FA Yuletide Writing Prize — Shortlisted Story
Theme: Dark Yuletide
Year: 2025/2026
Author: IkeChukwu Henry

The chalk mark was a cold thumbprint on the sun-warmed wood of the gate. Efe saw it first, a stark white smear against the burnt umber of the compound wall. The harmattan wind, that December thief, had stolen all moisture, leaving the air gritty and tasting of distant deserts. It carried the news faster than any town crier. By mid-morning, the compound was empty of neighbours, the usual chatter replaced by the stifled sounds of her mother, Iriagbonse, grinding peppers in the ukho—a frantic, rhythmic pounding that spoke of dread. 

Her father, Uwu, sat on a low stool by the yam barn, staring at his hands as if they no longer belonged to him. They were the hands that had built this house, that had tied the thatch on the roof now chosen. “Do not look them in the eye,” he whispered, not to Efe, but to the dusty earth. “Do not let your fear smell the air. It is a hungry thing.” 

At dusk, they came. 

Three of them. They emerged from the haze where the footpath blurred into the brush, tall and straight as iroko saplings. Their skin was not like skin; it was a shimmering, liquid gold, catching the last light like the foil on a communion wafer. It was beautiful and utterly wrong. They wore simple loincloths of a bark-brown fibre. But it was their faces that stopped Efe’s breath. Where mouths should have been, a web of thick, black thread criss-crossed their lower faces, pulled taut, the stitches ugly and raised. They moved in silence, their bare feet making no impression on the dry earth. They entered the parlour, as was known they would, and sat on the three stools placed by the cold hearth. They did not blink. 

The Red Stew simmered in the pot over the fire in the backyard kitchen, a secret guarded by the oldest women. Her mother had prepared it behind a locked door, her instructions hissed through the keyhole. Now, it steamed in a cracked ceramic bowl, its scent filling the room—not the familiar aroma of blended tomatoes and onions, but something deeper, metallic, like the tang of blood after a nosebleed, mixed with the wet-earth smell of clay and a bitter, herbal undertone. It was the colour of a fresh heart.

“Welcome,” Uwu said, his voice cracking. He placed a bowl before each Visitor. The ritual was precise. He bowed, set the bowl at their feet, and retreated without meeting the gaze that seemed to see everything and nothing. 

Efe, twenty and taut with a rebellion born of watching her parents bow year after year to unseen things, felt her stomach twist. This was not reverence; it was a prison of fear. She hated the sheen of sweat on her father’s temple, the way her mother’s hands fluttered like trapped birds. As her family pretended to sleep on mats in the adjoining room that night, the silence from the parlour thick and heavy, Efe made her decision. She needed to see. 

When the deep-snore rhythms of pretended sleep filled the room, she crept. A loose ceiling board in the storage closet gave access to the rafters. The space was a coffin of heat and cobwebs. She inched forward on her belly, the wood groaning softly under her weight, until she found a gap overlooking the parlour. 

The Visitors were still seated, rigid in the moonlight filtering through the window. For an hour, nothing. Then, the one nearest the hearth turned its head. Slowly, it looked up. It looked directly at her hiding place. 

Its gold skin rippled. Then it cracked, a fine web of lines spreading from its cheekbone downwards, like dry earth begging for rain. Through the cracks, Efe saw not flesh, not bone, but a profound, starless blackness. A void. The Visitor raised a hand—its fingers too long, too still—and touched its stitched lips. The black threads trembled. 

A soundless scream detonated in Efe’s skull. It was not a sound, but a pressure, a high, piercing frequency that scraped the inside of her mind raw. She felt a warm, sudden trickle from her ears. In the darkness, she touched her cheek. Her fingers came away slick and dark. The coppery scent of her own blood filled her nostrils, mirroring the stew below. She tried to gasp, but her breath hitched backwards. She tried to say “Mama,” but what left her lips was a guttural, reversed sigh: “Amam.” 

The world tilted. She fell, or the house shifted, crashing through the weakened ceiling board in a shower of dust and splinters.

Her parents found her in the wreckage, bleeding from the ears, dark rivulets painting her neck. Her mother screamed, but it was not a mother’s cry for an injured child. It was a ritualist’s cry of contamination. “Forgive us! Forgive!” she wailed, scrambling for the pot still warming by the embers. She scooped more of the thick, red gruel into a bowl, hands trembling toward the Visitors, who had not moved. 

Efe’s vision swam. The world had taken on a strange double-exposure. She saw her mother’s terrified face, but she also smelled the truth. The stew’s scent resolved in her shattered mind: it was clay from the sacred grove, ogilisi leaves crushed for binding, palm oil as carrier, and the iron-rich blood of a black rooster—not food, but mortar. A sealant. 

“Pleh,” Efe croaked, her tongue a clumsy stone. “Nur!” Help. Run. The words were leaves blown backward in a storm. 

Her mother lunged toward the golden figures, bowl extended in supplication. “Take it! Silence! Hold!” 

In that moment, Efe understood the true weight of the silence. It was not for the Visitors’ comfort. It was a cork in a bottle containing everything the village wished to forget—the wars, the betrayals, the sins buried in red earth. The stew glued the stitches shut. 

With a strength born of horrific clarity, Efe lurched forward. Her hand, slick with her own blood, struck her mother’s wrist. The bowl flew from her grip. It arced through the air, a parabolic splash of crimson, and shattered on the packed mud floor. 

The stew pooled, glistening. 

The Visitor nearest the spill stood. It was a motion unlike any human movement, more like a tree deciding to rise. It looked down at the broken seal at its feet, then back to the family.

One by one, with tiny, dry pings, the black threads over its mouth snapped. The stitches unravelled, falling away like dead spiders. The lips, revealed, were thin and colourless. They parted. 

No roar emerged. No ancient curse. Only a soft, silent exhalation of white light. It was not blinding, but bleaching. Where it touched the wall, the memory of the wall faded. When it touched her father’s face, the recognition in his eyes dissolved into placid blankness. Her mother turned to her, her scream dying before it was born, her expression smoothing into the serene emptiness of one who has never known love or fear. Efe watched her mother forget her. She felt the memory of her own name—Efe, meaning wealth—unspool from her mind like thread from a dropped reel. The white light reached her, warm and weightless. The last thing she knew was the taste of red blood, and a reversed word, her final thought, echoing into the coming nothing: Efe.