"Calling into Silence"

Incense and flutes, drums and the wailing songs of women. The sun beating down on the clearing, watching what went on below. Bloodflowers and fronds of the sunset palm laid in a circle, marking the sacred ground, the space for the dance. The spirit ground.

In this ring Ngwela danced from noon until sunset, until the murmur grew loud and the music stopped, and she stopped with it.

The women all whispered it, but Imbule announced it for all to hear.

Gendra's daughter had called, and no spirit had come.

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This story won the Grand Prize in the 2003 Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. It was inspired by a class I took as an undergraduate, where several of the ethnographies we read had to do with African spirit possession; the concept really interested me, and this story was the result. "Calling into Silence" is set on the Nahele Peninsula of the Nine Lands; that's the long, thin tropical peninsula visible at the bottom of the map. Dead Can Dance's album Spiritchaser provided mood music for me while I was working on this story.

The story itself is available to read on the website for Asimov's.

More information on the Asimov Award can be found here; it's out of date in terms of the year listed, but other than that the information is still good.

You can read the story for free online, or have it bound into a custom-designed anthology of your choice at Anthology Builder.