We had two eclipses the year that I met Nuru. During the first one, all the aunties in the city told us to go pray fajr outside because the moon and the sun, two signs of Allah, were pregnant with each other and would give birth to blessings on our heads. That whole day was a womb: Everything muffled and wet inside it, suckling and dark. Even the crows kept their wings bound to their bodies; the dew refused to slip off the plumeria petals. If you had been born then, you would have tried to curl back into me. That’s how the first eclipse was: It closed the sky into a belly. At school, our teacher taught us how to make protective glasses out of dusty cardboard so we could go out and look at the mooned sun. I took mine home and tried to teach your great-grandmother about science. Ona, I said, you have to look at the sun through its shadow on the cardboard, otherwise it will burn your eyes into milk. But she said she’d already seen much worse than the sky’s pupil, and that anyway there are worse things than being blind, like being uprooted, or giving birth in the middle of a desert, or having your language untongued from your mouth by the british, or not having language at all. And besides, what will cardboard protect you from? She said it’s better to use makuti, something that can withstand fire and flooding. Something you can actually make a roof out of, the thing that roofed her childhood in Lamu. So your habati taught me how to weave makuti out of the dead palm leaves that littered the road outside our house. We sat together on the kitchen floor, our sweat curling in our knees. If you soak the dead leaves you can bend them like hair, she told me, and braid yourself something strong. But when I brought my makuti glasses to school on the day of the second eclipse, everyone laughed at me because I’d chosen my bibi over science. What’s the point of being the first educated girl in your family, they taunted in our teacher’s english, if you can’t learn to dismiss your grandmother’s stories? 

Only one person didn’t laugh: The new girl, who said her name was Nuru, meaning light or luminous. Her skin was brown like wet sand and her eyes were serious and completely black. Why did your mother name you that? I asked her as we sharpened our pencils that morning, because you know a name is like a skeleton, it decides your shape. I never asked her, she said with a voice that salted the air, maybe she was making fun of me. Since she hadn’t mocked my makuti glasses, which meant she understood something about grandmothers, I offered: Or maybe you have suns hidden behind your irises, like an eclipse. I told her that if I inspected her eyes with my makuti glasses, I might be able to see them. That’s what my bibi had said: Anything can be eclipsed, even a person, even a village. Even eyes? Nuru asked, and I said yes, even eyes. But my bibi said I shouldn’t use those cardboard ones because you can’t understand something through its shadow. You have to look at it directly. I need to look directly into your pupils, I told Nuru, to see if I can find your name there.

Later, when everyone went out to watch the moon swallow the sun, me and Nuru snuck into the bathroom behind the school building. It was the kind with only a hole in the ground, no tiles or paint on the walls, just raw cement and a plastic jug in the corner for washing our kumas. There was no light in the stall except an orange bulb that dangled from the ceiling like a loose limb. We crouched on either side of the hole. Nuru, I said while inspecting her pupils with my makuti glasses, hoping the name would arrive if I called it. But her eyes stayed black as a cavity. Maybe they are just holes, Nuru said through a thick sigh, and my mother gave me the wrong name. She paused, then continued: I think I’ll change it. As if that was her choice to make. Eh! Me, I was shocked. A name is not something you can change like clothes. How can you change something that doesn’t really belong to you? On the streets, nobody ever asks what is your name, only whose child are you. A name is the skeleton a mother builds for you. You don’t choose your skeleton. That’s what I said to Nuru: You can’t change your bones. The light twitched faintly in the bulb like some kind of spirit. No, she replied, but I can break them.

From that day, I saw Nuru everywhere. I can’t explain it to you. It didn’t matter how much I prayed or in what direction I twisted my neck. The whites of her eyes were my clouds, the blackness of her irises my night. Her beauty spots were stones in the lentils I had to sort every evening after school. At one point I started collecting the stones in small bags, like those ones your jiddi uses for drying lavender and jasmine, and I would offer them to her in class the next day. Look, I would say, this is how many eyes you had in my dream last night. This is how many suns I found behind them. Or, look, I would say, this is how many ribs you had in your skeleton. This is how many names. She would take the stones and count them so carefully you would think they were money, or something more precious. Sometimes a laugh would flutter out of her mouth, a flock of bulbuls that would buzz in my ears for days after. They would circle every sky I looked up at, drawing a picture of her face with their small brown bodies. The chickens I chased down the street chattered about her; even the crickets stopped disturbing me at night and instead started singing: Nuru Nuru Nuru. That girl skied my life. It was as if she was God, astaghfirullah. She lived inside me in the way that God does, taking up residence in my lungs, punctuating my breath to remind me that she was there; pulsing under my skin like an alligator plant asking to sprout. I’m telling you this because it was not normal. What kind of girl, if not a daughter and if not God, blooms inside another girl?

When I saw her in school, Nuru’s uniform always smelled the same: Something like salt and red snapper and sunned algae. Like a body steeped in warm seawater. One day a group of fair-skinned girls, whose families strictly married their own cousins to keep their blood Arab and their genes moneyed, started a rumor that she had no family to go home to. That’s why she smells like that, they said, that’s why she waits for everyone including the mice and insects to leave the school compound before she does. But when I told your habati about this, she said: Only that girl can tell you if she has a home or not. The next day, as we watched a red ant dance around our teacher’s feet, I asked Nuru: Do you have a mother? Nuru kept her eyes in front and simply said: Do you? And the words coiled inside my ear like a newborn, like a threat or a promise, like this girl had the power to unstitch my mother from me.

In class we were being taught about the architecture inside us. Every organ, the teacher said, is connected by tunnels: Tunnels that carry blood, tunnels that siphon snot, tunnels that digest food. Tunnels that your habati said also carry spirits; all the possible roads a jinn could take in and out of you. God made a world inside everyone, she declared one night while wrapping her waist in a leaf-patterned leso, but there’s always more than one way to map it. According to her, the first mapper is the mother. The second, usually, is a husband. But Nuru was the one to somehow unmap me. That day in class, her question rolled through my ear tunnel into my heart, where it solidified into a seed. As I walked home, do you? sprouted up my spine, pressed at the roots of my ribs, threatened to undo my daughtershape. Do you? reached into all the regions my mother had sewn shut before I was even born, when she was designing a daughter with good borders inside her, and sang them open. Weh, I was scared. I tried to keep my body tight, to crush the thing by pressing my shoulders together, as if it were a cockroach that my bones could kill. I must have looked crazy folding my body like that in the street. Because I’d named it a cockroach, do you? didn’t die: It skittered up my throat and settled back inside my head, throbbing just behind my eyelids like a second heartbeat. I thought of how Nuru’s name was hidden past her irises, and wondered if that was what was beating inside me: A new name. But who would look into my eyes and try to find it? Who would check all the roads inside me for something new? I thought of Nuru’s fingers, how they curled around her feet when we sat in the bathroom stall, how they could open something up like a flower.

How do you recognize a jinn? I asked my cousin that night, our backs making a soft X in the bed we shared. She said they usually don’t look human, and if they do they might have something unnatural about their body, like a leaf instead of a toenail or no nails at all or claws instead of fingers. But Nuru had all her nails and no claws, and her fingers were definitely all bone. The next morning at fajr, I asked another older cousin, who seemed wiser since she’d already had her period for four years: How do you recognize a jinn? She sighed like a stiff door and said it was very tricky, because they are cunning and can possess people, and it would cost me 30 bob to hear the rest. I slipped my cousin the money I had planned to spend on mohogo crisps that week. She smelled it and said: I’ve heard it’s usually young girls they possess. At least in this place. She said she’d heard stories of girls who smelled like beaches and showed up in schools as new students, of long-lost daughters materializing back in their family homes, wearing different pupils in their eyes. Shortly after, their sister-cousins and friends would be found dead in the ocean. Probably they drowned them, my cousin said, you know jinns, they don’t have the same morals we do. I had also heard stories like these, about girls who were not really girls, girls who could lodge a seed of confusion inside your heart until you couldn’t tell the difference between your foot and your head. Before leaving for school, I asked one last person: That aunty with the starfish scar on her arm. What is she called? I can’t remember her name now. You know the one who always seems sad, who moves like a shadow looking for its body. She was possessed once, so I thought she would surely know. That morning she was on kitchen duty, sizzling a palmful of cumin seeds in a sufuria as deep as her own ribcage. How do you recognize a jinn? I asked carefully, trying to curve my words around her scar. A pearl of oil landed on my arm and boiled a spot of skin, my mark mirroring hers. Aunty kept her eyes on the fire and said softly: You can tell by the eyes. If you see a girl whose eyes suck you in like planets, then shauri yako, you’d do best to get away and pray for protection. I asked her what happens if the prayers don’t work. When she spoke again, her voice was so low I had to close my eyes to hear, like listening to a slightly cracked seashell. Then you’ll have to live with more than one heart inside you, and you’ll struggle to keep your ribs closed around both. Every morning the sun will knock on your eyelids and ask: Do you keep the bones your mother gave you? And every day you’ll have to apologize to your insides and say yes, because you want to stay recognizable.

***

Something every mother must do when her daughter is born: Count her ribs. Sometimes jinns give you extra bones when they possess you. If you don’t count, how will you be able to tell when your daughter’s shape is broken? How will you know what to fix? That’s what your great-uncle told me once when I was younger than you. He sat me down in the living room with the red prayer mat, the one with hairs straggling out of it like stray fathers who come into the house only to pray and then leave again, since God can punish them but their children can’t. That rib rule, he said, is the reason we were able to save your aunty with the starfish scar. That’s when he told me the full story of how that aunty used to have a jinn. I wasn’t born yet, imagine. Apparently, one day she woke up with a moonlike glow in her eyes and started speaking to the wall like it could hear. Her voice splintered as she spoke: I  need to  get    out. Out of where? Haya, no one knew. But that’s all she could say. I need to  get out    I need  to get  out. They took her outside the house where the sun spat openly on her forehead. Still,  I   need  to get  out. They took her back in and had her mother undress her in the L-shaped bedroom. I  need  to get    out even though she was naked. Of what, her skin? Mambo ya mashetani haya. Her mother was told to make sure everything was where it needed to be. To inspect the body properly, and if the body was clean, to inspect its shadow. So she checked everything: Her daughter’s pupils, her nascent breasts, the nails on both her hands and her feet, the dry skin around her ankles, the tight curl of each black hair in her armpits, and most importantly, she counted her ribs, to make sure she had the same number that she was born with. Haya! She had one extra, growing from the bottom of the ribcage like a new root. That’s how we knew she had a jinn, your great-uncle said. Body parts where they shouldn’t be. Sometimes it’s not just the ribs, it’s between the legs, or in the mouth. There was one woman whose tongue grew spikes overnight, like a cat’s, and it would prick and burn any man that tried to be with her. These sheitan things. In the end, the local sheikh came to help him exorcize aunty’s jinn. They made her walk barefoot on a bed of burning oud, so that the jinn wouldn’t try to fold itself up inside her heels and later repossess her. Bodies are like that, there’s no guarantee of being the only inhabitant. An exorcism, according to uncle, is like making a good house out of a body; a good house like the ones we used to make detours to see in Kizingo, with huge black iron gates and hired guards and glass shards piled on the walls. A good prayer is like a glass shard, he said to me, it protects your body from thieves.

***

The day I followed Nuru home, we ended up at the ocean. Around us, crushed bottles and mangled cans poked out of the sand like pimples; shreds of plastic bags fluttered like forgotten flags. And we were alone. Not like those tourist beaches, with white sand as smooth and clean as a tooth and beach boys swarming to sell 300 bob bracelets. This isn’t a house, I told Nuru, my feet sighing into the sand. She took off her black school shoes and white socks and sat down facing the water, and I saw that her feet were shaped like those wooden fishing boats that orbit the island like small moons. Thank God, she said, houses are horrible. Houses are filled with men who make knives out of prayers and beat full babies out of their wives and sisters. And those babies fall out with bruises instead of birthmarks, with their fingers and feet pre-calloused, since they’ve already walked the world in their mother’s shoes. But when their feet turn out like mine instead, big and boatlike, the mothers chase them out of the house. This isn’t what I asked for, they cry to God in secret after isha prayer, what kind of daughter is this? A daughter’s feet should curl nicely into very small shoes, the mothers complain, her toes should tuck themselves in without being asked. A daughter, like her toes, should learn to tuck in her heart and accept the husband we promise her to. A daughter should keep her hair long and drenched in olive oil so we can parade it with pride at her wedding. Look at this daughter, with her misshapen body, how her voice tumbles from her throat like a pile of slick sea rocks. What kind of man will love her? This one with her head shaved like an uncle, with feet that reject land, this daughter who is barely a daughter. Houses don’t like daughters like me, Nuru said, whose bodies eclipse their names. Daughters who whisper their names to the walls at night until their meanings wear out. 

Behind us, our shadows rippled, braiding our bodies into one thing and sprouting us extra limbs. I wanted to say: Your house sounds like mine. I wanted to say: Here are all the names that are trapped in its walls. They whisper back to me sometimes. Shameless, Mannerless, Possessed, Whose Child, Not The Daughter I Raised, Why Do You Hurt Me Like This, Don’t You Know A Mother Bears Her Daughter’s Sins, Don’t You Know A Daughter Is An Open Wound, All Mothers Have A Wound Inside Them Where A Daughter Used To Be, The Least You Could Do Is Nurse Us. But the words only swelled under my tongue, and I kept quiet. We sat in a silence that felt like a fruit, heavy and ripe, begging us to tear it open. In front of us, the sky continued folding itself into low waves. An empty fishing boat bruised the horizon. Finally, Nuru breathed. I’m not what you think I am, she said, and I said, motherless? And she said, a girl.

Can I count your ribs? I asked Nuru. I wanted to search for proof under her skin. To map out the bones inside, to confirm what structured her. Maybe even to find what it was that tethered me to her like a tendon. Surely it was a jinn. Nuru said yes, and the wind agreed, puffing her uniform shirt like a jellyfish bell and revealing a section of skin. Slowly, I pressed my fingertip against her side until I felt the bone under. One, I whispered, naming the rib. But as soon as I did, it shifted. I tried again. Every rib was slippery, swimming like an eel, refusing my language. I said: Nuru, I think there’s a bad thing inside you. Suddenly her eyes uneclipsed and shone out of her face like suns. I can’t explain it to you. It was like sitting next to a world. I was afraid that she would try to do something to me then, like drown me or eat me or possess my body, or maybe I would simply go blind from looking at her, so I started reciting ayatul kursi in my heart. And in my head I made dua: God Please Protect Me From The Evils Of What I Find And Fear. Nuru traced a circle into the sand between us, like a moon or an eye. I think there’s a bad thing inside you too, she said, and the words beaded coldly on my shoulder like sweat. I felt that seed yawning inside me again, nudging my ribs, promising to betray my mother’s careful handiwork. You have to give it a name, Nuru said then, a name other than bad thing. So it can feel safe inside you and rest. Otherwise it will just keep hurting. I said: I’m not like you. She looked at me and her eyes were planets. No you’re not, she decided, blinking the wind out of her eyes, you still have a mother. What kind of answer was that? I stared at my nails, embarrassed. Nuru had once said that nails were just bones leaking from our bodies, as if God forgot to make a clear border between our insides and the world. I peeled my finger off of her like a scale, unsticking us. If you don’t have a mother, I said quietly, then how were you born? Nuru looked at the fishing boat in the distance, the way it belly-buttoned the sky. From a womb just like everyone else, she said, and the ocean’s mouth greeted our toes.

I knew a story from your habati that called the ocean a mother. Once, there was a girl who came from the sea as if it was a womb. Except she was not born a baby or a girl. What happened was that she had drowned herself because she was missing limbs, or perhaps needed them changed—you know your habati and her confusion with bodies—and God told all the exiled jinns who’d made a home in the sea to help build her some new ones so she could have a second chance at life. Over the course of three nights, the sea jinns dug wet clay out of the ocean floor and molded it onto her body, smoothing out the edges with their flexible fingers. They plucked and collected hairs from each member of her family, even finding some distant ones who lived in other climates: Three uncles, four aunties, one living grandmother and one freshly buried, one mother, three siblings, a great-grandfather and seven cousins, all with different degrees of closeness in their blood. They planted the hairs under the skin of her arms, her stomach, the nape of her neck, and raised them like little trees. Each hair was given sunlight and fresh unsalted water that the God-fearing jinns kept in glorious gardens at the bottom of the sea. What they were doing was performing a kind of surgery, which your habati sometimes calls a kind of prayer. Prayer to make the body livable. This   time,  the jinns said in voices that would sound foreign to us, we will make  her  belong. This time  she will be  rooted. Her family  will have  no choice but   to recognize her as one of their own    the curl   of each  of their hairs    smiling from her  follicles.  This time,     they can not   make her    not belong. She   will be strong     and steady     as  a hundred-year-old  mangrove tree    with its   roots    comfortable  in the air  as in earth  as  in  water. When the jinns were done, God smiled at the results and granted the girl a new name to fill her bones with, one that fit inside her like marrow. Then she woke up between two waves that formed an opening like a mother, not knowing how she got there. She didn’t know anything, except that she’d just been born. Everything gives birth all the time, your habati says, even flowers, even men. But they all learned it from the ocean, who learned it from God. She says the ocean mothers everything that doesn’t belong. That’s why only certain people can speak to the ocean: Those whose roots have been cut, those who’ve been unstitched from their mothers, those with rocks in their throats and more than one heart beating under their chests. That’s how those people have all kinds of scars, according to your habati. Starfish-shaped scars, rope-shaped scars that reach across the chest like a vine, scars where names used to be. Loss-shaped skeletons. To this day, she says, there are not as many fish in the ocean as there are bones. Listen to the sound it makes. Where do you think all those extra daughter ribs go?