Don’t Feed the Chickens: C. T. Muchemwa’s “The Inheritance”

Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover C. T. Muchemwa’s “The Inheritance,” first published in Fiyah #33 in Winter 2025, and reprinted in Michael Kelly’s The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 in 2026. Spoilers ahead—but go read this one, it’s short and very good!

Taona doesn’t cry when his father, the richest man in Harare, dies. He was an only son among a “sea” of half-sisters, but his father never recognized him. Taona’s mother had refused to become Baba’s mistress, holding out for a marriage that never happened, and she and Taona were left in poverty.

Later, Taona weeps one tear of “absolute joy”—for Baba has left him a secondhand Honda Fit. It’s hardly the Lamborghini he’d driven, but it’s all Taona’s own. Per the lawyer, Baba said “this car will make a man of you.” The lawyer cautioned, however: “It’s the kind of gift that forces you to decide who you want to be. Choose wisely.“

Taona chooses to drive through town, displaying his inheritance. His elation turns to alarm when a “deep guttural voice” speaks from the backseat: “Taona Mudede, my boy. I’m so glad we finally get to meet.” The rearview mirror reveals only a chicken. Taona drives off the road and hits a boulder. He’s unhurt, the car only slightly damaged. But what has Baba gotten him into?

A chikwambo, Taona realizes. A money goblin. He’s wondered about Baba’s wealth, never fully accounted for. So instead of business acumen, Baba had this dangerous arrangement!

Taona reaches home on foot only to encounter his landlady, Mai Simba. She understands his father’s death has been a trial, but she needs the rent. Taona promises to pay tomorrow. Both know that’s unlikely.

A garage calls Taona, demanding that he retrieve his abandoned Honda along with his “things.” He ignores increasingly urgent calls until the garage threatens to publicize “the things you get up to.” He drives to a deserted parking lot and faces the inheritance on his passenger seat: a golden-brown hen with an oversized black comb. It grins, revealing human teeth. When Taona insists he wants nothing to do with “chivanhu magic,” the chikwambo says that Baba always believed Taona ran from his responsibilities. He can’t run from the chikwambo. They’re bound together for life, as the chikwambo’s bound to the Honda. Taona should be grateful he didn’t have to sacrifice anything to get “Chiki,” as Baba called the money goblin.

Back home, Mai Simba again demands her rent. Chiki remarks it could easily find that money. Later, the Honda’s alarm summons Taona. Chiki’s hungry. Only fresh chicken blood will satisfy it. Taona procures a hen and mixes its blood with meal, which Chiki devours to the last speck. Chiki must have a chicken a day, but Taona has none and can’t borrow anymore. He should have heeded the lawyer’s warning. Now he must say forever life-changing words to Chiki: If he needs money, how would they do that?

Fed chicken innards, particularly the heart, Chiki can lay money rolls like eggs. Paid, Mai Simba lets Taona set up a coop for Chiki’s future meals. He pays his other debts, takes care of his mother, and parties with his friends in the downtown clubs. He’s having too much fun, and gets so wasted that he neglects feeding Chiki. An apology doesn’t appease the goblin, whose “You forget who I am” chills Taona to sobriety. Nor will chickens satisfy Chiki any longer. Now it wants human blood. Chiki bites Taono in his elbow pit and suckles like a baby. Sated, it says that Taona is “just as sweet as [his] brothers.”

The chill hits Taona harder as he says, “I don’t have any brothers,” then realizes what that implies.

Taona feeds Chiki his own blood until he begins to weaken. Since “stale” stuff from a bloodbank won’t do, he considers using his many new girlfriends as donors. But Chiki says that older women have more “flavor.” Mai Simba will do.

That evening, Taona picks up Mai Simba from her church meeting. He gives her a sedative drink and leaves her in the Honda with Chiki. Shut in his bedroom, he can’t stop picturing what’s happening to a woman who trusted him and whom he now imagines as his mother. He can’t go on with this for life. He must decide what kind of man he wants to be.

When he returns to the car, Mai Simba is still sleeping. Chiki is sleeping, too, surrounded by money-eggs. Taona carries his landlady into the house. Then he drives to an abandoned field, pours petrol on the car, and sets it ablaze with Chiki panicking inside. All night he watches his inheritance burn to a husk, then walks home. Market women are already busy. Young men are heading out to find ways to survive, while others slouch home from nocturnal “nefarious deeds.” What future do any of them have? Taona remembers childish dreams that his father would “whisk [him] away to a different life,” would notice him. How wrong Taona had been.

Back home, he senses something watching him. A pile of ashes lies on the doorstep; a trail of them leads to the chicken coop. On the ground lies Mai Simba, a bowl of feed beside her, blood soaking her chest. Her heart’s been ripped out.

Something nestles in the crook of her arm. It looks at him, blood dripping from its teeth. “You’re finally back,” Chiki says. “Thank you so much for freeing me from the shackles of that car, my friend.”

“Now,” it adds, “let the real fun begin.”

Libronomicon: Mai Simba is eager to quote the Bible—sort of—on the obligations of tenants behind on their rent.

Weirdbuilding: Taona is at least somewhat familiar with chikwambo stories, and recalls many forms that the goblins can take: money snakes, “little men” who eat children, feathery sticks.

Anne’s Commentary

My dentist’s office has in one of its treatment rooms a print I always find disturbing. An adage about impossible occurrences runs, “When hens have teeth!” Another runs “Rare as hens’ teeth.” Well, in this print there’s a whole dental waiting room full of chickens with gritted human teeth, apparently wishing they could go back to simply having beaks. It’s way too uncanny valley for me, thanks, Doc.

A dive into the question of whether domestic fowl ever had or ever could have gleaming choppers led me to a delightful site called Randy’s Chicken Blog and the linked post. That led me to a Scientific American article titled “Mutant Chicken Grows Alligatorlike Teeth.” Author David Biello writes about what University of Wisconsin researcher Matthew Harris found “while working late in the developmental biology lab one night [cue the ominous-discovery soundtrack]:

Or a dinosaur, of which clan birds are the sole survivors. Paleontologist Jack Horner explains his vision of creating a dino from a chicken in this TED Talk. It would include reverse-engineering velociraptor snouts and teeth into the already formidable avians! Because walking a pack of velociraptors in the dogpark would be much cooler than walking a string of Yorkies, and nothing could possibly go wrong with animal-altering experimentation, as we are learning in our series on The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Muchemwa’s story about a boy and his chikwambo is faithful to the folklore of the Zimbabwean Shona culture, right down to those human teeth that animal-mimicking “money goblins” commonly possess, the better to disconcert their enslaved “masters.” Zvikwambo (the plural of chikwambo) may be purchased from rogue healers (n’angas); they’re believed by some not to be natural (supernatural?) beings but creatures conjured from the spirits of the dead. In addition to animal mimics, zvikwambo may manifest as humanoid dwarves or inanimate objects such as animal horns, calabash gourds, pottery, or beaded wood carvings. Whatever its form, the chikwambo is an instrument of kuromba, the occult practice for acquiring wealth and/or influence while skipping the time-consuming and uncertain alternative of earning it by one’s own efforts. Self-generated wealth is especially uncertain if, like Taona, you’re at the bottom of a steeply stratified socioeconomic system. As he muses after torching his inheritance of a Honda Fit and chicken chikwambo, what future does anyone like him have, lacking a miracle?

Lunches don’t come free, far less so miracles. The chikwambo may be a familiar, but it’s no slave; the relationship between it and its beneficiary is founded on a rule-laden supernatural contract that requires blood and betrayals of socially cherished bonds. We don’t know exactly what Baba did to get his Chiki, but the traditional payment involves the health, finances, emotional well-being, and even the lives of family members.

Could Taona and his mother have been Baba’s sacrifices? Could he have thought while making his will that Chiki would be just the ticket for making things right for his only son?

That is, his only surviving son, as Chiki implies when he tells Taona that he tastes as good as his brothers. And no sooner does Taona protest that he has no brothers than he gets the probable truth behind Chiki’s not-so-throwaway comment.

Taona has in fact inherited the sin of his father, and getting rid of it cannot be as easy as torching a Honda Fit. Where would the fun in that be for Chiki who, fortified by Mai Simba’s heart, is ready for his “real fun” to begin?

Not to speculate too far beyond the story’s end, but I wouldn’t want to be Taona’s mother when he arrives for his next visit.

A much-detailed account of the complexities of freeing oneself from a chikwambo can be found in this article on the intersection of Christianity with traditional magic in dealing with just that quandary.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There’s an ongoing Tumblr joke that certain types of material invite an interfaith response: “None of those words are in the bible,” “By Allah you are all dogs,” and “This too is Torah.” This came to mind a lot this week, because I’m pretty sure that the Lord has a lot less to say in support of landlords than Mai Simba thinks.

What the Lord does say is “the meek shall inherit.” That line gets quoted, mellifluously, by Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon, the doo-wop Greek chorus of Little Shop of Horrors. Taona ought to have paid more attention to the Gospel of Seymore Krelbourne.

Always wanting to be pre-warned about potential bad-idea supernatural deals, I looked up chikwambos. They do, indeed, grant material wishes in exchange for blood sacrifice, and get worse if you don’t live up to your end of the bargain. If you don’t return them to the healer from whence they came, you’re also stuck serving them in the afterlife, which makes me wonder where Baba is in this whole mess. They can be passed on as inheritance, but usually the heir needs to agree to “renew the contract.” Nothing says, though, that the chikwambo can’t lie or pressure you into doing so – or that the tow yard can’t do the same.

Chivanhu, on the other hand, is the indigenous religion of Zimbabwe, with the full range of practices that you’d expect. No surprise, though, that someone raised Christian would treat it as solely the source of bad-idea magic. The Lord says, etc. What’s unfortunate, though, is that Taona isn’t Christian enough to, say, go ask for help with an exorcism. He’s just Christian enough not to go to a Chivanhu expert. And this really, really isn’t the sort of situation that you want to handle on your own.

Baba has a lot to answer for. He spared Taona his whole life (unlike the mysterious “brothers” who presumably went into the creature’s maw)—possibly, specifically, so he’d have an uninformed heir on whom to foist the thing. “This will make you a man, choose wisely,” my ass. Talk about toxic masculinity! At least include a manual.

Blood sacrifice in exchange for wealth is an extremely straightforward deal, even moreso with a sharp-toothed chicken than a mysterious giant plant. The questions all center around what to do. Once you’ve fallen into the initial trap—and avoiding homelessness is a pretty big temptation – is there a way out? Chikwambos can be “returned,” but only if you know where they came from. They cannot, apparently, be destroyed in a burning car. Could the car have been abandoned somewhere, owner unknown, while Chiki was still bound to it? Would a priest (of any religion) have been helpful? Anne’s findings suggest that the answer is “absolutely.”

It’s not clear to me whether Chivanhu itself, or any of Tumblr’s Abrahamic trio, or a combination thereof would provide the ideal guidance in this particular situation. Are we dealing with something like a djinn or dybbuk, that can be negotiated with in any useful way, and that has the free will to make better choices in its own right? Or the equivalent of a Christian demon, inherently evil and more of a force of nature than a horrible business partner?

Unlike Seymore, Taona doesn’t have an on-screen girlfriend to fall into his pet anthropophage’s clutches. Just a semi-sympathetic landlord—the equivalent of Mr. Mushnik—and a lot of chickens. And his mother. And whoever else gets caught up in “the real fun” to come.

I have an unfortunate suspicion that said fun does not involve splashy musical numbers. Though if I were so unfortunate as to have a chikwambo at hand, I would encourage it to belt out “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space” whenever the situation seemed remotely appropriate.

Next week, Chapters 16-18 of The Island of Doctor Moreau offer yet more disturbing options for tasting blood.