Competition Thirty-One Highly Commended: When the Night Took Notice by Charon Maseka
The night on the mountain should have been silent, but nothing stays silent when Folake dances.
Captured far from the river that raised her, she now moved before foreign eyes, Portuguese nobles who believed Olympus was the only place where gods listened. They sat wrapped in velvet and arrogance, waiting for spectacle. But Folake didn’t dance for them. She danced because her body still remembered every story stolen from her.
By the flicker of an eye, she stepped into the firelight, the cool mountain air trembling around her. Her wrists carved crescents through the dark, movements shaped by Oshun’s river-sweet rhythms; soft, sensual and patient as if the goddess herself had risen through Folake’s spine. But her stance held the discipline of Greek choruses, the lines Alexios once taught her, where bodies became poems against the sky.
Rivers and mountains, meeting inside one woman.
The nobles murmured. They didn’t understand the way the air tightened, the way shadows leaned closer, as though Olympus’ spirits had paused their bickering to watch.
Folake felt them. All of them.
The river goddess whispering through her pulse.
The old Greek myths humming through her bones.
The long night of the Middle Passage clinging to her breath.
She brought her foot down; one heartbeat, sharp and clean.
Chains rattled in memory. Water stirred where no water ran. Even the torches trembled.
In that impossible moment, the night took notice.
Folake lifted her arm, palm open, offering nothing and everything. And something answered… not with thunder, not with miracle, but with sweat and recognition.
A woman from a stolen river.
A stage on a foreign mountain.
Two mythic worlds folding into her shadow.
And for a single flicker of an eye, Folake was not enslaved.
She was the invocation itself.
She writes on her own terms, guided by mood and moment rather than obligation. Trained as a mining engineer, she thinks with structure and detail, yet at heart she is a creative- drawn to stories, people, and ideas that connect. Creativity is not a task but a release: she writes, draws, and paints for the sheer pleasure of expression. Her most recent short story was featured in the book “101 Lessons in Leading with Laughter” by Jim Dunn.
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