The package on my doorstep had my name, but I definitely didn't order it.
Except this package wasn't wrapped in brown paper or sealed with tape. This package was a darkness that followed me, whispered through our mud-walled compound, and crept between the shadows of the banana trees that surrounded our small village in the heart of rural Kenya.
I was sixteen,adopted five years ago by mama Wanjiku and baba Kimani after my parents died in a car accident. They were good people - kind, respected in the village. But kindness couldn't stop the things that were happening.
It started with the dreams. Not ordinary dreams, but vivid nightmares that felt more like memories. I would see faces I'd never known - a woman with eyes like shattered glass, a man whose mouth never moved but whose screams echoed in my skull. Each morning, I'd wake with dirt under my fingernails, though I'd slept on a clean mat inside the house.
The elders whispered. Not to me, but around me. Conversations would stop when I entered the room. Mothers would pull their children closer when I walked past the market stalls. Something clung to me - an invisible dust of unspoken history.
Mama Wanjiku's sister, Auntie Adhiambo, was different. She looked at me with eyes that saw beyond the physical. "Some inheritances," she told me one evening as we shelled beans on the veranda, "cannot be chosen. They choose you."
The first real sign came during the dry season. Normally, our village buzzed with life - children playing, women washing clothes by the river, men working in the fields. But something changed. The chickens stopped crowing. Dogs became silent, their usual night barking replaced by a strange, suffocating quiet.
I began seeing them everywhere. Shadows that moved against the wind. Figures at the edge of the banana plantation that dissolved when I turned to look. My school uniform would be clean in the morning, but by afternoon, strange marks would appear - symbols I didn't recognize, drawn in what looked like ash.
Auntie Adhiambo knew. She would prepare special tea - dark and bitter, with leaves I didn't recognize. "Drink," she would say. "Protection comes in many forms."
The village healer, an old man everyone called Babu wa Kijana, visited our compound one night. I watched from behind the curtain as he and my parents spoke in low, urgent tones. His walking stick traced patterns in the dust - protective symbols that seemed to shimmer and move even after he finished drawing them.
The first time I truly understood something was different about me was during the harvest festival. Normally, our village celebrated with dancing, drums, and enough food to feed everyone for days. But that year, everything felt wrong.
I stood at the edge of the celebrations, watching other teenagers laugh and dance. Their joy seemed foreign to me, like a language I could no longer understand. The traditional dancers moved in rhythmic patterns, but to me, their shadows seemed to stretch impossibly, twisting into shapes that shouldn't exist.
My best friend Wanza approached me, her bright kitenge dress a stark contrast to my own muted clothing. "Are you okay?" she asked, her hand briefly touching my arm. The moment she touched me, she pulled back as if burned. Her eyes widened, and for a split second, I saw fear replace her usual warmth.
The village children began to avoid me. Where they once played near our compound, now they would cross the road, their mothers pulling them closer. Even the stray dogs that usually roamed freely would whimper and slink away when I approaches.
My school performance suffered. Concentration became impossible. In class, I would see faces in the blackboard - faces that weren't human, faces that seemed to be screaming silent messages only I could almost understand.
"The family you weren't born into," Auntie Adhiambo told me one night, "carries wounds deeper than blood. Wounds that seek healing through whoever is connected, biological or not."
Nights became my true companion. While others slept, I would sit by the window, watching the moonlight paint strange patterns on the ground. Sometimes, I could swear the banana trees outside would move - not from wind, but from some internal, deliberate motion.
The nightmares intensified. I would wake to find my room rearranged - furniture slightly shifted, personal items moved millimeters from their original position. My school books would have strange symbols written in their margins - symbols that looked like they were bleeding into the paper.
School became a battlefield. My teachers looked at me with a mixture of pity and something else - a kind of distant respect mixed with fear. My grades began to slip, not from lack of intelligence, but from the constant distraction of the shadows that seemed to dance at the edges of my vision.
Mama Wanjiku tried to protect me. She would burn herbs, hang protective charms near my bed. But protection seemed futile against something that wasn't entirely of this world.
Auntie Adhiambo began to teach me things. Quiet lessons that happened away from others' ears. She showed me how to read the patterns of smoke from burning herbs, how to listen to the spaces between sounds. "Some people are bridges," she would say. "Bridges between what is seen and unseen."
The local church pastor tried to intervene once. He came to our compound, bible in hand, speaking words of protection and deliverance. But even he seemed to hesitate when he looked directly at me. His prayers became mumbled, his confidence crumbling under something he couldn't explain.
The village began to change. Crops withered unexpectedly. Wells that had been reliable for generations suddenly ran dry. And always, always, those shadows followed me.
Babu wa Kijana performed a ritual one moonless night. I watched as he drew complex patterns around our compound, chanting in a language older than our village. The air felt heavy, charged with something between electricity and memory.
I learned to live between worlds. The world of my family, of the village, of normal life - and the world of shadows and whispers that followed me like a second skin. I became an expert at hiding, at blending, at appearing normal while carrying something extraordinary.
"You are a vessel," Babu wa Kijana told me afterwards. "Not the cause. Not the problem. Just the path through which something seeks resolution."
But normalcy was a thin veil. And veils, as Auntie Adhiambo often said, are meant to be lifted.
The spirits didn't care about my desire for a simple life. They had chosen me. And their choice was absolute.
My story wasn't just about me. It was about generations of unspoken pain, of secrets buried deeper than our village's oldest roots. I was merely the surface - the point where something ancient decided to break through.
The package I didn't order was more than a supernatural inheritance. It was a calling. A responsibility. A truth that would not be silenced.
I understood then that I was experiencing something beyond horror. This was a spiritual reckoning, a generational pain seeking acknowledgment, seeking peace.
My name is Makena. And this is my uninvited inheritance.
