Eight Questions for the Goddess

In 1893 a man named Herbert Wells uncovered the mysteries of time travel for a universe that would eventually forget his middle name. Little Mei Lubaba knew that it was George. Herbert George Wells would be lost to time behind the letters H and G. A universe of time travelers from thousands of years in the future on planets lightyears from Earth would be unable to find him in the distant past to thank him for his efforts by rescuing him from death. Herbert Wells was a common name and time travel was a precise undertaking.

Collecting heroes from the past and bringing them into the future was very popular in my grandfather’s time until the practice was banned and by the time the records could be pieced together, the practice was illegal.

1893 was also the year that Little Mei Lubaba was born. A coincidence maybe but the H.G. Wells classic would become one of her favorite books.

Mei was a fairly large child, born as if from a dream that her tiny mother had dreamed on a small chain of islands in the South China Sea, An archipelago that would also eventually be lost to time. Her mother, I am very sad to report, never awoke from that dream. Mei never knew her.

In 1900, Frank L. Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and that same year Little Mei Lubaba fell into a deep sleep after being kicked in the side by a carriage horse on her father’s farm. She spent three days in bed and dreamed, she thought, of other realms and strange worlds. She awoke with a tremendous appetite.

She was competitive, confident, and colossal for her age and Mei Lubaba approached every challenge as a contest between boisterous triumph and epic failure. There was no in between. She was outspoken and funny when she wanted to be and never did any task the way she was taught. The boys her age kept their distance, in fear of her size, her pride, and her father’s wealth and power. She didn’t mind. She preferred being alone. She liked to read. A tomboy who sprouted early, Mei was clumsy and uncomfortable until she learned balance and control by putting the books on top of her head as well as in it.

Little Mei didn’t always get along with people, but she loved most animals, except of course yaks. Yaks, she felt, were more like an invasive species of weed on her father’s farm. They were everywhere. But on the non-yak side of things she loved cats, chickens, pigs, wolves, and okay, maybe yaks when they were small, but they weren’t that small for long. They got big in a hurry, like her, and they were always in the way, like her.

Little Mei took school lessons with the children of the farm workers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers – all boys, but she realized early on, that when it came to matters of the heart, she fancied the girls. When she smiled at the older girls and the women who did her chores, they always smiled back. She thought it meant they liked her too but they were scared of her as well. But when she smiled it was as if the left side of her mouth received the message moments before the right, as if her face were patiently painting a grin in one slow swoosh — a pink and amber brushstroke that, for all intents and purposes, brought out the sun.

Little Mei Lubaba wanted two things out of life: to be the main character in an epic adventure, and for her father to see her as more than part a business deal, to be married off to the wealthiest suitor that wanted large sons. All the reading and the lessons would be for nothing and she would spend the rest of her life giving birth.

Mei Lubaba was the namesake of her tragic mother who died in childbirth and she was called little Mei by those who had known her. Little Mei liked hearing stories about and somehow knew that her mother would always watch over her from the great beyond.

The night before her sixteenth birthday, Mei sat on the edge of her bed in her childhood bedroom next to the kitchen in the servant’s house for the last time. This was the night that all of that would change. This was the night she would decide to become what her father probably thought she already was, a disappointment. She would be sixteen in the morning, in a matter of hours, but she would never be the boy that he had wanted or the wife and mother her new husband would expect.

Mei never wanted to have children but this was something she knew she could never express. Motherhood wasn’t for every woman, but in the early 20th century it was not a choice that she was given. It was a requirement.

Mei sat in her room and chanted the mantra of the goddess of excellence and action for strength. The candles flickered one by one as she repeated the powerful prayer to the goddess of action again and again until her tongue was numb. She sat on the bed with plans of adventure but fear in her heart. Many, many people died on the road to the big city.

“Om Tare Tutare Ture Svaha.” She prayed for the divine beings to watch over her father and his farm when was gone.” Oh, who the hell was she kidding? She thought. I’m not going anywhere. She would be sixteen when the sun rose and even the full moon she was never going anywhere.

Her father’s mansions was the most prominent house on all four islands that made up the island chain of Shanqui Jian in the South China Sea before the volcanoes swallowed it all and she had hardly seen every room. I’ve travelled back to the beginning of her life to watch it unfold. I hope you don’t mind. Her power was a miracle that only a few hundred humans had experienced and this was the night it manifested. Of course I planned to pluck her out of that prison right before the end, so as not to disturb the timeline but I couldn’t passed up the opportunity to see it play out. It was like having a god’s eye view on the most important moments of her life and I had time. I had nothing but time. For time travel was and is and will be not only physical but metaphysical. Thank you, H. G. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Mei looked up from her darkest thoughts into the silence and the unknown. The candles were almost all out, and the clouds that hid the face of the moon were being uncooperative but then Mei heard a woman’s voice from beyond the bed. It was inside the room! But that was impossible. Startled and shaken Little Mei waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark but surely there was no one there. Her Father would have had anyone hanged for anything. No one would be so bold.

“AN INQUISITION THEN.”

A voice called out. It was feminine but deep, booming, and commanding. It was the confident voice of a powerful female warrior with a slight growl like a big bear or the lisp of an African lion who had learned to speak with too sharp teeth.

“I can hear you,” Mei replied in a panicked whisper beneath the sound of her own beating heart drumming in her ears. “But I can’t see you.”

“YOU SUMMONED ME AND I AM HERE.”

Mei froze. There was a woman in the corner! A woman who breathed with the grace of an angel and stood perfectly still beside her bookcase like she had walked through the wall. How did she get into my bedroom, she thought. How could she have gotten into the corner past the bed without me noticing? She was not there before the candles flickered and the light faded.

A warrior woman, nearly naked, stood tall and proud opposite the door but far enough away from the window that she must have come through the wall. Mei’s fifteen, almost sixteen-year-old heart pumped free and fast as the woman’s voice thundered in her ears.

“YOU GET EIGHT QUESTIONS, MY CHILD. NO MORE.” The goddess set the rules of engagement like celestial beings often do. “EIGHT QUESTIONS THEN WE SHALL SEE WHAT WILL BECOME OF YOU.”

Mei swallowed hard. She had more than eight questions, but the first thing she wanted to know was who this woman was. “Are you a god?” she tried to ask, but was quickly interrupted as the goddess Ekajati corrected her misunderstanding.

“THE QUESTIONS ARE MINE TO ASK, MY DEAR.”

“Seriously?” Mei wondered aloud. “But if this is my dream shouldn’t I be…”

No, because it wasn’t a dream and not a delusion, bad fish, or her imagination. This was a divine intervention, and a human witness to divinity did not make the rules.

A flood of pain jolted Mei’s solar plexus as the clouds shifted and the moon pushed its way into her bedroom, casting its pale spotlight against the dark. There she was. She was enormous and muscular. A dark-skinned athletically built woman of war wearing nearly nothing at all. She was glorious.

The goddess was midnight black, jet from head to toe, with lips that glowed purple in the cloud-strangled moonlight. It wasn’t the darkness that covered her but the light she consumed that defined her form. A fully grown woman with the blackest skin, the blackest hair, and the most fearsome frowning visage, the goddess of decisive action absorbed what little moonlight dared to touch her, hips and breast carved purely out of negative space.

“ARE YOU A STONE?” She asked.

“What?” The goddess of action had begun the inquisition and nothing could stop what was going to happen. “No. I can be stubborn sometimes,” Mei answered. “But it’s really only when I’m right.”

“THEN YOU ARE ALIVE.” She proclaimed and it was decided.

Mei’s heart seemed to stop as a stiff breeze pushed the last puffs of cloud from in front of the moon. She could her nightly visitor completely now. Unmistakably. Larger than life. She was there. Nine feet tall. Warm blooded and oddly still. She was the goddess in black, noble and beautiful, fierce yet serene.

Ekajati was much taller than Mei, bigger even than a bull ox, and absolutely larger than any person Mei had ever seen, as she stood in the corner of the young woman’s bedroom, mostly in shadow but mostly uncovered, Little Mei felt undeniably threatened.

“ARE YOU A GOD?”

Mei took a moment to answer, thinking perhaps it was a trick question, because it was what she had asked her. But finally she said, “No. I’m just Mei.”

“THEN YOU ARE DEAD.”

Mei understood the meaning of her words, That god’s were immortal but every other being in the universe would die and become a ghost. And it was decided that she would as well.

Mei was still astonished by Ekajati’s dark skin. The goddess was darker than any person Mei had ever seen. Darker even than the enslaved North Africans for sale in the harbor town, the ones her father refused to buy because he worried their beautiful dark skin might corrupt the loins of the gentlewomen of Shanqui Jian. His fear, it could be told, said more about his desires than it did about any of theirs.

“Should I be writing this down?” Mei muttered comically, because apparently panic made her funny.

“ARE YOU A CHILD?” Ekajati growled with distain.

“No, I was just making a joke,” Mei blurted.

“THEN YOU ARE A MOTHER.”

“What? No. I don’t want children.” Mei complained but it was decided. “So it’s just the two choices then?”

“ARE YOU A HERO?”

“God, no. I can’t even save myself?” Mei muttered nervously.

“THEN YOU WILL BE A VILLAIN.”

“Wait. Stop.” Mei pleaded, seeming to regain her confidence. “I’m not a villain,” she said adamantly. “I’m the hero of this story. I swear,” she insisted, looking past the woman to some of her favorite books on her bookshelf. “Can we start the test over? I wasn’t ready.”

“ARE YOU A FOOL?” The goddess continued.

Little Mei’s big heart pounded harder. Hard enough to shake the bed as she noticed the shrunken human heads that hung from the goddess’s hair knot and around her neck. Who could those people have been? Were they other girls from other bedrooms? Would that be her if her answers weren’t… right?

“ARE YOU A FOOL?” The goddess asked the question again, and it was as if a veil had lifted or a fever had broken.

“No,” Mei said confidently, straightening, definitive. “No. I am not.”

“THEN YOU ARE A TEACHER.”

Tears formed in her eyes as Mei trembled with every heartbeat and it was decided. Mere moments before sunrise and Little Mei had turned sixteen while incisors, sharpened, gray, and slick, flashed momentarily in what she helplessly hoped was a smile.

The goddess breathed a wave of heat that made Mei shiver all the more, while the closeness of her bare body made the birthday girl blush. And then she was calm.

“ARE YOU AFRAID?”

Her timing couldn’t have been better. “I was,” Mei admitted. “I was afraid of leaving home, but I don’t think I am anymore.”

The goddess smiled again.

“I was afraid of you but I don’t think I am anymore.” Mei marveled at her newfound bravery.

“THEN YOU ARE A WARRIOR.” Ekajati stated proudly.

Mei’s breathing grew subtle and her focus singular, her life clock slowed to a hair’s breadth from stopping. There were two questions left and we were just starting to get to know each other, she thought. “Okay, hit me. What are the last two questions?”

“ARE YOU A GOOD PERSON?”

The goddess’s voice became that of a concerned mother. Mei had never heard her own mother’s voice except perhaps in the womb. So she was caught off guard by the sudden concern. “I don’t know,” is what she said. “I have good days and I have bad days. I’m just me at all times. I’m just Mei: my father’s disappointment, and my tragic mother’s only child.”

The goddess said nothing. She leaned in closer, her presence heavy and silent. She regarded the girl’s uncertainty with a sharp toothy grin and asked the last of the eight questions.

“ARE YOU BRAVE?”

The goddess’s question was off putting and Mei did not answer. The woman waited but only for a moment before taking an intimidating step closer to the child.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Mei said twice. “I’m just Mei and I don’t think that’s what you want to hear. You want me to be strong and self-confident but I’m just Mei and that’s all. Does that mean you’re going to eat me or kill me?” Mei spoke timidly, her throat tightening with tension and her nose suddenly wet with snot. “I thought you were here to guide me?” She pleaded. “I thought for a moment my mother had sent you.” Mei’s voice raised slightly, her body shook noticeably. “Please,” she added. “I can be brave. I know how to be brave.”

“THEN YOU ARE.”

The goddess’s third eye snapped open with a smile. It was vertical, perpendicular to the other two and in the center of her forehead as the young girl’s two eyes flooded with more tears blurring her vision. The goddess saw clearly and continued in silence as she sifted through Mei’s possible future, seeing hope and compassion but also violence and suffering. Mei Lubaba would inhabit the form of many great heroes in the coming years, but for now she was just a little girl. She was just Mei.

The goddess tilted and turned her head slightly as if to look at me but she couldn’t have seen me because I was not there. I did not exist at that time. I was born centuries later. That would be impossible even for a god. I don’t know what she was looking at but it couldn’t have been me.

Mei paused, and her tears subsided. She never shifted her gaze from the warrior goddess to the plain white walls, the satin silver bedcover, or the early-morning moonlight spilling through the open window. Little Mei barely blinked.

“I don’t want to be a villain,” Mei whispered as her answers to the eight questions echoed in her mind.

“Do not accept what you do not want, Just Mei.” The goddess whispered words of wisdom that vibrated through Mei’s chest and settled in the base of her stomach.

Suddenly Ekajati’s expression changed and as quick as a crocodile, the large woman pounced in one violently smooth motion; a movement mimicking the quiet ferocity of a large bird of prey swooping down from the trees to catch a field mouse in it’s talons. She attacked the young woman with the shocking fluidity of a great white shark pursuing a wounded seal. There was nothing the girl could do.

Ekajati became the true goddess of action, and she hurled herself forward through the narrow space in a flash. The test was over, Mei had clearly failed and the savage warrior, fierce and frightening, was coming for her throat.

Incisors like funeral daggers reached to rip the young woman’s head from her body with the swift mercy of an executioner’s axe, sharp enough not to be felt. She would be beheaded in an instant. Her severed skull would hit the bed before she knew she had died.

Little Mei was not afraid and without hesitation, she threw her head back and offered her killer an exposed neck. If this was how she was going to die, then let it be this, she thought – not in childbirth like her mother, but in the teeth of the goddess, eyes open, conscious, and accepting of this divine end.

Just as the Black Goddess’s sharp fangs closed around the girl’s exposed neck, her jaws widened and her teeth clamped down on what should have been Mei’s final breath, she disappeared. She was gone as quickly as she had come. A wispy cloud of pale smoke hung in the open space where the goddess had been. It drifted past the sixteen-year-old before slipping out the window into the midnight air.

Mother Ruth, Teacher, Leader, Activist, Nun, the woman Mei would one day become, would look back on this moment from her prison cell at the end of her life and agree with her younger self. If she cold face death then she could face anything. And even if the woman was right and she did become the villain, she would not be a villain for long. For if she had I would not be here needing her help to save the world.

Mei Lubaba turned sixteen that night and she was no longer little. She was just. She wasn’t getting married in the morning. She was leaving home. It had been decided. ||