The clouds are drifting away, like Pa and Ma. The moon is left alone in the middle of the sky. Around it is nothing but a blank sky. The stars dim in appearance in their brilliant radiance. There is nothing else. Like the moon, I am alone. The voices that comfort me have entered their rooms on their parents’ commands. My thoughts grew too heavy to hold; now they’ve sunken my mind.
So, I am still—laden with a burden I am too young to know—like the yard is still. The cockroaches and the lizards and the late birds and the fireflies have found a different compound to wander. Even the bats can’t be seen hanging upside down on the mango tree branches tonight. Like they all know that the shadows in which they usually lurk are different today. Holding an unfriendly air that chokes life. But my life, with nowhere else to go, must survive tonight. Even though I wished for my life, this godforsaken place wasn’t my home.
Even though it is still, within this stillness is a lone noise that shatters my heart. Pa and Ma are fighting. Ma is cussing. Pa is cussing back. He never used to cuss back. Ma has bared her breasts in front of Pa, but he isn’t sucking on his lower lip in excitement like he does (in the middle of the night when I look through the curtain that separates our beds to see why theirs quaked and mine didn’t). I cannot separate their angers. They have fused in war, and together, they combust and incense everything. Anger of the absence of money—like petrol burns the yard’s refuse in front of the compound—has things it ashens too. I can see the lantern fire dividing its light in many pieces before it dies. Pa raised the lantern on Ma’s face. Before the light died, I saw two pairs of hands wrestling each other. Ma is crying. She continues to cuss loudly: you will never know peace; your children’s children will suffer in this world; an infidel can born an infidel; God will punish you and your family who deceived me into this marriage. Pa thinks she’s the devil, so he calls her the devil’s name: Ekwensu, while he delivers his drum of blows.
My eyes hold a pool that soon my cheeks are wet from. My lacrimation is not because they’re fighting. If not, my eyes will be dry and flaky, and they’ll hurt to move. No. I cry because I am hungry. My belly worms pin me to desperate corners of pain. I bend here and I bend there. I beat it away here and it goes there. Sometimes, a wave conducts itself from below my breasts to my navel. I lie on my back on my mat and I look at the moon. I see my face on its own. As its face is uneven, the same is mine. It is a mirror of me. I wrestle the sleep from my eyes with my knuckles. I swallow the floating breeze. I pump it out from below again. A little relief washes over my face, a smile the size of an ant. It doesn’t go. It blows up into laughter. My belly hurts, but I laugh even louder. Windows open. The neighbours whose pretensions of peaceful sleeps have endured so far pretend no more. When joy is stirred in the thicket of violence, it is a new thing, a curious thing. So, tonight, I was their curious thing, willfully.
Three years ago, when I was seven, I used to think a husband and his wife were like a pair of slippers. Two feet made for each other. One useless without the other. You limped on one slipper alone. One foot is preserved, the other gets covered in dust and grime. Until my parents turned into a mismatched pair. They fought until their very similarities became their very differences. They were embittered by each other in the same way my tongue absorbs the tang of bitter leaf as though it were sweet, only for my face to convulse in regret. But one couldn’t dismember the other and survive. Ma’s soup contained less meat. Pa thinks she’s cutting the market funds he gives for more Hollandis because her cloth bag is thickening. It’s the same amount but our foods are smaller. She comments on the country’s situation of hardship. The country is hard; she complains every second. She nearly sings it. An inventive third stanza of the national anthem. Pa thinks she’s starting to keep bad friends. Her new makeup box is another module of her deceptive irony. Lie-lie, Pa began to remark when she sang her inventive anthem.
Pa was right. Ma had a new friend. We’d welcomed new neighbours—a man, his wife, and their three children—into the yard about a year ago. They’d arrived with more things than could fit in their rooms. So much so that the items they couldn’t find space for were left under all kinds of weather to destroy. And destroyed, they became. These neighbours became known as the Dike’s. The wife of Mr Dike was called Lolo after her husband’s praise. She was an obvious woman. Her style was overt: always on her bright red lipstick. She picked her gait like a model, crossing herself as she went about. Ma liked her. Ma therefore turned into her friend and confidant.
But Pa was wrong. And Ma, right. The country was hard. He knew the country was hard. He too sang the anthem, but by the linguistics of his body. He was no longer the clown of the night. His jokes withered and died, together with the smile that made up his face. He sat outside with the other men and took Schnapps in shots, tightening his face in the same way I saw them do. He slept more. And his voice started to change. From loud and soft, it thickened and vibrated like I sounded when I spoke through the standing fan. Then it thickened to the voice of Bobby, the landlord’s ekuke. And the same way, I ran when I saw Bobby; I ran when he spoke.
If I say it is the Schnapps, or if I say it is Lolo, or if I say I were the one, or join in the third verse of the nation’s anthem and say, the country is hard, each time I’ll be correct. But a pair of slippers do not become mismatched because they have attained disrepair. They may need a mending. But never do they turn into mismatched pairs. Except they weren’t ever a pair. Or maybe a husband and wife weren’t ever like a pair of slippers. Will I not also be correct if I say that my parents are fighting because of money? If all they are fighting for is the blue paper that can no longer buy enough meat in the market or enough peace for our home.
Featured Image by Ugochukwu Emebiriodo
Wow! This is brilliant!
I had to finish it!
Good work bro!
Oh, thank you. Merry Christmas in advance