A man who is dying should do so under a big sky, feeling the wind on his skin, tasting the clean air, absorbing the sounds of life until he leaves it.

That old moon is up, big and yellow as ripest meingo. Night is coming. They are coming, but they won’t take Gabriel Ballanta. I am not that man anymore. A helikopter hangs low over the village, hunting him, because he is loose, he is dangerous, and he is the last. They have lost no time: flames leap and rise, destroying everything he was, cleansing what is left and what is to come.
The mangrove is a good place to die. Hot, noisy, familiar, a boyhood place. Haak, Kaar, Kreechowl swooping .Giant leaves flapping and rustling. Something heavy passes, pauses, splashes.....wowla, maybe danab. I have no fear of night-creatures...I’ll be feeding them soon enough, when the dark water takes me.

Heart is pounding: can’t run no more, can’t even walk, breathing comes hard, guts twisting, brain hurts, arms and legs and belly and back. Skin is crawling with the bites of a thousand baidibaidi. Here it begins, and here it will end.

Mamakoh’s spirit is finally free. Even in her Passing, she burns like a baya tri as I hold her close, kissing blistered lips, closing scorch-red eye-sockets, wiping blood-tears, rocking the wasted bones of her: there’s no time for more. And I wash her, gently, with the last, precious drops of water, wrap her in the proper, traditional way, say the words, lay her with the babies.....Kossi, Fallubah, sweet Favour.
Burial is forbidden: the doktabala will burn them. And they are coming, bright lights and rumbling trucks on the dirt road. Healers who don’t heal, wise men who are not. My village is gone, my place here with the Dead. Yet if I stay, they will put me in the embyulin, fill my body with greater poisons, take me to the Facility, where I will die, as it is said they all do, among white-suited strangers who dare not touch me because I have embraced my wife and my children and tasted their death.

Their blood is my blood, our fate is shared, and I give thanks for it. Soon we shall meet again. Kissing their shrouds, whispering: ‘Jaja’, I step out to face the night and the Killer that stalks our land.