A voice spoke from inside his own skull: “You have picked Asem. Now Asem will pick you.”
Dr. Paa Bobo dismissed it as superstition. He was here to study a rare parasitic fungus, Cordyceps obeisei , which local healers claimed could “eat a man’s secrets.” But the fungus was nowhere to be found. Every sample plot came up empty. Every elder he interviewed grew silent when he mentioned the name. Dr. Paa Bobo - Asem Mpe Nipa
Asem mpe nipa.
“What do I do?”
The villagers had whispered it when he arrived. “Trouble does not like a person,” they’d say, shrugging. “If you seek Asem, Asem will find you.” A voice spoke from inside his own skull:
Trouble does not like a person. It loves them. It clings. It multiplies. Every step he took to fix one problem birthed three more. His phone played voicemails from his dead mother. His car tires melted into red clay. The more he tried to name the trouble, to analyze it, to write it into a peer-reviewed paper, the worse it became. He was here to study a rare parasitic
“I can’t. I… I dissected it. Preserved it in formalin.”