even Nkem — suffered differently, but in the first few weeks after their deaths, Mother emerged as the greatest sufferer.

Spiders built temporary shelters and nested in our home as the Igbo people believe they do when people mourn, but they took their invasion a step further and invaded our mother’s mind. Mother was the first to notice the spiders and the bulging orbs clipped by thread-like fangs to the roof; but that was not all. She began seeing Ikenna spying on us from the carapace of the spiders hanging in the orbs, or saw his eyes looking through the spirals. She complained about them: Ndi ajo ife—These beastly, scaly, terrifying creatures. They scared her. They made her weep, pointing at the spiders, until Father — in a bid to soothe her, and having been mightily pressed by Mama Bose, a pharmacist, and Iya Iyabo to harken to the voice of a grieving woman no matter how absurd he might consider her request — dislodged every webbed abode in the house and smashed several spiders dead against the walls. Then, he also drove out wall geckos, and drew battle lines against cockroaches, whose proliferation was fast becoming a menace. Only then was peace restored; but it was a peace with swollen feet and a limp in its gait.

For soon after the spiders left, Mother began to hear voices from the edge. She suddenly became conscious of the perpetual manoeuvres of an army of biting termites that she perceived had infested her brain and had begun gnawing at the grey matter. She told people who came to comfort her that Boja had forewarned her in a dream that he would die. She frequently recounted the strange dream she had the morning Ikenna and Boja died to the neighbours and church members who swarmed like bees to our home in the days succeeding the deaths, pegging the dreams to the tragedy because the people of that area, and even all of Africa, very strongly believed that when the fruit of a woman’s womb — her child — dies, or is about to, she somehow obtains prescient knowledge of it.

The first day I heard Mother recount this experience — on the eve of Ikenna’s funeral — the reaction that followed it had moved me. Mama Bose, the pharmacist, threw herself on the floor in a loud wail. “Ohhh, that must have been God warning you,” she moaned as she rolled from one end of the floor to the other. “It must have been God warning you it was going to happen, ooooo, eeeyyyy.” Her ejaculation of pain and sorrow was uttered in wordless groans that consisted of jarred vowels stretched to precipitous levels — sometimes totally meaningless, but the nuance of which everyone there perfectly understood. What gripped those who were there even more was what Mother did after telling the story. She stood near the Central Bank calendar that hung on the wall still open to the eagle’s page — to May — because no one had remembered to change it during the terrible weeks of Ikenna’s metamorphosis. Raising both hands up, Mother cried: “Elu n’ala—Heaven-and-earth, look at my hands and see that they are clean. Look, look at the scar of their birth, it has not yet healed and now they are dead.” When she said this, she raised her blouse and pointed below her navel. “Look at the breasts they sucked; they are still full, but they are no more.” She pulled up her blouse — apparently to show her breasts — but one of the women rushed forward spryly to pull it back down. Too late, for almost everyone in the room had already seen it: the two vein-strewn breasts with prominent nipples — in broad daylight.

The first time I heard Mother tell this account, I’d felt a gripping fear that I might have received a clearer warning in the dream of the bridge if only I’d known dreams could be warnings. I told my brother the dream after Mother recounted hers, and he said it was a warning. Mother recounted that dream again to the pastor of our church, Pastor Collins, and his wife a week or so after that. Father was not home at the time. He’d gone to buy petrol at the filling station on the outskirts of the town. The government had increased fuel price the week Boja was found from twelve naira to twenty-one naira, sending filling stations to hoard petrol and resulting in long, endless queues at stations all over the country. Father stayed in one of them from afternoon until early evening before returning with his car tank full, a cask full of kerosene in the trunk. Tired, he made straight for one of the lounges, his “throne” one, and sank into it. He was still removing his sweaty shirt when Mother began telling him about all the people that had called that day. Although she sat beside him, she was oblivious of the strong odour of palm wine that had returned with him like flies trailing a cow with a fresh wound. She spoke on for a long time until he cried out “Enough!”

“I said enough!” he repeated, already on his feet, his bare arms bursting with sinews as he stood over Mother, who had stiffened and clasped her hands on her thighs. “What is this rubbish you are even telling me, eh, my friend? Has my house now become a stray zoo for every kind of living thing in this town? How many people will come to commiserate? The dogs will soon come, then the goats, the frogs, and even the puffy-cheeked cats. Do you not know that some of these people are simply nothing but mourners who cry louder than the bereaved? Will there be no limit?”

Mother did not answer him. She dropped her eyes to her thigh that was covered in a faded wrappa, shaking her head as she stared at it. By the light of the kerosene lantern on the table in front of them, I saw her eyes filling up with tears. I have come to believe that that confrontation was the needle that poked her psychic wound and it started bleeding from that day. She stopped talking, and the silence that would numb her entire world began. From then on, she sat in the house, silent, staring wildly at nothing in particular. Most times when Father spoke to her, she stared merely at him as if she had heard nothing at all. This tongue, which was now frozen, used to produce words as fungi produced spores. When agitated, words often sprang like tigers from her mouth, and poured like leaks from a broken pipe when sober. But from that night onwards, words pooled in her brain but only very little leaked out; they congealed in her mind. But when Father — fretting over the silence — pestered her daily, she broke the regime of silence and complained frequently about a presence she perceived to be that of Boja’s restless spirit. By the last few days of September, the complaints had become a daily nagging that Father could no longer take.

“How can a city woman be this superstitious?” he burst out one morning after Mother had told him she’d felt Boja standing in the kitchen while she was cooking. “Just how, my friend?”

Mother’s ire was sparked profoundly; she went into a fury. “How dare you tell me this, Eme?” she screamed back at him. “How dare you? Am I not the mother of these kids? Can I not know when their spirits disturb me?”

She wiped her wet hands on her wrappa as Father, grinding his teeth, grabbed the remote control, and amped the volume of the television until the voice of the Yoruba actor’s incantations threatened to drown out Mother’s voice.

“You can pretend you are not listening to me,” she taunted, slapping her hands together. “But you cannot pretend our children died the way they should have. Eme, you and I know they didn’t! Just go out and see. A na eme ye eme—it isn’t the norm, anywhere. Parents should not bury their own kids; it should be the other way around!”

Although the television was still on and a movie effect was blaring like a siren from the screen, Mother’s words wrapped the room with a quilt of silence. Outside, the horizon was covered with a grey mist of heavy clouds. Just as Mother sank into one of the lounges, after she finished speaking, blasts of thunder ripped through the sky, sending a whoosh of rain-soaked wind that slammed the kitchen door shut. Power vanished in an instant, throwing the room into near darkness. Father closed the windows, but left the curtain for the light that still could be got from outside. He returned to his seat, silent, surrounded by legions bred by Mother’s words.

Mother’s space in the room of existence gradually shrank as days passed. She became encircled by ordinary words, common tropes, familiar songs, all of which transformed into fiends whose sole purpose was the obliteration of her being. Nkem’s familiar body, long arms and long plaited hair — all of which she used to adore — suddenly became abhorrent. And once, when Nkem attempted to sit on her lap, she called her “this thing trying to mount my lap,” scaring away the little girl. Father, who was fixed in the world of the Guardian at the time, was alarmed.

“Gracious me! Are you serious, Adaku?” he asked in horror. “Was it Nkem you treated that way?”

Father’s words caused a drastic change in Mother’s countenance. As if she’d been blind and had suddenly regained her sight, she gazed at Nkem with weedy scrutiny, her mouth agape. Then, glancing from Nkem to Father and back again, she mumbled “Nkem” with her tongue darting about in her mouth as if it were unhinged. She looked up again, and said: “This is Nkem, my daughter” in a way that seemed as if she were — all at once — making a statement while asking and suggesting it at the same time.

Father stood there as if both his feet were nailed to the ground. Although his mouth opened, he did not speak.

When Mother again said: “I did not know it was her,” all he did was nod, and, lifting Nkem, who was wailing and sucking her thumb to his chest, quietly walked out of the house.

In reply, Mother began to cry.

“I did not know it was her,” she said.

The next day, Father made breakfast while Mother, dressed in sweaters as if sick with a cold, sobbed on her bed and refused to rise. She lay there all day until nightfall, when she emerged from her room while we were all seated, watching television with Father.

“Eme, do you see the white cow grazing here?” she asked, pointing around the room.

“What, what cow?”

She threw her head backwards and laughed throatily. Her lips were dry and cracked.

“Can’t you see the cow eating the grass there?” she demanded, opening her palm.

“Which cow, my friend?” She’d said it with so much conviction in her eyes that Father, for a moment, looked around the room as though he expected that a cow might actually be in it.

“Eme, have you gone blind? Is it that you can’t see that shiny white cow?”

She pointed at me seated on a lone chair with its cushion on my lap. I could not believe it. I was so surprised that when she pointed, I’d turned back to see — as if it was possible — if a cow was behind the chair in which I sat; then I realized that Mother had actually pointed at me.

“Look at one there, and one there”—she went on, pointing at Obembe and David—“and one is eating outside while one is in this room — they are grazing everywhere. Eme, why can’t you see them?”

“Will you shut up?” Father roared. “What are you talking about? Good gracious! When did your children become cows grazing in our house?”

He grabbed her and shoved her towards the master bedroom. She staggered, her braided hair pouring over her face, and her massive breasts dancing in her ash-coloured sweater.

“Leave me, leave me, let me watch the shiny white cows,” she shouted as they struggled.

“Shut up!” Father cried in response every time she spoke.

Her voice shrieked awkwardly as Father pushed her forwards. Nkem broke into a wail at the sight of their struggle. Obembe reached for her and carried Nkem, but her legs danced against him, as she wailed even louder for Mother. Father dragged Mother to their room and locked the door. They stayed there for a long time, their voices intermittently audible. Finally, Father came out and asked us to go to our room. He asked David and Nkem to stay with us a bit while he went to get us bread. It was about six in the evening. They agreed, but once we locked our door, we heard the prolonged sound of feet shuffling, the door slamming against the wall, the frantic cry of “Eme, leave me alone, leave me, where are you taking me to?” and the sound of Father’s laboured breathing. Then the main door shut with a loud bang.

Mother vanished for two weeks. She was, as I would find out later, in a psychiatric hospital, tucked away as if she were a dangerous explosive material. There had been a cataclysmic explosion of her mind, and her perception of the known world had been blasted into smithereens. Her senses became imbued with extraordinary sensitivity so that to her ears the sound of the clock in her ward became noisier than the din of a drilling machine. The sound of a rat came to her as the peal of many bells.

She developed a destructive nyctophobia, so that every night became a pregnant mother that birthed litters of terrors that haunted her. Big things shrunk to incredible smallness while small things bulged, bloated, and turned monstrous. Animated Achara leaves with long, giant prickly stalks — and with the preternatural power to grow by the minute — suddenly surrounded her, and began to slowly squeeze her out of existence. As visions of this plant — and of the forest she became persuaded she was in — tormented her, she began to see more things. Her father, who was blasted to bits by artillery fire while fighting on the Biafran Front during the civil war in 1969, came frequently to dance in the centre of the hospital room. Most times, he danced with two hands in the air — his before-the-war body. And at other times — the times she screamed the loudest — he came to dance in his during/ after-the-war body, with one movable hand and the other, a stump of bloodied flesh. Sometimes, he lured her, with endearments, to join him. But of all these, the visions of invasive spiders ruled supreme. And by the end of her second week at the institution, every speck of spider web had been removed from the vicinity and every spider smashed to bits. And it seemed that with every spider smashed, by every inky smear on the wall, she drew closer to healing.

The days she was away were difficult. Nkem cried almost perpetually, refusing to be pacified. I tried many times to sing her songs — lullabies that Mother often sang to her, but she would have none of them. My brother’s attempts were also mere Sisyphean rituals. When Father returned one morning and saw Nkem in this state of helpless grief, he announced that he would take us to see Mother. Nkem’s wailing instantly ceased. Before we left, Father, who had been making all the meals since the morning Mother left, made breakfast — bread and fried eggs. After breakfast, Obembe followed him to Igbafe’s compound to fetch buckets of water — our well was still locked up since Boja was dragged out of it. Then one after the other, we bathed and dressed. Father wore a big white T-shirt with a neck that had yellowed from washing. He’d grown an unusual amount of beard, completely changing his appearance. We all followed him to the car, Obembe sat in front with him, and David, Nkem and I, in the back seat. He did not say anything; he merely locked the door, wound down the window and started the ignition.

He drove in silence through the street that was, on that evening, alive and bustling. We took the road around the big stadium from which the floodlights and innumerable Nigerian flags were flying. The great statue of Okwaraji which had always inspired awe in me loomed above this part of the town. As I gazed at it, I noticed a huge slate-black bird resembling a vulture, perched on top of its head. We drove up the right side of the two-way lane leading out of our street until we reached the small open market on the clearing beyond the shoulder of the road. The car slowed down, negotiating the unpaved stretch of road littered with dirt. The carcass of a hen lay on one side of the lane, flattened against the asphalt, its feathers scattered about. A few metres away from there I saw a dog dining on the contents of a split-open bag of trash, its head lost in the bag. From here, the car moved carefully between heavy-duty trucks and semis wedged on both sides of the road. Beggars holding up placards advertising their plights—I am blind, please help me, or, Lawrence Ojo, a burn victim needs your assistance—stood like guards of honour on both sides of the open-market pathway. One of them, a man I recognized by virtue of having seen him everywhere in our street — by the church, around the post office, near my school, and even in the market — crawled by on a small slate with rollers, his hands gloved with shrunken flip-flops. Passing the Ondo State Radio Station, we merged awkwardly into the round traffic circle in the centre of Akure, in the midst of which were statues of three men beating traditional talking drums. Around the concrete platter under the statutes were cacti striving with small weeds.

Father parked in front of the yellow building, and sat a moment in the car as though he’d just realized he had made a mistake. Just then, I noticed why Father had made this diversion. Alighting from a car just in front of us was a group of people surrounding a middle-aged man who was laughing crazily and dangling his large penis that stuck out from between his zippers. This man would have passed for Abulu were he not fairer in complexion and better looking. Once Father saw the man, he turned to us at once and said aloud, “Ngwa, close your eyes and let us pray for Mama — quickly!”

He turned back at once and saw me still gazing at the man.

“All of you close your eyes now!” he barked. He watched to ensure we’d all complied and then said, “Benjamin, lead us in prayer.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I replied, clearing my throat, and began praying in English, the only language in which I knew how to pray. “In Jesus’ name, Lord God, I ask that you help us… bless us, oh God, please heal Mama, you who healed the sick, Lazarus and all, let her stop talking like a madwoman in Jesus’ name we have prayed.”

The rest chorused “Amen!”

By the time we opened our eyes, the group had reached the entrance of the hospital, but still visible was the dust-caked fundament of the deranged man as he was being forced into the hospital. Father came to the back-seat door and opened it from where I sat, Nkem sandwiched between David and me.

“Listen, my friends,” he began, his bloodshot eyes peering down into our faces. “Number one: your mother is not a madwoman. Listen, all of you, when you enter there, do not look left or right; just face straight ahead of you. Whatever you see within these halls will remain in your mind. I will give anyone who misbehaves a Guerdon once we get home.”

We all nodded in agreement. Then, one after the other, we alighted with Obembe leading, Father beside him, I at the back. We walked through the long line of flowers to the entrance of the big building whose floors were fully tiled and smelt of lavender. We entered a large hall full of people chattering. I tried not to look, so as not to get whipped, but I could not resist. So when I thought Father was not looking, I diverged to the left, my eyes falling on a pale girl with a thin long neck that moved mechanically as though she were a robot. Her tongue stuck halfway almost interminably out of her mouth and her hair was so thin and pale her scalp could be glimpsed. I was horrified. When I turned back to Father, he was taking a blue tag from the white-uniformed woman across the counter and saying: “Yes, they are all her children, they shall come with me.”

When he said this, the woman behind the glass counter rose to her feet and looked at us.

“Her children,” Father mumbled.

“Are you sure they can see her in this condition?” the woman asked.

She was light-complexioned, clothed in a white pinafore. Her nursing cap sat solidly on her beautifully oiled hair and the clipped tag on the top of her breast read: Nkechi Daniel.

“I believe it will be okay,” Father mumbled. “I have carefully weighed the consequences and believe I can manage it.”

Not satisfied, the woman shook her head.

“We have regulations here, sir,” she said. “But please give me one minute, let me ask my boss.”

“All right,” Father agreed.

While we waited there, clustered around Father, I could not let go of the feeling that the eyes of the pale girl were set on me. In turn, I tried to focus on a calendar on the wooden wall of the small room behind the counter, and on the many photos of medicine and medical instructions. One of them was the silhouetted portrait of a pregnant woman with a child on her back and two toddlers on both sides of her. A little distance in front of her was a man who was apparently her husband. He had a child sitting on his shoulder and one about my height was before them carrying a raffia basket. I could not see the writing below it, but I could guess what it was — one of the numerous ads in the aggressive government campaign for birth control.

The nurse returned and said, “Okay, you may all go in, Mr Agwu; ward thirty-two. Chukwu che be unu.”

“Da-alu—Thank you, nurse,” Father said in reply to her Igbo, bowing slightly.

The Mother we saw in ward thirty-two was vacant-eyed, and sat in an emaciated body that was packed into a black blouse she had been wearing since the day Ikenna died. She’d become so frail and pale that I almost cried out in shock. I wondered, at the sight of her, if this horrible place sucked out the flesh of human beings and deflated large buttocks. That her hair was messy and dirty, her lips flaking and dried, and that she looked so changed, greatly horrified me. Father went to her, as Nkem cried out, “Mama, Mama.”

“Adaku,” he said, putting his arms around her, but Mother did not even turn. She kept staring at the naked ceiling, at the unmoving ceiling fan in the centre of it, and at the corners of the walls. As she stared, she whispered in silent, cautious, knowing tones “Umu ugeredide, umu ugeredide—the spiders, the spiders.”

“Nwuyem, which spiders again, have they not all been removed?” He looked around at the edges of the ceiling. “Where did you find them now?”

She continued her whispering, her hands clasped to her chest as though she did not hear him.

“Why are you doing this to us — your children and me?” Father said as Nkem’s wailing soared. Obembe lifted her but she struggled with him, kicking wildly at his knees until he dropped her.

Father made to sit beside Mother on the bed, but she pulled away, crying “Leave me! Go away! Leave me alone!”

“I should leave you, eh?” Father asked, rising to his feet. His face had turned colourless and the veins at the side of his head had become deeply pronounced. “Look at you, look at the way you’re pining away before the eyes of the rest of your children. Ada, do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome?” He gestured at her with a splayed-out palm rising from her head to her feet.

“Pine away, go on and pine away.”

I noticed then that David was standing there beside me, his hand on my shirt. When I looked, I saw that he was about to cry. I felt a sudden need to hold him to stop his tears. I pulled him closer and held him. I sniffed the olive oil with which I’d oiled his head that morning and thought of how Ikenna used to bathe me when I was a little boy and hold me by the hand on the way to our primary school. I was a shy child, who was very scared of the teachers because of their canes, and would not raise my hand when pressed to say: “Excuse me, ma, I want to go and pupu.” I would rather raise my voice instead and cry as loud as I could in Igbo so that Boja, whose classroom was partitioned from mine by just a wooden wall, could hear me say: “Brother Boja, achoro mi iyun insi.” Boja would rush out of his class, and take me to the latrine while his classmates and mine were thrown into a fit of laughter. He would wait for me to finish, clean me up and return me to the class, where most of those times, I would be asked to stretch my palms out in front of everyone and the teacher would whip me on them for disrupting the class. This happened many times, and in all of those times, Boja did not once complain.

Father did not let Obembe and me return to the hospital. He sometimes took Nkem and David along with him to see Mother only after they’d disturbed him beyond what he could bear. She was tucked away for three more weeks. Those days were cold and unnatural, even the wind that blew every night seemed to croon like a dying animal. Then, in late October, the Harmattan — a season when the dry dusty wind from the Sahara desert of northern Nigeria travelled south and covered most of sub-Saharan Africa — seemed to have appeared overnight, leaving a thick, heavy fog to hang suspended in patches of cumulus awnings over Akure like a spectral presence even into sunrise. Father drove into the compound with Mother at his side in the car. She’d been away for five weeks, and had doubly shrunk. Her fair colour had darkened as though she had tanned without ceasing for innumerable days. Her hands had become spotted with scars from intravenous punctures, and on one of her thumbs was a plaster stuffed with much cotton wool. While it was obvious that she would not be the same again, it was hard to comprehend the enormity of what had happened to her.

Father guarded her like the egg of a rare bird and would often shoo us — David mostly — away from her as if we were gnats. Only Nkem was allowed to hover around her. He relayed messages from her to us and hurried her off to their room when people came to visit. He’d kept her condition secret from people except his closest friends, and lied to neighbours most of the time that she had travelled to our village near Umuahia to stay with her family to regain strength from the loss of her children. He’d warned us in the strictest terms, and with his hands pulling at the lobes of his ears, not to mention Mother’s illness to anyone. “Even the mosquito singing beside your ear must not hear it,” he’d warned. He continued to cook all the meals afterwards, serving her first and then us. He ran the home alone.

Then, almost one week after her return, we caught phrases from what seemed to have been an intense argument carried out in whispers and behind closed doors. Obembe and I had gone to the cinema near the post office earlier, and when we returned, we found Father carrying out cartons in which Ikenna had stored many of his books and drawings. At the place where we played football, most of our brothers’ belongings were already stacked in a growing heap. When Obembe asked him why he wanted to burn them, Father replied that Mother had insisted that their things be burned. She did not want the curse on them — Abulu’s curse — to be transferred to the rest of us via contact with their possessions. He did not turn to look at us while he explained, and when he finished, he shook his head and went back to the house to take more things until the room was emptied. Ikenna’s study table had been pushed against the purple wall that was covered with pencil sketches and watercolour paintings. His bent chair was placed on the top of it. Father went out with the last of Boja’s bags, and poured out their contents into the heap. He kicked in Ikenna’s old guitar, which had been given to him by a Rastafarian musician who used to entertain people on the street when Ikenna was a child. That man, with dreadlocks that stretched to his chest, would often render Lucky Dube and Bob Marley, drawing a large audience from neighbourhood kids and adults. He often sang under the coconut tree in front of our gate and Ikenna would — against our parents’ warning — dance to entertain the audience. He would become known as “Rasta Boy,” a designation that Father exorcised by the power of a smarting Guerdon.

We watched as Father sprinkled kerosene on the heap from the red can, every drop we had left in the house. Then, with a few glances at Mother, he struck the match. The heap lighted and a burst of smoke exploded into the air. As the fire gnawed the belongings of Ikenna and Boja and the things they had touched while on earth, the sense of their end filled my body with a thousand tacks. Vividly do I recall how one of Boja’s favourite garments, a kaftan, struggled with the fire. It first spread out from its compressed state when the fire caught it as if it were a living thing struggling for life, then it slowly began to tilt backwards, wilting, as it dissolved into black ash. I heard Mother’s sobs, and looked back. I saw she had come out of the room and was now sitting on the ground a few metres from the heap with Nkem squatted beside her. Father stood for long beside the heap, the empty can of kerosene in his hand, wiping his rheumy eyes and his dirtied face. Obembe and I stood beside him. When he noticed Mother, he dropped the can and went to her.

“Nwuyem,” he said, “I told you this grief will pass — eh. We cannot continue to grieve forever. I’ve told you that we cannot flip precedence. We cannot bring forward what is behind, nor can we bring what is forward back. It is enough, Adaku, I beg you. I’m here now, we will get through this together.”

A flock of birds, barely visible in the approaching darkness, had begun to circle the skyward smoke. The sky above us had now become the colour of bright fire, and the trees, now turned into mere silhouettes, appeared like uncanny witnesses of the burning as the ashes of Ikenna’s briefcase, Boja’s bags, their clothes, their shoes, Ikenna’s bad guitar, their M.K.O. writing books, their photographs, notebooks with sketches of Yoyodon, tadpoles, the Omi-Ala River, their fishing clothes, one of the tins we’d hoped to store fish in but never used, their toy guns, their alarm clock, their drawing books, their matchboxes, their underpants, their shirts, their trousers — all the things they once had or touched — rose in a cloud of smoke, and vanished into the sky.