The puddle of water in the centre of Chi-Chi’s room had no source. We were weeks into the dry season. The roof wasn’t leaking and yet water pooled at the floor where my sister should have been sleeping. The bed was empty, sheets wrapped neatly and piled in a corner. The windows were open, curtains floating in the breeze.

Chi-Chi was gone. 

But I should start at the beginning, when I first noticed something was wrong.

Three weeks earlier, I found Chi-Chi in the nursery she had spent months preparing. The walls were painted in shades of pink, teddy bears arranged on the shelves. The air was thick with the scent of baby oil and powder. She stood at the window, one hand on her swollen belly, humming softly. The afternoon sun caught the gold in her eyes and for a moment she looked peaceful. 

“Only two more weeks,” she said, turning to smile at me. “Then I will finally meet her.”

This was the Chi-Chi I knew. The sister who filled our compound, danced to highlife music while cooking, called me every evening from the University to tell me about her day. Mama’s pride, the first in our family to attend University, who always had her nose in a book or sketching designs for the fashion line she dreamed of starting. 

We were once close, Chi-Chi and I. The only two Mama bore before our father passed away. She never remarried and raised us with fierce love. Chi-Chi and I often knew what each other was thinking without any words, passing messages with mischievous glares. We walked back from school hand in hand, plucking hibiscus flowers and placing them in our hair. When we were children, Chi-Chi had been my protector. The day Emeka, a bully, pushed me into the gutter on our way home from school, she tracked him down three streets over and made him apologize in front of his friends. She was only nine. She braided my hair every Sunday, even when her own looked like tangled yarn. “You first, Nnenne,” she would always say. “You are the one people will stare at when you go to church.” She had taught me how to bargain at the market, how to spot when boys were lying, how to walk through Ogwu at night without looking afraid. When we did Saturday chores, we turned the volume of the music high. Chi-Chi would moonwalk with the mop. I would throw my rag in the air and catch it while doing cartwheels to P-Square. Mama would yell at us in the background but she was always smiling. 

Everything I knew about being strong, I learned from watching Chi-Chi refuse to break. Now she was breaking and I didn’t know how to save her.  I couldn’t find the sister I knew anywhere. 

I couldn’t imagine how the father of her child had managed to deceive her. Chi-Chi was strong, goal-oriented. But she had been lonely, at the University, far from home, and loneliness made you believe sweet, meaningless words. When she got pregnant in her final year, the man disappeared, closed his shop, cut all connections and never returned a single call.

Mama cried bitterly when she found out. Chi-Chi was supposed to be our first graduate. But my sister was resilient. She had promised to have her baby and shower her with all the love she had to give. 

“I am going to be a good mother,” Chi-Chi told me that day in the nursery, her hand still on her belly. “Better than he deserved to see.”

Two weeks later, I brought Somkene to her, wrapped in a thick, white shawl. 

“Sister, meet Somkene, our beautiful baby girl.”

Chi-Chi waved me aside and turned to the wall. 

I was taken aback. Nobody expected her to act that way. She was supposed to take the crying baby from my arms, cuddle her closely to her engorged breasts and sing those nursery rhymes she had practiced. I placed Somkene in her arms anyway. When she finally looked down at the baby, she held her stiffly, arms barely cradling her weight, staring past Somkene’s face with a distant, tasteless look in her face before pushing her back in my arms. 

My heart lurched with fear.

 “Do you think it is because of the father?” Mama asked and I shook my head vehemently. Chi-Chi saw such men as weak–men who made mistakes and ran. She wouldn’t let him have such power over her.

But something had changed.

The baby screamed for the warmth of her mother’s body or breasts but found none. Chi-Chi walked past her Somkene’s cradle without looking in. She never asked to hold her. When the baby cried, Chi-Chi left the room. 

Then a week after the birth, Chi-Chi finally reached for her daughter. 

“She looks like him,” she muttered, staring at Somkene. “She cheated me. A whole nine months for you to come out with his stubborn face and chin.”

“Leave us!” For the first time in days, Chi-Chi’s eyes were bright and wild with excitement. “I want to bond with my child.” 

My lungs swelled and deflated with relief. I raised my hands to the skies in thanksgiving before leaving the room to gather scent leaves that Mama would use to make her pepper soup. Chi-Chi would need her strength and pepper soup was the only meal she tolerated. 

I was barely finished with harvesting, my hands stained green when I heard screams and shouts from the compound. 

I looked up and saw Chi-Chi on the balcony, baby in hands, smiling. It was a strange smile, the kind that told me something was very, very wrong. The baby shrieked. My mother was on the ground, rolling in the dirt, her wrapper loose.  

“Chi-Chi, nwa m, biko, come down, don’t do this.” 

            Mama, our neighbours and I were all begging her. 

She wanted to kill Somkene, not bond with her. Praying for a miracle that slowed time, I tiptoed upstairs to the balcony, sneaked up behind her, yanked her back, and grabbed the baby from her hands. 

“Chi Chi, ara o na agba gi?! Are you mad? What kind of mother thinks of doing this to her child?” were the questions that hovered above us when we gathered in the sitting room, heads bowed like we were mourning. 

Chi-Chi just stared into the void, her eyes blank. 

After that day, my sister was given a new name: Chi-Chi onye ara – Chi-Chi the mad woman. I was christened, “Nnenne, nwanne Chi-Chi, onye ara” – Nnenne, the sister of Chi-Chi the mad woman. Little children trailed me everywhere, clapping, making up songs referencing my sister while I chased them, angry at them and the situation that birthed their cruelty.

Chi-Chi was kept in her room, where she crept further back into her shell, saying few words and staring out the window towards the clump of bushes. The room began to smell different: not just the stench of sadness and stale air but of something damper, like clothes left out for long in the rain. 

That’s when I first noticed her talking to the corner. 

I left a music box in her room. Sometimes she changed the music on the box to match her mood. Sometimes she was a firework and other times she was melancholic, frozen in her own body. I let the music play because they said music is therapeutic, maybe she would find her way back to us through it. 

I would enter to bring her food and find her gesturing at shadows. When I asked who she was talking to, she would go silent. But one evening, she looked at me with hollow eyes. 

“The wet woman understands me,” she said. “She knows what I should do.”

Cold water ran through my veins. “What woman, Sister Chi-Chi?”

She lifted her hands slowly, to the dark corner where her wig stand stood, the brunette wig she hadn’t worn in months, casting a dark shadow in the dim light. 

“She comes sometimes, always sad and wet, like she had stepped in from a stormy rain.”

 I ran to Mama and told her everything. 

“This is where Prophet Ukoh comes in. Before Chi-Chi will wake up one day, carry her clothes and enter Eke Uboh.” 

I knew Prophet Ukoh, the tall man with an intimidating physique dressed in white from head to toe with well-cut Afro hair. His wild nostrils flared out when he commanded the evil spirits to come out and drown in our Osimmiri River. He never walked alone; he had a procession of white-clad zealous believers tethered to him by an invisible string and latching onto each word with a feverish Amen!

You could tell he was miles away by the bell he used to ward off evil spirits and the strong scent of the herbs he immersed in water to purge the environment of them. He was known for the tactics and theatrics he employed in calling out unclean spirits. When he was in a good mood, he asked politely, imploring them to take host in a new body. On other days, he would go as far as challenging the spirit to a duel or wrestling the victim, making sure that the demon was stressed before eventually leaving, so it would think twice before coming back. 

Mama had faith in Prophet Ukoh because of what he had done for our neighbour, Mama Chidinma. Her daughter had been speaking in tongues for weeks, violent and strange, until Prophet Ukoh came. Whatever he did during that three-day ritual, the girl emerged quiet and normal, though she never remembered those weeks of madness. There were stories about him in Ogwu; some said he had trained with a powerful dibia in his village before turning to Christianity. Others whispered that he could see things ordinary people couldn’t, that the spirits spoke to him in dreams. Whether these stories were true or not, people believed them. And belief, in Ogwu, was a kind of power itself. 

When he arrived three days later, even I felt something shift; the air grew heavier, charged, like just before a storm. He moved around the space with authority, touching walls, sniffing the air, muttering prayers I couldn’t quite hear.

He danced around Chi-Chi for some time, as if trying to inspect the demon he was expunging and group it accordingly. 

“Tell me what you see,” he said to Chi-Chi, his voice surprisingly low. 

Chi-Chi’s eyes were unfocused, staring past all of us. “She is here now. In the corner. She is always wet, the water from her clothes, dripping on the floor. Her eyes are very dark, her nails are long and black. She wears a faded floral gown that billows, even when there is no wind. Her wig is something from the eighties, ruffled and stringy.” Her voice dropped in a whisper. “But she is sad, so sad. She tells me she understands my pain and she can take it all away.”

“How does she speak to you?” Prophet Ukoh pressed further.

“She gurgles like she is underwater. But I can hear her clearly.” Chi-Chi’s lips parted and she smiled in that crazed, unhinged way. “She tells me that the baby is poison. That I should send her back. That we can go together, I and her, somewhere the pain cannot reach.”

Prophet Ukoh’s face went pale. He turned to Mama.

“Your daughter is suffering a possession from the ghost of a woman who drowned her babies when she was alive. Then she took her own life too. She visits women who recently gave birth, women with porous spiritual fields.” He looked at Chi-Chi with pity. “A woman’s body is powerful, it is a portal for life and childbirth is one of her most vulnerable moments. A lot happens in her body. Childbirth weakened her. The heartbreak from that useless man, the shame, the loneliness, all of it opened cracks in her spirit. The woman slipped through those cracks and has constructed a three-story building there.”

Mama’s hands trembled. “Can you help her?”

“We must try. But we need specific items. Pure alkaline water, raven’s eggs, red and white candles, aromatic incense. The alkaline water will neutralize the damage caused by the evil spirit, the raven’s eggs are to make sacrifices to appease her. The red and white candles will build a protective wall around her.  The aromatic incense will create a good environment for good spirits to come and replace the bad ones.”

It took Mama three weeks to gather the items requested by the prophet. She travelled as far as Enugu for the raven’s eggs and the specific type of alkaline water the prophet demanded: not the kind sold in shops, but water drawn from a particular stream known for its healing properties.

In those weeks, Chi-Chi grew worse. She grew erratic, refusing food and drink unless we forced her. She shut her ears to the music I played. Her appearance became unkempt, hair matted and clothes stained with sweat and saliva. She whispered constantly to the corner, sometimes arguing, sometimes laughing that terrible laugh. 

“She is getting stronger,” Chi-Chi told me one evening when I brought her pepper soup. Her breasts were still swollen with milk she wouldn’t give. “The wet woman. She is showing me things. Her babies, how they looked when they went under. How peaceful they were after.” She looked at me with eyes that weren’t quite hers anymore. “She says Somkene would be peaceful too.” She looked in the direction of Somkene, who was crying out her lungs in the cradle in the opposite room. 

The bowl of soup almost dropped from my hands. We had to find a way to protect Somkene from her own mother! It was very sad to see her slow descent into chaos. 

When Prophet Ukoh returned, he and his followers formed a circle in Chi-Chi’s room at sunset, candles flickering in the darkness. The alkaline water sat in a rubber bowl at the centre, its surface strangely still despite the movement around it.

His pristine white agbada was embroidered with gold thread that caught the yellow light. Red coral beads, the kind made only for prophets hung around his neck and wrists. A leather pouch filled with sacred herbs was strapped around his waist and he clutched a strange staff carved with symbols I didn’t understand. The brass bell at his waist rang with each movement. 

He moved in circles, sometimes clockwise, sometimes against it, his bare feet stamping the ground in rhythm. His arms would shoot out suddenly as if grabbing something from the air–then he would pull back sharply, head jerking to avoid invisible blows. His whole body swayed and twisted, engaged in a battle only he could see.

He began to chant, his voice rising and falling in patterns I didn’t recognize. The incense smoke curled upward in impossible spirals, defying the stillness of the air. Prophet Ukoh’s chanting grew rhythmic, hypnotic, each syllable pressing against my chest. The candle flames stretched tall and thin, pointing toward Chi-Chi like accusing fingers. Chi-Chi sat rigid on the bed, staring at her corner. But now I could see what she saw or thought I could. The shadows there seemed denser, darker than shadows should be. They moved when nothing else moved. 

He poured the alkaline water in a ring around Chi-Chi's bed.

“This will neutralize her hold,” he declared, lighting the incense. Sweet smoke filled the room, making my eyes water.

Chi-Chi sat on her bed, blank-faced, as he began calling to the spirit, commanding it to leave.

The candles fluttered suddenly, though there was no wind. The temperature dropped so sharply I could see my breath.

Then I heard it, a woman’s voice, wet and gurgling, like someone speaking underwater.

“She is mine now.”

The voice didn’t come from Chi-Chi's mouth, but from the corner, near the wig stand where water had begun to pool. My heart pounded. My body froze in fear.

Prophet Ukoh's eyes widened. He grabbed his staff and struck the floor three times.

“In the name of the Most High, I command you to—”

The candles went out all at once. In the darkness, I heard splashing, feet walking through puddles. When Mama rushed in with a lantern, water pooled in the center of the room, soaking into the floor.

Chi-Chi was laughing in a high-pitched, scary voice that didn’t belong to her.

Prophet Ukoh wiped sweat from his brow. “We need more time. This spirit is old and very angry. We will try again. Keep her within the circle I drew with the water.” He left, clutching his Bible with shaky hands.

Three days later, he returned with holy water and chalk. He lit the candles, drew symbols on the walls and floor, protection signs I didn’t recognize. He made Chi-Chi drink from a calabash filled with blessed herbs while he rang his bell furiously, the sound echoing through the compound.

“Leave this child!” he shouted. “You have no claim here!”

Chi-Chi's head snapped toward him, but her eyes were unfocused, looking past him at something only she could see. Her lips moved, forming words I couldn’t quite hear.

Then she spoke, and her voice was overlaid with another one, sadder, drowned.

“She called me. She wanted me to take her pain away. And I will.”

The wig stand tipped over on its own, clattering to the floor. It fell onto the candles and caught fire. There was commotion, everyone shouting. Mama crying. Prophet Ukoh and his followers throwing their bibles toward the burning wig, screaming “Jesus Christ!”

 I rushed to the drum in the corridor and poured water on the flames.

But more water began seeping up through the floorboards, spreading in dark stains across the wood. The smell of river water filled the room, that particular scent of Eke Uboh, where the drowned were sometimes found.

Prophet Ukoh stumbled backward, his face pale.

“The spirit is too strong,” Prophet Ukoh announced, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool air. “It has been here a long time. It knows this place.” He lit the candles again, poured some alkaline water into the clay pot, added drops of something dark and viscous, crushed herbs between his palms and let them fall into the mixture. The smell changed—no longer just incense, but something earthier. Mama clutched her rosary so tightly her knuckles went white. 

“We call upon the Lord,” Prophet Ukoh continued. “We call upon the power of Chukwu Okike. We command this spirit to release this child and return to the waters that birthed it.” For a moment, just one impossible moment, the shadows in the corner seemed to coalesce into a shape. A woman’s shape. She was dripping wet. She was sad. Then, the candles went out, all at once, though there was no wind.

In the sudden darkness, I heard Prophet Ukoh gasp. “She is stronger than I thought. I cannot do this now. I need to fortify myself more at the altar. Give me more time. I will come back.”

He disappeared into the darkness with a promise to come back and cast the spirit away. We barely slept that night, as we took turns to keep vigil in Chi-Chi’s room, watching over her and praying with our rosaries. 

But Prophet Ukoh never got the chance to perform the last ritual.

On the morning of the full ritual, Mama and I walked into Chi-Chi’s room. The bedsheets were wrapped neatly and piled in the corner. The window was open, and the wind floated the curtains. I rushed to it, screaming her name, but no one replied and my words reverberated in the chilly breeze. 

The only thing left was a large puddle in the centre of the room which had no source. We were weeks into the dry season and the roof wasn’t leaking. 

“I told you the woman has been pulling her into her world,” Prophet Ukoh said heavily, when he arrived. I noticed his hands were trembling. “Now she is gone.”

My mother rolled on the floor, wailing. Somkene joined in the confusion, crying her tiny lungs out from the next room. I fell to my knees beside the puddle and wept. 

We never saw Chi-Chi again.

The woman had pulled her into her world to the place where drowned spirits go just as Prophet Ukoh had warned would happen. For weeks, we searched, Mama consulted other prophets, we reported to the police, we walked through Eke Uboh calling her name until our voices cracked. But it was as if she had dissolved into water and flowed away to some place we couldn’t follow.

It was only when I entered the university years later that I started hearing things like “postpartum psychosis” in my psychology classes. I learned about hormonal imbalances, about serotonin and dopamine, about how the brain could fracture under the weight of childbirth and isolation. I learned that women could see things that weren’t there, hear voices, believe impossible things.

Was the wet woman a metaphor for what happened to my sister? Or was postpartum depression itself an explanation for something darker, something that medical textbooks couldn’t fully explain?

I still don’t know.

Somkene calls my mother “Mama” now. She is ten years old, bright and beautiful, with her father’s dark eyes and stubborn chin. She is the only living reminder of the beauty that sprouted amidst the sadness and chaos of our home. That sunflower that wasn’t stifled by thorny weeds.

Sometimes, during the rainy season, when water pools in unexpected places and the air smells of wet earth, Somkene will pause in whatever she is doing and stare at nothing in particular.

“Aunty Nnenne,” she asked me once, “Sometimes I dream of a woman in the rain who looks like me.”

I didn’t know how to answer her.

I still book masses for Chi-Chi’s safe return and her soul. I light candles red and white, like Prophet Ukoh said. I am not sure anymore what I am warding off or welcoming in. In the room that used to be hers, which we have turned into a storage space, that corner near the wardrobe still gets damp during the rainy season, no matter what we do. We have tried cement, waterproofing, even tearing out the wall and rebuilding it.

But the water always comes back.

Maybe she would change her mind one day and appear at our gate, dripping wet, wearing that strange smile from the balcony, ready to tell us where she has been all these years. Maybe the woman in the rain will finally release her. Maybe the alkaline water will have done its work after all, just in ways we couldn’t predict.

We can only hope.

But sometimes, when I am alone, I wonder if hope is enough. I wonder if Chi-Chi is somewhere thinking the same thing about us, hoping we will find our way to where she is, hoping we will understand what the water took and why it had to take her too.

I wonder if she is still trying to bond with her child, in whatever strange place she has gone to. I wonder if the woman is still with her, still sad and still whispering advice that sounds like love but tastes like drowning.

I wonder, and the wondering itself feels like its own kind of madness.

Chidera Udochukwu-Nduka is an award-winning Nigerian-Igbo writer, screenwriter and pharmacist based in Canada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Brittle Paper, Harriet’s House and other international publications and anthologies. She is the winner of the 2025 LIGHT Magazine Letters Contest and has received recognition from the Iskanchi Magazine Prize, the Dissolution Climate Change Essay Contest, the Ikenga Short Story Prize and the Afro-Abebi Award for Non-Fiction, among others. Her writing explores memory, migration, identity, climate and the quiet hauntings of everyday life.

Visual Art
Janina Aza Karpinska is a multidisciplinary Artist-Poet from the south coast of England. Poetry informs her collages with an eye for the 'chime' and rhythm of line and pattern; featured on covers of: Heart of Flesh; Drawn to the Light; The Genre Society; Under_Score Magazine, and in: 3 Elements Review; The Empty Mirror; Waxing and Waning; Grim and Gilded; Blue Mesa Review; Quibble; Rundelania, and Mercurius amongst others.

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