He’d had a name once, this man. A name he could barely remember now, a name that came to him in dreams, spoken through the cracked lips of a woman he knew he had once known but had no memory of. Back then, the village had not always been this silent, this empty. There had been people; men, women, children, and livestock. There had been the constant tolling of the temple bells, calling the people to worship; the booming voice of the priest vehemently preaching the Holy Word. But that had been a long time ago. How long, he could not tell, for just like his name, and the faces in his dream, time was lost to him.
He wandered through the village, past deserted huts, empty animal pens, overgrown farmlands, keeping his eyes sharp, his ears alert, and his nose in the air. This has been his routine since the village emptied; prowling his territory to ensure its safety. His feet led him, as they always did, to a small hut with cracked mud walls. He stopped, drew in a deep breath, filtered through the hundreds of faded scents that filled his nose, and latched on to the one, the scent that brought to mind the face in his dream who knew his name, the face he had once known but could no longer recall. For the briefest of moments, he saw her, seated on a stool, a basket resting on aged thighs, cleaning beans, humming a familiar tune. She looked so old, so tired, yet in her eyes was determination, the one that had never left since her daughter, his mother, ran mad and hung herself. And just like that, the image was gone, and with it, the memory of who she was.
He stared at the hut for a while longer, as if by doing so he would unravel the memories it held trapped within cracks in its walls. It offered him nothing. He huffed and walked away.
He was eight when the first shifting happened. Though he does not remember it, the walls remember because they saw him bite down on the enraged hen’s neck, tearing out her gullet while her chicks, whom she had been defending from him, screeched and scattered.
The noise had drawn his grandmother to the back of the hut—no one messed with her chickens and got away with it. She took one look at him, bloodied, a twitching hen trapped between his teeth, his eyes gleaming bright golden, fingers extending into claws, and an oddly shaped head caught between cat and person. It was alien to behold. Yet, she did not scream nor did she faint. She just stared at him, sadness clouding her face. Alas, the devil they had hoped they’d escaped had found its way into the boy.
When she tried to pry the dead hen away from him, he snarled, bared his fangs and swiped his claws at her. But she was a large woman, stronger. She smacked him hard enough to tame the beast in his blood, hard enough to make him wail in confusion as the fangs disappeared and the claws retracted. Then hauled him far away from the hut to bathe and clean him before anyone, especially his mother, saw.
This was long ago, when he still had a name, when there were still people in the village to hide from.
He smelled it in his sleep, an unfamiliar scent that did not belong in his territory. His eyes slid open, and he rose. The scent grew, washing over him, so powerful it seemed to tug at his feet, to call to him. He growled, low and deep, then stepped closer to the edge of the temple’s roof. It was the tallest building in the village, granting him a bird’s eye view of the village. He stared into the darkness below, his keen eyes carefully tracing each hut, pen, and abandoned farmstead. He saw nothing, yet he smelled everything.
He had never smelled anything like this before, and something about it made him uneasy, yet excited. An overpowering urge washed through him, forcing him to follow that smell, to chase it. But he had learned the hard way never to follow his animal instinct without thinking. So he waited, listened, watched.
Three days that smell tormented, excited, and frightened him. Three days he prowled the village looking for its source, but came up empty. It teased him, sometimes so strong he could almost reach out and touch it, other times so faint it might have been imagined. He feared this was madness coming upon him, when, on the third night, he saw the intruder.
At first he thought it was a trick of his mind, but as he sat still on the temple roof, watching, the woman stepped out of a hut into the night, naked, hair wild. She stretched, taut, powerful muscles expanding and contracting. Then she turned. Despite the distance, he could have sworn she smirked at him, winked, and shifted. He froze, stunned at the sight of her human body churning and twisting, until in its place, a sleek dark golden leopard with dark spots grouped in rosettes stood. All sense of reason left him and he leaped off the roof and charged after her.
She was gone by the time he got to the hut, but she had left footprints, and her smell was stronger than it had ever been. It made him mad, a blind rage that was not his own, but came from him. Through the night he hunted and searched, yet she was nowhere to be found, gone as though she never existed.
At dawn he concluded that perhaps this was indeed madness, when she crawled out from behind a hut, casually as though she owned the place.
The rage, which he had thought was gone, overcame him once more, and he went after her.
This time, she did not run. She was bigger than him, a belated observation he made when they got locked in a fight, claws and teeth snapping and tearing. Her roar was deeper too, and her movement, by the gods, she was quick. Human reasoning screamed at him to stop and surrender, animal instinct was ravenous, ready to fight to the death. To surrender would mean to lose his territory, his home. He would kill her, rip her throat out.
But before he could do any of those things, her paws became human hands, grabbed a rock, and smashed it into his head, twice. The blow sent him plummeting into darkness, and by the time he came to, he was lying in a hut, alive, with a blinding headache. He did not notice her until he tried to get up and powerful rough hands gently lowered him back to the mat.
“Rest, you took a bad beating, let yourself heal,” she said, her voice a strange mix of a growl and human speech.
And rest he did, and in his rest, he dreamed, and in his dream, he saw the woman he knew he knew but could not remember.
“Odinaka,” she whispered and became a puff of smoke.
When he woke again, all the pain was gone, not even the faintest ache. He was about to dismiss his fight with the leopard woman as a dream when she stepped into the hut, a large dead goat between her teeth. The smell filled his nose and sent his stomach grumbling, his mouth watering, and he growled with hunger. When had he last eaten something so fresh that smelled so good? He’d gone for so long without feeding his leopard self, relying on the crops and fruits that grew on trees surrounding the village. She glared at him, dropped the dead goat and shifted back to human form.
“You are awake, good, you talk too much in your sleep,” she said.
“W-who are you?” he growled, feeling the desire to claw her apart returning.
She grinned at him, mocking, knowing.
“It is strange,” she said, “how all you want is to rip me to shreds and not to father an offspring by me, even though my body is going mad with the desire to carry cubs.”
And as though by merely speaking the words she had invoked something, he caught another scent on her, one that had always been there, but his drive to protect his territory had blinded him to it. The leopard in him tore its way out in a heartbeat and lunged at her, not to kill, but to do something else. She was quick. One second she was there, and the next she was gone, dashing out of the hut, becoming a leopard and letting him chase her through the village until he was out of breath, by which time every desire to kill her was gone, replaced by something more intimate.
She did not share her meals with him. Every time she ate and he came too close, she growled, and hissed, then walked away with it.
“Get your own,” she snarled.
“Where do you get it, these…meals?” he asked.
Almost every day she returned with a dead goat, a dead pig, a calf, a colt, sometimes a large chicken, even a dog. He suspected she knew some human settlement close by and stole their livestock. He had never left the village since its desertion, only hunting whatever ventured into his territory, or relying on the crops. Sometimes he was so hungry he felt himself going mad, but he had made it a point never to leave the village and risk encountering other humans. Though he had little memory of his past, he did remember screams, torn limbs, shredded guts, and fleeing people. Never again would he hurt another human.
“You hide in here too long and starve, that is why you are so weak, so skinny. You cannot father my offspring,” she said, and he immediately became overwhelmed with panic. He wanted nothing more than to father her offspring, “perhaps I have made a mistake and should—”
“No,” he had said, and she stared at him curiously.
“I leave in the morrow.”
“I said no!” he growled.
She grinned at him but said nothing.
Later that night, he’d woken to find her inches from his face, her yellow eyes glowing in the dark.
“You sleep too deeply. I could have killed you,” she said. “Come with me.”
With slight hesitation, he followed, wondering how she had snuck up on him on the roof of the temple without his notice. She led him toward the outskirts of the village and he stopped. She did not stop, did not turn around, just kept walking. His human mind was frightened, it screamed at him to go back. What if they got caught? It was inevitable death. What if things escalated and, to protect themselves, they had to kill? He had vowed never again to spill human blood, had sworn it to those who’d died that day. But his animal mind did not care. He was hungry, she was a potential mate, he could lose her if he did not follow, he would starve to death. But he had never left the village since…how long had it been? He could not tell. Now, in the face of this tough decision, his reasons looked pathetic. He was starving, and she knew how to get food that wasn’t people. How bad could that be?
For several moons his grandmother tried to keep him hidden, tried to tame the beast growing inside him. She forbade him from playing with other children, from going to the chicken pen, and most of all, warned him never to show or tell anyone what he was, especially not his mother.
But he was just a boy, and little boys did not understand the dangers of being different. So he defied her and went to play with other children anyway. And when one day his mother lost herself to the voices in her head, as she usually did, she attacked him. His grandmother was not at home to protect him from her. So to protect himself, he let loose the beast, and it clawed and bit her. She screamed, eyes bulging, not in pain, but in horror at what he had become.
She kept screaming as she ran out of the hut, through the street with villagers gawking and whispering, into a nearby forest where she hung herself, for her eyes had seen the devil, and she would rather die than live to see it another day.
She led him to a large village with farms and more people than he had ever smelled in a long time. It was lined with houses made from wood, concrete, and mud, windows aglow with lanterns. She selected one farm, snuck in, killed the dog that would not stop barking, snuck into a barn where a man, perhaps the farmer, was sweeping hay and animal shit. And, much to his horror, killed the man too. No hesitation, pure animal drive. She selected and killed a fat ram, and when he would not kill but kept staring at the dead farmer, she reminded him they did not have much time, someone would soon wander into the shed and she’d have to kill them too. Repulsed, but hungry, he killed a ram of his own, and together they left the farm and the village unnoticed, guilt tightening his throat as he walked past the shredded dead man.
By the time they arrived at his village, every muscle ached with the strain of carrying a huge dead animal in his mouth. But that night, he ate to his fill.
“You are fighting a losing battle, it is a waste of time,” she said to him perhaps a week or a moon later, he could not tell how long it had been since she had come into his life. “The leopard is no house cat, it will always be a wild beast, you cannot tame it,”
Those words sounded familiar to him, yet he could not tell where he had heard them before.
“It is like refusing to shit even when your bowel is full of shit.”
“I am not an animal,” he said.
She scoffed.
“What man eats a ram without gutting and cooking it first?” she replied.
He did not respond.
“You will not last long like this,” she said. “You are what you are, which makes me wonder, did the one who birthed you not teach you of our kind?”
He searched his memory for who that might have been, but as always, he saw emptiness. He shook his head.
She was silent for a moment, then she said, “You killed all of them, the people who once lived here, did you not?”
“I do not remember,” he lied.
She nodded.
“As I suspected. As leopard and man all in one, sometimes what we know as man and what we know as leopard mixes too much and becomes a blur, forgotten. There are many things I do not remember too, not even the one who birthed me, or the ones I have birthed, or how long I have lived,” she said, but there was no sadness in her voice.
“Come with me,” he said after a short while of silence.
He thought she would not follow at first, but she did. He led her to the small hut, the one where his memory always returned briefly whenever he sniffed the air. He closed his eyes and sniffed, seeing with his nose. The images were there, blurred, but there. The woman with his name on her lips, a name he could not remember. Lips on his lips, hands around him in an embrace, hands guiding his hands to flesh. He opened his eyes, and she was there, the leopard woman, her lips on his own, her hand roaming over his body, searching. For what, he did not know. He did not notice her lead him into the hut, and there, they touched in more ways than he had ever touched anyone before.
They took to making love every night after each hunt, brimming with excitement of their kill. For a moment he forgot the agony of his being, the curse of man and cat wearing the same skin, and for the first time in a long time he knew the liberation of happiness.
And then one night, when he came to her, she refused him. He did not understand why, but her scent had changed too. It had lost the smell that always excited him. Still, the part of him that was man wanted to be close to her. But she was irritable; hissing, snarling, and baring her teeth each time he came too close.
She ate more and stayed in leopard form often. Sometimes she did not go hunting, so he did, returning to her with kill. Still she snarled, growled, and snatched the kill from him, then disappeared into a hut. She spent her days sleeping, and her nights prowling restlessly. Then he began to notice the swell in her stomach, and he understood.
It terrified him, the thought of fathering offspring of his own. But it filled him with excitement too. The promise of a new thing, a new life. The bigger her stomach grew, the more irritable, aggressive, and elusive she became. There were whole weeks he went without seeing her, but her smell remained strong, reassuring him she was still around.
Then one day, while it rained terribly, he returned to smell something different. Blood, shit, and other things he had no words for. He tried to find her that night, but she was so hidden, and the rain made tracing her scent difficult. He decided to wait till dawn.
Dawn came and he searched again. He still did not find her. And for the next four days she was missing. Then on the fifth day, she stepped out from behind a hut in her leopard form. She acknowledged him with a flick of her long tail and left. He followed her. She went into another village, killed a heifer, and dragged its corpse back. She ate alone and growled when he came close.
For days, she vanished again. And by the end of the third week, when she finally reappeared, she was not alone.
Two furry little things awkwardly trotted behind her. He watched them from his vantage point on the temple roof. His children. But he knew if he came close, she would growl and maybe attack him. So he stayed away, watching from a distance.
He named them Ihedike and Zoputa. Their mother thought it was stupid to name them like humans did their children.
“They will grow to forget their names. Just like you have forgotten yours.
But he did not care much for her opinion on the matter.
“You are not supposed to take care of them, that is my job,” she said when he spent time cleaning, playing, and looking after them.
“I am not an animal,” he said.
“We are all animals.”
“Animals don’t talk.”
“Humans don’t eat raw flesh, except for the barbarians in the old water’s edge of Bakupe. And even they sometimes cook their meat.”
He was not having any of it. He would not raise his children like animals.
“They are cubs, not children,” she argued, her voice ending in an impatient snarl.
“They are my children.”
“You need to stop thinking like a man. Perhaps you would have made a fine husband had you been human, but you are not, stop holding on to what is not there.”
Still, he did not listen, for the birth of his two children had awoken in him a sense of purpose, a sense of something far greater than the leopard under his human skin.
He spent a great amount of time teaching his son and daughter the human tongue, how to shift at will, to walk on two legs like humans. He showed them their little world through the eyes of a human father. And when Zoputa, thoughtful and inquisitive, asked why they lived in a place so empty, he found his memory of what had happened here to be lost. And when she asked what lay beyond the walls of the village, he warned her sternly never to cross its boundaries.
“But Mother crosses it and so do you, to bring home food,” she said.
“You are too young and vulnerable, never cross the wall,” he said.
Ihedike was more like his mother. He did not like his human form and could hardly speak the human tongue. He spent most of his time napping within any hut of his choice, and hissed when his father woke him to learn the human ways.
“You must learn if you are to survive in this world,” he said to his son.
“Your father is right, you do need to learn the ways of men to blend in,” his mother said, agreeing with his father for the first time.
Ihedike, unable to speak the tongue of men, hissed through most of the lessons.
Zoputa loved humanity, she was intrigued by it and peppered her father with questions. Sometimes when he was not looking, she snuck out of the village and spied on other surrounding villages, marveling at how the men herded cattle, sheep, and goats, the women fetched water with babies attached to their backs, the boys gallivanted, shooting birds from the sky with catapults, and the girls giggled and gossiped while peeling maize. She knew to stay out of sight, for Papa had warned her how dangerous they were. But watching them, all she saw were people living in a monotonous daily routine.
So, one day, she trailed behind a group of boys heading to the stream. She watched them dive in and out of the water, tussling, and daring each other. She enjoyed watching the humans play, so different from how she and Ihedike played. There was no biting or scratching, or even hissing. So focused was she on the boys that she did not notice another boy approaching. Had she not been in her leopard from, things could have played out differently. But it was easier to stay hidden wearing the skin of a spotted cat. The boy saw her, a leopard crouching in the bush, watching other naked boys swim.
A girl might have screamed and alerted the village. But a boy saw an opportunity to prove himself a worthy man. He grabbed his spear and hurled it at her.
Zoputa’s roar of agony echoed through the forest.
The day Zoputa died, her father woke on his usual spot on the roof of the now dilapidated temple, to a bloody sky. He stretched his feline body, and yawned, tasting the clean air of a new day. Then he tasted something else, metallic, salty. Blood. At first he thought it was the smell of a fresh kill, then he recognized it, the smell he had come to associate with Zoputa.
He bounded down the roof, not yet alarmed, but concerned. He called out for her. Usually, she was by his side the moment he descended from the roof. But she did not come to him. He called her once more. The familiar stillness of the abandoned village greeted him. His heart sank with dread.
He shifted, taking the form of man.
“Zoputa!” he bellowed. His voice bounced off the emptiness around him and returned void. The panic struck like a spike to the heart.
“Zoputa!” he called more desperately. “Ihedike!”
He went from one hut to the next. All empty. But it was there, the stench of fresh blood, taunting the morning air.
He followed the smell, and it led him to the outskirts of the village. He saw the leopard woman. Beside her stood their son in leopard form. On the floor was a body.
“I found her this morning,” she said calmly without taking her eyes off the body.
He froze, gripped by terror that locked his muscles in place.
Slowly he approached the body, and the sight of the face sent weakness to his knees.
The body looked like something wrought by white science gone wrong. Her limbs were longer than usual, the bones bending at awkward angles. Golden spotted hair trailed down her bare back. Her feet were a mutation of toes and paws. Her fingers ended in claws. A large hole burst through her abdomen, visceral organs peeking out. There was almost nothing left of her face. Whoever had killed her, had gone for her head, bashing the skull to a mash of flesh. Flies buzzed around the body, perching and sucking blood that had started to dry.
He fell on his knees and cradled her in his arms. He lifted his head to the heavens and let out a wail. He pulled her closer, his sobs running into hisses and growls.
“We have to leave,” her mother said, “the people who killed her are on the lookout, they now know our kind are nearby, this place is no longer safe.”
But he was not listening to a word she said. He beat the earth and roared. His skin rippled like silk as his body shifted. And when the leopard woman tried to touch him, he snarled at her. She glowered at him.
“You waste tears for the dead, she is gone, and unless you want us to end up like her, we better leave too.”
He did not respond. And by the time he had cried himself to exhaustion, he got up to find he was alone with his dead daughter.
The smell of the killer was on her, faint, but present. He followed it. The night air was cool and the wind brought to him too many scents and sounds. But he had one goal, one focus. An owl hooted overhead, and a nightjar screeched. The smell led him to a silent sleeping village, through winding streets with dogs that he had to avoid by climbing the roof of lined-up houses. Then to a wooden house with shuttered windows. With his hands, he pried open the window where the smell was strongest and crawled in. To his leopard eyes the dark was no different from day. The room was a small space with two beddings from which a mismatched chorus of snores came. He followed the smell to the bed on the right and stared at the still sleeping face of his daughter’s killer. He wanted the boy awake so his face would be the last thing he’d see before tearing it off. But he also wanted him silent. The quickest way to kill a prey was to take it by the neck. But he did not want to give the boy a quick death. He imagined Zoputa must have screamed as the boy lifted the rock and crushed her head repeatedly.
His anger flared, twisting like a viper around his heart. He did not hear himself growl so loud that the boy started awake. They stared into each other’s eyes for a fraction of a second that lasted long enough for knowing to register. The boy drew breath to scream, but he whipped a claw around his face, tearing the flesh off. The body fell back, convulsing and choking on blood. The other sleeper stirred, and by the time he woke, the leopard was gone.
He returned to the village, and for the first time in so long, he went to the hut that held a scent with fickle memories of a woman he knew but had forgotten. He sniffed, hoping to see the face; grass, blood, shit, and dust. The smell was gone, buried under a hundred different smells. He could hear them, the angry mob marching from miles away. He could smell the acrid stench of flames on torches, and the excited frenzied barking of hounds. They had tracked him down here. It was time to leave. He went to the spot where he had laid Zoputa to rest, placed a hand on the mound of earth in silent farewell, and fled into the night.
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Ephraim N. Orji is a writer from Nigeria who flies in his dreams. His works have been published in Omenana Magazine, Flaming Tree African Ghost Story Collection, Eboquills, and the Will This Be A Problem? anthology. He is a finalist of the Awele Creative Writing Short Story contest of 2020 and an alumnus of the Idembeka Writers’ Workshop 2025. When he isn’t lost in the pages of a book, he spends his time cleaning data on Excel, goofing around with his dog Reneé, and torturing his sims in the Sims 4 gameplay. |