How To Mourn Your Body by Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi
Ogechi watches her own funeral rites and remembers her life, love, family, and the choices that preceded her death.
Day 5
You stare at it for a while, your pathetic body, splayed out on a mat with frayed edges. Until you catch an amoebic dent on the white, silky gown your body was forced into, a gown that doesn't reach your ankles. You hunker down and try to reach for the dress, to wriggle your body out of it, but you watch your hands catch the air, clasp together. The dent is splashed across your abdomen, and it is obvious. But obvious to whom? Perhaps nobody cares about a stained dress on a corpse. Even if nobody noticed the stain, your mother should have seen it, should have grimaced when she saw it, an oddity on your body. Had she forgotten how clean you used to be as a child maturing into a teenager? How you paused on the side of the road when she spotted a stain or a tear in your dress, her voice layered in mock-observance, and almost immediately you dashed back home to change, begging her to wait for you. But in your head, you didn't care if she waited for you or not.
You marvel at your plump cheeks, your swollen hands and legs, and suddenly a veneer of sadness fills you. You were almost like a toothpick when you were alive, scrounging on whatever food that came your way. Under the lone bulb hanging down from the ceiling, your face appears peaceful and shiny from the formaldehyde your mother and Innocent use to clean your body every morning and night, to keep it from the fangs of putrefaction. You are still staring at your body when the door clicks and snaps and opens. Your mother and Innocent walk in. Your father lingers for a while at the door, wedging his nkpara at the edge of the door. He comes across as someone who is about to peer inside the room and at the same time walk right into it. Still, he remains at the door. "Kachifo nu. Good night," he says and limps away. He hasn't seen your body since it was ferried from Abuja to Enugu. He had only glimpsed your face the first day and looked away, as though afraid that something in him would split open if he gazed at you for too long. You think he's still furious with you for running away from the house, despite his warning.
The door howls as it closes and although you did not feel the weight of that sound, the harshness of it, you think your body felt it by the way your hand collapses on your side. But it's your mother who moved your hand that way, to make room for the rag that she dabs under your armpit. You will her to do something when she catches the stain on your gown, but she looks away swiftly. Innocent stares at it for a moment, as though trying to understand how it got there. Still, like your mother, he looks away. He doesn't meet your mother's eyes as he moves the rag between your toes. Their shared silence has endured for the past four days, and you hate it. They barely share a glance, barely allow their hands to brush against each other. They use their heads, eyes or hands to make requests from each other. A gust of wind rushes into the room, dragging your gown, almost pulling it over your thighs. Your mother tugs it down as Innocent scoots to shut the windows. When he settles down to work on your thighs, your mother puts a hand on his, and he withdraws and settles on your fingers. You wish your mother will allow him. You long for those sturdy hands to touch your thighs, to caress your body until you chuckled and dissolved into moans. Your mother clears her throat as she wipes your thighs with a flash of irritation on her face. She pauses, staring at the star-shaped scar on your left leg, a little below your knee.
"Do you know how she got this?" she asks, as Innocent turns around. You smile, a flurry of excitement rushing through you. You don't want her to stop talking. Innocent shakes his head. "She was fourteen, riding her brother's bike. She was bigger than the bicycle and I had warned her to never take it beyond the boundaries of our compound. But she never listened. She rammed into a tree stump, and it tore her skin open. Thank God she did not bleed to death." You like what this anecdote does to Innocent, the way his face breaks open in a smile. But you don't see what comes next, until your mother starts to sniff and dab her eyes with the edge of her faded wrapper. The smile vanishes from Innocent's face as he scoops her into his arms, begging her to stop crying.
"We warned her o," your mother says in a voice cloaked with tears. "Her father and I warned Ogechi about living the village, that she should wait for God's time. She insisted that she wanted a better life. But we're not poor. At least, we have a roof over our heads, and we can afford three square meals every day. So, what else did she want?" You sigh and roll your eyes. Didn't she know how dissatisfied you were with your life, the village, with waking up every morning only to hurry down to the stream with a yellow jerrycan slung under your armpit? Did she not notice how you became distant from the girls in your age grade and stopped attending their monthly meetings? You did not hide your feelings from her or your father. You complained about the slowness of the meeting, the way the girls spent useful hours gossiping about every young man or woman who had returned from Lagos, Abuja or ala ndi ocha in brand new cars, loaded with gifts for their loved ones. But you didn't tell her how much you envied them, how you wish to be like them, these people who drove around the village in flashy cars, cars you only see on your friend's television whenever you visit her on weekends. You wanted more for yourself, something beyond the simplistic smallness of village life. But more importantly, you wanted to be far from your parent's rant and their usual mantra about waiting for God's time. Your mother never failed to remind you that you were a woman, that the world was a forest that guzzled up any woman who dared to survive on her own.
She has stopped crying and Innocent squats at a corner, his hands spread out, as though unsure what to do with himself. Your mother rises to her feet, carrying a bowl in the curve of her arm and walks to the door. She pauses and turns around. She scratches her hair flecked with white, as if trying to remember something. "Good night," Innocent says, and stares around once the door closes. He's not wont to sleep with the lights on. But since the first night, he's never turned off the light. You wish your parents will allow him to sleep in the other free room or with your brother Uwakwe and your son Chisimdi, not with a corpse. But you have no influence over tradition from where you are.
Yet, one thing you know how to do best is watch over him as he sleeps, trying to ward off the spirits that attempt to infiltrate his dreams. Even now, as he curls on his side and shuts his eyes, you can sense he's already having one of those night horrors from the changes in his body, the way he rolls from side to side, wheezing. Something hovers above his chest, pressing his neck. She's half human, half-goat. You duck as she launches a spear of light from her hoofed foot. It dissolves into the wall without setting it ablaze. She launches another. You dodge. Innocent jerks awake, coughing as you pin the creature to the wall. Her breath is a foul mix of ginger, nutmegs and potatoes. You scrunch your nose as she howls. You reach for her neck and snap it. She shrivels into ash and vapourizes. You dust your palms together and lean against the wall, watching Innocent, who's now calm and spread on his side. He makes the sign of the cross three times and closes his eyes, his chest rising and falling slowly. You smile when he smiles now, and you imagine that he's thinking of you, dreaming of you.
Before Day 1
You are living in Abuja, somewhere in Jikwoyi, where mornings break with the hubbub of traffic, the wails of a child and the cry of a rooster. Every morning, the smell of a neighbour's suck-away kisses your nostrils, churning your intestines. Still, you manage to say a short prayer and make the sign of the cross, committing the day's hustle to God and praying for a good Samaritan to appear and take you out of poverty. You walk many short, eroded routes, holding two big coolers of food - all because you want to save up your transport fare.
When you arrive at the busy market, you take a deep breath and squeeze past the horde of people standing - walking slowly and faster, people talking - through the noisy clash of horns, and walk over to the corner of the road, facing the Xpression mart supermarket. There, you say a short prayer and greet the other traders around. You mount a huge umbrella over a wooden table bearing the coolers. You work around the clock, attending to customers, roasting yams and plantains on a burner, sweating in the burning sun. You spend the next hours waiting and waiting for the porridge beans to finish or at least go beyond half the height of the cooler. You don't want to have to give it away to the children in your neighbourhood this time because the customers complained yesterday that the food was stale from reheating. You don't know how to conceal your disgust for your side neighbour, Mama Peace. You scrunch your face and eye her as she smiles and counts the wad of money. She said she had not sat down since she came to the market. You can see it now, from the way people in splashy cars pull up in front of her stand to buy jollof or fried rice, capped with either chicken or fish. You think she visited a dibia for good market. Maybe you should diversify into her kind of business, maybe you will make better sales like she does. But you have changed three businesses in a space of two years since you came to Abuja. First, you started making hair, but you shut it down because the smell of relaxer and hair polish irritated you and most importantly, because your fingers grew numb from the day's job. Then, you sold agidi and fried akara for two months until you stopped because you could not bear the sting of hot oil and the heat from the flames. Then, you ventured into the business of selling soft drinks, but the incessant power outages and the pile of debtors chased you out of it.
You're still thinking of this, staring intermittently at Mama Peace and your coolers, when your phone chimes. You kiss your teeth when you check the phone. Mama Peace asks if there's a problem, but you feign a smile and say, "Nothing. I bin think say na alert. But nah one stupid message from MTN."
"You mind them. Nah so dem dey do," she adds, smoothening her skirt, and you wish she will just mind her business. You stare at the phone again and heave your chest. It's a message from Innocent saying that he's stalled in traffic and he may come home a bit late tonight. "I will also come home a bit late," you want to type but refrain from it, realizing that it's already ten minutes past three in the afternoon and Chisimdi's school must have dismissed by now. You spring to your feet, wedging your purse under your armpit, but you don't turn to Mama Peace today. Instead, you beg the woman on your right, the one carrying a sleeping baby, to watch over your business, while you hurry to your son's school.
When he reaches for you that night, you do not squirm away, remembering your heated argument in the early hours of the morning. You let his quivering hands unclip your buttons and find your breasts in the semi-darkness, the moon partially revealing the smallness of your room, the cluster of bags and shoes in a corner, the tiny finger imprints on the wall made by Chisimdi. You close your eyes and breathe deeply as his lips latch onto the soft tissues of your nipples, sucking ravenously, burying your anger in the pit of your stomach as you recall how he raised his voice when you told him that all you had was your transport fare and besides, he hadn't paid for the thirty thousand naira he borrowed from you last month.
Your eyes wander to your boy curled up on the other side of the bed as Innocent works on your skirt, pulling it down. Chisimdi snores quietly, his chest rising and falling. You pat down his hair, remembering the way he stood at a corner, watching the both of you rip each other apart with cusses over trifling issues hemmed around money and food. You wonder what a boy of seven thinks when he sees his parents quarrelling every time. What does his silence mean? Is it a medium to better understand the events unfurling before him, to process his pain? Sometimes you hold his hands after your quarrels and ask if he's alright. But he nods and smiles. You give him snacks and sometimes chicken wings to pacify him, to get him to talk, to share his pain, but he smiles and continues to munch his food.
You steady yourself as he nibbles at your belly button and draws down your pants. You stifle your moan when he buries his face between your thighs. You dig your nails into his back, groaning softly and crying over your current predicament, over the things that seem to overwhelm you.
Day 6
Your father's kinsmen gather in the compound again. But this time, the chief priest is among them. He leads the procession into the house, striking the floor intermittently with his staff. A strand of omu nkwu is pressed down between the lips of the men. The jiggling of the tiny bells strapped to the staff interlaces with the Christmas songs blaring from a nearby ice-cream vendor, even though Christmas is in two weeks. They walk into the room where your body lay, your hands by your side. Innocent opens the window, even though your body hasn't started to reek of decay. The chief priest encircles your body three times, chanting, his bare feet slightly pulling at the mat's edges. Then he stops, digs into his bag, pulls out a piece of nzu. He marks your forehead, palms and feet with it. Your father lingers at the door, watching the drama unfold. The chief priest faces Innocent. "Tomorrow is the final day of the ritual. Because you did not marry her while she was alive, you will marry her in death. Fail to do this, her soul will continue to hover listlessly around you and her family, until the right thing is done. Did you hear me?" You watch Innocent's lips and hands twitch for a moment as he tugs at the omu nkwu and says, "Yes," without looking at the chief priest.
Day 1
You had been well the previous night. You had only complained of a mild headache and a tautness in your body, which faded away when Innocent massaged your back, neck, hands and legs. You had even laughed when Chisimdi offered his service, massaging your toes with his fingers and saying "Sorry, mummy," when you winced from pain. The following morning, you wake shivering so hard your teeth knock together, your breath dwindling inside your lungs. The next minutes pass quickly, but you sense something uncanny is happening to you when you lose your voice. But you can hear Innocent calling your name, your son's wails interspersed with Mummy. Tears and mucus stream down his nose. You realize something terrible has happened when you wake in the hospital, but your body remains on the bed. The doctor draws the blue shroud over your body and Innocent shrieks and crumples on the floor, crying. He pulls Chisimdi to himself. You scream at the doctor, who tells the nurse beside him to record the time of death and cause of death. You tell him that you are still here, that you're very much alive, but your voice doesn't venture beyond the vacuum which you occupy. Seeing that the doctor has walked out of the room, you move towards the nurse and peer into her notebook, as she writes things that do not make sense. How could you have died of pneumonia, common pneumonia? You tell the nurse to stop writing such nonsense, that you don't remember catching pneumonia. You who have been careful of your health after iba almost knocked you out of life at thirteen if not for the timely intervention of your mother's herbs. You who take precautionary measures during cold seasons, wearing thick sweaters. But the nurse shakes her head and walks away. You face them, Innocent and Chisimdi. Tears snake down your eyes as your boy asks his father if you're going to be alright. "Mummy has gone somewhere," Innocent says, and your boy wants to know where. "To a better place," Innocent says, the tears clogging his voice as he wraps his arms around Chisimdi. Something shifts in you and at that moment, it dawns on you that your feet are not touching the floor, and you are floating, buoyed by nothing, far beyond the liminal state between life and death.
Day 6
That evening, Uwakwe and Innocent sit in front of the ube tree, launching grains into the air. You settle over the elevated stone platform by the suck-away, and watch them. A flock of pigeons flutter around as the grains descend on the ground. "Inno, how are you?" your brother asks, and then adds: "I don't want the usual fine. We use fine a lot, even when we are not. I mean, how have you been holding up these past days?"
Innocent shrugs, stares at the sky blazing pink and red, and looks downwards. "I don't know how I have been. Sometimes, I wish I..." He pauses, tossing the seeds to the ground. "It's not been easy sleeping in that room with a corpse for six days."
"I can imagine. You're a good man. I bu dike. Not all men will do what you're doing. You know, some would have ran away the moment my sister died. But you stayed and bore the shame, even when your family and friends deserted you." The compound is saturated with birdsong and the cooing of pigeons. You stare at the carpet of dry leaves and rotten fruits under the tree. Of the chores you preferred, sweeping wasn't part of them. You hated sweeping under the tree. But it was one of the things your mother made sure you did each morning before anything else. Even after sweeping the entire compound, it only took a minute before the birds and wind littered it with leaves and fruits.
When you turn to them, Uwakwe is dusting his trousers and reaching into the small nylon on the bench for more grains. He asks Innocent about his relationship with you. "I know my sister can be a handful. Sometimes we used to fight as children, and she would even swing a punch at me as if I am her agemate." Their chuckle is a welcome distraction from the weight of your grief.
Innocent flips his palms open and some pigeons peck on the seeds until he sprays them in the air and claps his palms. "We did not have a perfect relationship," Innocent says. "We quarrelled a lot, argued over many things. But I never hit her. We made ourselves happy even from the little we had." He says that he wished he had given you a better life, the one you had always dreamed of. He wished you had met him when he had enough money, when his business was still booming and he was importing clothes and shoes from China and selling in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu.
He clears his throat. "When my business crashed and my goods were seized by custom officers, I paid so much, but they were never released. Those I helped in the past turned their backs on me." You heard that story so many times until it became a kind of mantra in his mouth. Sometimes you wondered if he said those things to sway you from asking him for money. Yet, you wanted more from him, instead of the grunt works he did from dawn to dusk, yielding little or nothing at the end of the month. You wanted a better life for your son, although you had already folded your dreams of becoming a nurse and tucked it somewhere in your luggage, where your WAEC certificate gathered dust.
Innocent clears his throat again and spits on the ground, the husky sound pulling you from your thoughts. And almost immediately, Chisimdi walks out of the house. You smile. Your boy is no longer a boy. He seems to have shed the fragility of a seven-year-old. He walks with a stoop in his shoulder, tucking his hands in his pocket - a new kind of fashion he must have picked from the school he attends in town. He greets his father and your brother, and they make a space for him to sit in the middle. There are sleep marks on his face when he wipes his eyes with his knuckles.
"Bobo, you slept for hours o," your brother says. "I hope you're enjoying your new school?"
Chisimdi shrugs. "The teachers are great. But I like the chemistry teacher the most. Her classes challenge you to think deeply."
"That's my boy. I know you'll do well there," your brother hails, pulling him in a bear hug.
"He's always been a smart kid," Innocent says, smiling. You stare ahead, a gentle wind floats around, tickling your neck and hair.
For the first time, your father walks into the room. Your eyes go wide with shock. Even Innocent's mouth hangs open. He greets your father as he glances around, squeezing his scarred jowls. When he asks if enough ventilation is coming into the room, Innocent says yes and squats beside the bed. He walks closer to the mat to get a better view of your face and shakes his head. You watch him sneeze into his handkerchief and swipe his nose.
"The formaldehyde is strong," he says to no one. A fly flits around your face for a while and he swats at it, until it scoots out of the window. He turns to Innocent and you're scared that he will scold or hurl invectives at him. But his voice is soft when he says, "Ogechi was a unique person. Of course, she was a handful and sometimes when she said she wouldn't do anything, that was it. There was no going back on her words." He sneezed again. "I don't know why she chose to hide her life from us, even the fact she was cohabiting with a man and had a son for him. I don't know what she saw in you, but I want to say thank you for not leaving my daughter even when you could have just ran away." When he sneezes again and walks to the door, you sense that he's about to unfurl and he doesn't want Innocent to see his tears. He turns to Innocent and says, "Thank you."
You settle beside Innocent as he snores. You pat down his forest of hair, one of the things your boy inherited from him. One of the things you fell in love with, the way it beautifully frames his face. You had met him a year after you arrived in Abuja, a year of roasting corn on grills during the day and spending the night under the awning of shops, shivering in the cold. You met him on that sweltering February sun as he greeted you and asked how much you sold an ear of corn. "Three for six hundred naira. One for two hundred," you said, noting his finely shaped face, his pink lips and his crown of hair and imagined running your fingers through it. There was a delicateness about him, in the way he priced the corn, as though he were trying not to offend you, and you thought he would be so boring to live with. Still, you engaged him with trivial matters, as you flipped three ears of corns over on the grill. You marvelled at his responses, his small laughter, the way he oohed and ahed, offering his own opinions. You loved the way he talked about Nigerian politics, about the insurgency in some parts of the east, using staggering words that made your heart swirl with pride as if you were the one using them. Within a month, you both became close. You visited him at Kugbo where he worked as a welder, bringing small chops and titbits of gossip. And on weekends, you cleaned his room and cooked pots of stew and soup, until, gradually, you told him that you were tired of staying in your friend's place, tired of her incessant complaints, even though you try to tidy up her room. Then, he asked if you would love to move in with him and you obliged.
Now, he stirs, but it's not one of his episodes. You look around the room, inspecting the walls and windows for strangeness, for anything extraterrestrial to leap out of them. Nothing happens. You whisper into his ears and as though prompted by your song, he becomes calm again.
Day 7
The music intensifies as the casket is shouldered by four huge men in suits. They rock the casket gently, leading a procession of men and women crying, dabbing their eyes with a scarf and handkerchief. Your mother wails and beats her chest as the women pat her shoulders and nudge her forward. Your father limps forward with a tightness on his face. Innocent and Chisimdi are unusually calm, their eyes hidden under sunglasses. The men mount the casket on the elevated platform, in the middle of the compound. Four canopies are arranged in a square, away from the tree.
The music dies. A priest - in a white cassock and a green stole - steps forward to pray over your body. He says, "May God forgive your sins and grant you eternal rest in His kingdom." You stand at a corner, looking around, hoping that no strange spirit interrupts the occasion. The priest concludes the prayer by sprinkling water on your body from a can. "Na nwa na muonso," he says, making the sign of the cross in the air. Everyone echoes, "Amen." He walks back to the canopy, kisses his stole, folds it neatly and hands it over to his assistant, who tucks it in a briefcase. The priest walks out of the compound quickly; the assistant follows him from behind.
The chief priest trudges forward. Two boys - carrying a pot of burning incense and a strand of omu nkwu between their lips - flank him. They go round your casket three times. The chief priest chants. Then, he pauses to mark your body with nzu. He beckons on Innocent to come forward. He takes a rusted ring from his bag and slips it onto Innocent's finger. He takes another one from the bag and slides it onto your finger. Then, he takes his right palm and stamps it to yours. "By this, the two become one: flesh and soul. And the soul of our daughter can now find rest." Half the crowd bursts into peals of excitement. But your father and mother stare ahead, as though they're strangers in this world. For the first time, Chisimdi looks away and cups his face. His chest and shoulders quiver. Your brother draws him into his chest. You look away for a moment, sniffling. Minutes later, your parents rise from the chair, and everyone walks to the mouth of the grave. Gradually, the men lower your body into it. Your father is the first to hurl a shovelful of earth into your grave, gazing at the casket for too long with misty eyes. Your mother steps forward with the women, crying as she says, "Ga nke oma. Go well, my child." She shovels the sand into the grave. Then your brother.
Your husband and son are the last on the rollcall. Your chest trembles when your boy holds the shovelful of sand and says, "Mummy, I love you. I love you so much." Your eyes swell with tears.
When your husband clenches the shovel, and says, "Even in the afterlife, I'll still choose you," you don't cry. Something settles in you. The well in your eyes dry. You look sideways, at the whirlwind gathering in a corner, spinning empty cans and papers around. Some people rush into the house to take cover. You float towards it. Then you halt, looking at your family one last time, before giving yourself over to the whirlwind. It sucks you into its bosom and ferries you over the fence, into oblivion.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/hHuAYBi
via IFTTT
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
You stare at it for a while, your pathetic body, splayed out on a mat with frayed edges. Until you catch an amoebic dent on the white, silky gown your body was forced into, a gown that doesn't reach your ankles. You hunker down and try to reach for the dress, to wriggle your body out of it, but you watch your hands catch the air, clasp together. The dent is splashed across your abdomen, and it is obvious. But obvious to whom? Perhaps nobody cares about a stained dress on a corpse. Even if nobody noticed the stain, your mother should have seen it, should have grimaced when she saw it, an oddity on your body. Had she forgotten how clean you used to be as a child maturing into a teenager? How you paused on the side of the road when she spotted a stain or a tear in your dress, her voice layered in mock-observance, and almost immediately you dashed back home to change, begging her to wait for you. But in your head, you didn't care if she waited for you or not.
You marvel at your plump cheeks, your swollen hands and legs, and suddenly a veneer of sadness fills you. You were almost like a toothpick when you were alive, scrounging on whatever food that came your way. Under the lone bulb hanging down from the ceiling, your face appears peaceful and shiny from the formaldehyde your mother and Innocent use to clean your body every morning and night, to keep it from the fangs of putrefaction. You are still staring at your body when the door clicks and snaps and opens. Your mother and Innocent walk in. Your father lingers for a while at the door, wedging his nkpara at the edge of the door. He comes across as someone who is about to peer inside the room and at the same time walk right into it. Still, he remains at the door. "Kachifo nu. Good night," he says and limps away. He hasn't seen your body since it was ferried from Abuja to Enugu. He had only glimpsed your face the first day and looked away, as though afraid that something in him would split open if he gazed at you for too long. You think he's still furious with you for running away from the house, despite his warning.
The door howls as it closes and although you did not feel the weight of that sound, the harshness of it, you think your body felt it by the way your hand collapses on your side. But it's your mother who moved your hand that way, to make room for the rag that she dabs under your armpit. You will her to do something when she catches the stain on your gown, but she looks away swiftly. Innocent stares at it for a moment, as though trying to understand how it got there. Still, like your mother, he looks away. He doesn't meet your mother's eyes as he moves the rag between your toes. Their shared silence has endured for the past four days, and you hate it. They barely share a glance, barely allow their hands to brush against each other. They use their heads, eyes or hands to make requests from each other. A gust of wind rushes into the room, dragging your gown, almost pulling it over your thighs. Your mother tugs it down as Innocent scoots to shut the windows. When he settles down to work on your thighs, your mother puts a hand on his, and he withdraws and settles on your fingers. You wish your mother will allow him. You long for those sturdy hands to touch your thighs, to caress your body until you chuckled and dissolved into moans. Your mother clears her throat as she wipes your thighs with a flash of irritation on her face. She pauses, staring at the star-shaped scar on your left leg, a little below your knee.
"Do you know how she got this?" she asks, as Innocent turns around. You smile, a flurry of excitement rushing through you. You don't want her to stop talking. Innocent shakes his head. "She was fourteen, riding her brother's bike. She was bigger than the bicycle and I had warned her to never take it beyond the boundaries of our compound. But she never listened. She rammed into a tree stump, and it tore her skin open. Thank God she did not bleed to death." You like what this anecdote does to Innocent, the way his face breaks open in a smile. But you don't see what comes next, until your mother starts to sniff and dab her eyes with the edge of her faded wrapper. The smile vanishes from Innocent's face as he scoops her into his arms, begging her to stop crying.
"We warned her o," your mother says in a voice cloaked with tears. "Her father and I warned Ogechi about living the village, that she should wait for God's time. She insisted that she wanted a better life. But we're not poor. At least, we have a roof over our heads, and we can afford three square meals every day. So, what else did she want?" You sigh and roll your eyes. Didn't she know how dissatisfied you were with your life, the village, with waking up every morning only to hurry down to the stream with a yellow jerrycan slung under your armpit? Did she not notice how you became distant from the girls in your age grade and stopped attending their monthly meetings? You did not hide your feelings from her or your father. You complained about the slowness of the meeting, the way the girls spent useful hours gossiping about every young man or woman who had returned from Lagos, Abuja or ala ndi ocha in brand new cars, loaded with gifts for their loved ones. But you didn't tell her how much you envied them, how you wish to be like them, these people who drove around the village in flashy cars, cars you only see on your friend's television whenever you visit her on weekends. You wanted more for yourself, something beyond the simplistic smallness of village life. But more importantly, you wanted to be far from your parent's rant and their usual mantra about waiting for God's time. Your mother never failed to remind you that you were a woman, that the world was a forest that guzzled up any woman who dared to survive on her own.
She has stopped crying and Innocent squats at a corner, his hands spread out, as though unsure what to do with himself. Your mother rises to her feet, carrying a bowl in the curve of her arm and walks to the door. She pauses and turns around. She scratches her hair flecked with white, as if trying to remember something. "Good night," Innocent says, and stares around once the door closes. He's not wont to sleep with the lights on. But since the first night, he's never turned off the light. You wish your parents will allow him to sleep in the other free room or with your brother Uwakwe and your son Chisimdi, not with a corpse. But you have no influence over tradition from where you are.
Yet, one thing you know how to do best is watch over him as he sleeps, trying to ward off the spirits that attempt to infiltrate his dreams. Even now, as he curls on his side and shuts his eyes, you can sense he's already having one of those night horrors from the changes in his body, the way he rolls from side to side, wheezing. Something hovers above his chest, pressing his neck. She's half human, half-goat. You duck as she launches a spear of light from her hoofed foot. It dissolves into the wall without setting it ablaze. She launches another. You dodge. Innocent jerks awake, coughing as you pin the creature to the wall. Her breath is a foul mix of ginger, nutmegs and potatoes. You scrunch your nose as she howls. You reach for her neck and snap it. She shrivels into ash and vapourizes. You dust your palms together and lean against the wall, watching Innocent, who's now calm and spread on his side. He makes the sign of the cross three times and closes his eyes, his chest rising and falling slowly. You smile when he smiles now, and you imagine that he's thinking of you, dreaming of you.
Before Day 1
You are living in Abuja, somewhere in Jikwoyi, where mornings break with the hubbub of traffic, the wails of a child and the cry of a rooster. Every morning, the smell of a neighbour's suck-away kisses your nostrils, churning your intestines. Still, you manage to say a short prayer and make the sign of the cross, committing the day's hustle to God and praying for a good Samaritan to appear and take you out of poverty. You walk many short, eroded routes, holding two big coolers of food - all because you want to save up your transport fare.
When you arrive at the busy market, you take a deep breath and squeeze past the horde of people standing - walking slowly and faster, people talking - through the noisy clash of horns, and walk over to the corner of the road, facing the Xpression mart supermarket. There, you say a short prayer and greet the other traders around. You mount a huge umbrella over a wooden table bearing the coolers. You work around the clock, attending to customers, roasting yams and plantains on a burner, sweating in the burning sun. You spend the next hours waiting and waiting for the porridge beans to finish or at least go beyond half the height of the cooler. You don't want to have to give it away to the children in your neighbourhood this time because the customers complained yesterday that the food was stale from reheating. You don't know how to conceal your disgust for your side neighbour, Mama Peace. You scrunch your face and eye her as she smiles and counts the wad of money. She said she had not sat down since she came to the market. You can see it now, from the way people in splashy cars pull up in front of her stand to buy jollof or fried rice, capped with either chicken or fish. You think she visited a dibia for good market. Maybe you should diversify into her kind of business, maybe you will make better sales like she does. But you have changed three businesses in a space of two years since you came to Abuja. First, you started making hair, but you shut it down because the smell of relaxer and hair polish irritated you and most importantly, because your fingers grew numb from the day's job. Then, you sold agidi and fried akara for two months until you stopped because you could not bear the sting of hot oil and the heat from the flames. Then, you ventured into the business of selling soft drinks, but the incessant power outages and the pile of debtors chased you out of it.
You're still thinking of this, staring intermittently at Mama Peace and your coolers, when your phone chimes. You kiss your teeth when you check the phone. Mama Peace asks if there's a problem, but you feign a smile and say, "Nothing. I bin think say na alert. But nah one stupid message from MTN."
"You mind them. Nah so dem dey do," she adds, smoothening her skirt, and you wish she will just mind her business. You stare at the phone again and heave your chest. It's a message from Innocent saying that he's stalled in traffic and he may come home a bit late tonight. "I will also come home a bit late," you want to type but refrain from it, realizing that it's already ten minutes past three in the afternoon and Chisimdi's school must have dismissed by now. You spring to your feet, wedging your purse under your armpit, but you don't turn to Mama Peace today. Instead, you beg the woman on your right, the one carrying a sleeping baby, to watch over your business, while you hurry to your son's school.
When he reaches for you that night, you do not squirm away, remembering your heated argument in the early hours of the morning. You let his quivering hands unclip your buttons and find your breasts in the semi-darkness, the moon partially revealing the smallness of your room, the cluster of bags and shoes in a corner, the tiny finger imprints on the wall made by Chisimdi. You close your eyes and breathe deeply as his lips latch onto the soft tissues of your nipples, sucking ravenously, burying your anger in the pit of your stomach as you recall how he raised his voice when you told him that all you had was your transport fare and besides, he hadn't paid for the thirty thousand naira he borrowed from you last month.
Your eyes wander to your boy curled up on the other side of the bed as Innocent works on your skirt, pulling it down. Chisimdi snores quietly, his chest rising and falling. You pat down his hair, remembering the way he stood at a corner, watching the both of you rip each other apart with cusses over trifling issues hemmed around money and food. You wonder what a boy of seven thinks when he sees his parents quarrelling every time. What does his silence mean? Is it a medium to better understand the events unfurling before him, to process his pain? Sometimes you hold his hands after your quarrels and ask if he's alright. But he nods and smiles. You give him snacks and sometimes chicken wings to pacify him, to get him to talk, to share his pain, but he smiles and continues to munch his food.
You steady yourself as he nibbles at your belly button and draws down your pants. You stifle your moan when he buries his face between your thighs. You dig your nails into his back, groaning softly and crying over your current predicament, over the things that seem to overwhelm you.
Day 6
Your father's kinsmen gather in the compound again. But this time, the chief priest is among them. He leads the procession into the house, striking the floor intermittently with his staff. A strand of omu nkwu is pressed down between the lips of the men. The jiggling of the tiny bells strapped to the staff interlaces with the Christmas songs blaring from a nearby ice-cream vendor, even though Christmas is in two weeks. They walk into the room where your body lay, your hands by your side. Innocent opens the window, even though your body hasn't started to reek of decay. The chief priest encircles your body three times, chanting, his bare feet slightly pulling at the mat's edges. Then he stops, digs into his bag, pulls out a piece of nzu. He marks your forehead, palms and feet with it. Your father lingers at the door, watching the drama unfold. The chief priest faces Innocent. "Tomorrow is the final day of the ritual. Because you did not marry her while she was alive, you will marry her in death. Fail to do this, her soul will continue to hover listlessly around you and her family, until the right thing is done. Did you hear me?" You watch Innocent's lips and hands twitch for a moment as he tugs at the omu nkwu and says, "Yes," without looking at the chief priest.
Day 1
You had been well the previous night. You had only complained of a mild headache and a tautness in your body, which faded away when Innocent massaged your back, neck, hands and legs. You had even laughed when Chisimdi offered his service, massaging your toes with his fingers and saying "Sorry, mummy," when you winced from pain. The following morning, you wake shivering so hard your teeth knock together, your breath dwindling inside your lungs. The next minutes pass quickly, but you sense something uncanny is happening to you when you lose your voice. But you can hear Innocent calling your name, your son's wails interspersed with Mummy. Tears and mucus stream down his nose. You realize something terrible has happened when you wake in the hospital, but your body remains on the bed. The doctor draws the blue shroud over your body and Innocent shrieks and crumples on the floor, crying. He pulls Chisimdi to himself. You scream at the doctor, who tells the nurse beside him to record the time of death and cause of death. You tell him that you are still here, that you're very much alive, but your voice doesn't venture beyond the vacuum which you occupy. Seeing that the doctor has walked out of the room, you move towards the nurse and peer into her notebook, as she writes things that do not make sense. How could you have died of pneumonia, common pneumonia? You tell the nurse to stop writing such nonsense, that you don't remember catching pneumonia. You who have been careful of your health after iba almost knocked you out of life at thirteen if not for the timely intervention of your mother's herbs. You who take precautionary measures during cold seasons, wearing thick sweaters. But the nurse shakes her head and walks away. You face them, Innocent and Chisimdi. Tears snake down your eyes as your boy asks his father if you're going to be alright. "Mummy has gone somewhere," Innocent says, and your boy wants to know where. "To a better place," Innocent says, the tears clogging his voice as he wraps his arms around Chisimdi. Something shifts in you and at that moment, it dawns on you that your feet are not touching the floor, and you are floating, buoyed by nothing, far beyond the liminal state between life and death.
Day 6
That evening, Uwakwe and Innocent sit in front of the ube tree, launching grains into the air. You settle over the elevated stone platform by the suck-away, and watch them. A flock of pigeons flutter around as the grains descend on the ground. "Inno, how are you?" your brother asks, and then adds: "I don't want the usual fine. We use fine a lot, even when we are not. I mean, how have you been holding up these past days?"
Innocent shrugs, stares at the sky blazing pink and red, and looks downwards. "I don't know how I have been. Sometimes, I wish I..." He pauses, tossing the seeds to the ground. "It's not been easy sleeping in that room with a corpse for six days."
"I can imagine. You're a good man. I bu dike. Not all men will do what you're doing. You know, some would have ran away the moment my sister died. But you stayed and bore the shame, even when your family and friends deserted you." The compound is saturated with birdsong and the cooing of pigeons. You stare at the carpet of dry leaves and rotten fruits under the tree. Of the chores you preferred, sweeping wasn't part of them. You hated sweeping under the tree. But it was one of the things your mother made sure you did each morning before anything else. Even after sweeping the entire compound, it only took a minute before the birds and wind littered it with leaves and fruits.
When you turn to them, Uwakwe is dusting his trousers and reaching into the small nylon on the bench for more grains. He asks Innocent about his relationship with you. "I know my sister can be a handful. Sometimes we used to fight as children, and she would even swing a punch at me as if I am her agemate." Their chuckle is a welcome distraction from the weight of your grief.
Innocent flips his palms open and some pigeons peck on the seeds until he sprays them in the air and claps his palms. "We did not have a perfect relationship," Innocent says. "We quarrelled a lot, argued over many things. But I never hit her. We made ourselves happy even from the little we had." He says that he wished he had given you a better life, the one you had always dreamed of. He wished you had met him when he had enough money, when his business was still booming and he was importing clothes and shoes from China and selling in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu.
He clears his throat. "When my business crashed and my goods were seized by custom officers, I paid so much, but they were never released. Those I helped in the past turned their backs on me." You heard that story so many times until it became a kind of mantra in his mouth. Sometimes you wondered if he said those things to sway you from asking him for money. Yet, you wanted more from him, instead of the grunt works he did from dawn to dusk, yielding little or nothing at the end of the month. You wanted a better life for your son, although you had already folded your dreams of becoming a nurse and tucked it somewhere in your luggage, where your WAEC certificate gathered dust.
Innocent clears his throat again and spits on the ground, the husky sound pulling you from your thoughts. And almost immediately, Chisimdi walks out of the house. You smile. Your boy is no longer a boy. He seems to have shed the fragility of a seven-year-old. He walks with a stoop in his shoulder, tucking his hands in his pocket - a new kind of fashion he must have picked from the school he attends in town. He greets his father and your brother, and they make a space for him to sit in the middle. There are sleep marks on his face when he wipes his eyes with his knuckles.
"Bobo, you slept for hours o," your brother says. "I hope you're enjoying your new school?"
Chisimdi shrugs. "The teachers are great. But I like the chemistry teacher the most. Her classes challenge you to think deeply."
"That's my boy. I know you'll do well there," your brother hails, pulling him in a bear hug.
"He's always been a smart kid," Innocent says, smiling. You stare ahead, a gentle wind floats around, tickling your neck and hair.
For the first time, your father walks into the room. Your eyes go wide with shock. Even Innocent's mouth hangs open. He greets your father as he glances around, squeezing his scarred jowls. When he asks if enough ventilation is coming into the room, Innocent says yes and squats beside the bed. He walks closer to the mat to get a better view of your face and shakes his head. You watch him sneeze into his handkerchief and swipe his nose.
"The formaldehyde is strong," he says to no one. A fly flits around your face for a while and he swats at it, until it scoots out of the window. He turns to Innocent and you're scared that he will scold or hurl invectives at him. But his voice is soft when he says, "Ogechi was a unique person. Of course, she was a handful and sometimes when she said she wouldn't do anything, that was it. There was no going back on her words." He sneezed again. "I don't know why she chose to hide her life from us, even the fact she was cohabiting with a man and had a son for him. I don't know what she saw in you, but I want to say thank you for not leaving my daughter even when you could have just ran away." When he sneezes again and walks to the door, you sense that he's about to unfurl and he doesn't want Innocent to see his tears. He turns to Innocent and says, "Thank you."
You settle beside Innocent as he snores. You pat down his forest of hair, one of the things your boy inherited from him. One of the things you fell in love with, the way it beautifully frames his face. You had met him a year after you arrived in Abuja, a year of roasting corn on grills during the day and spending the night under the awning of shops, shivering in the cold. You met him on that sweltering February sun as he greeted you and asked how much you sold an ear of corn. "Three for six hundred naira. One for two hundred," you said, noting his finely shaped face, his pink lips and his crown of hair and imagined running your fingers through it. There was a delicateness about him, in the way he priced the corn, as though he were trying not to offend you, and you thought he would be so boring to live with. Still, you engaged him with trivial matters, as you flipped three ears of corns over on the grill. You marvelled at his responses, his small laughter, the way he oohed and ahed, offering his own opinions. You loved the way he talked about Nigerian politics, about the insurgency in some parts of the east, using staggering words that made your heart swirl with pride as if you were the one using them. Within a month, you both became close. You visited him at Kugbo where he worked as a welder, bringing small chops and titbits of gossip. And on weekends, you cleaned his room and cooked pots of stew and soup, until, gradually, you told him that you were tired of staying in your friend's place, tired of her incessant complaints, even though you try to tidy up her room. Then, he asked if you would love to move in with him and you obliged.
Now, he stirs, but it's not one of his episodes. You look around the room, inspecting the walls and windows for strangeness, for anything extraterrestrial to leap out of them. Nothing happens. You whisper into his ears and as though prompted by your song, he becomes calm again.
Day 7
The music intensifies as the casket is shouldered by four huge men in suits. They rock the casket gently, leading a procession of men and women crying, dabbing their eyes with a scarf and handkerchief. Your mother wails and beats her chest as the women pat her shoulders and nudge her forward. Your father limps forward with a tightness on his face. Innocent and Chisimdi are unusually calm, their eyes hidden under sunglasses. The men mount the casket on the elevated platform, in the middle of the compound. Four canopies are arranged in a square, away from the tree.
The music dies. A priest - in a white cassock and a green stole - steps forward to pray over your body. He says, "May God forgive your sins and grant you eternal rest in His kingdom." You stand at a corner, looking around, hoping that no strange spirit interrupts the occasion. The priest concludes the prayer by sprinkling water on your body from a can. "Na nwa na muonso," he says, making the sign of the cross in the air. Everyone echoes, "Amen." He walks back to the canopy, kisses his stole, folds it neatly and hands it over to his assistant, who tucks it in a briefcase. The priest walks out of the compound quickly; the assistant follows him from behind.
The chief priest trudges forward. Two boys - carrying a pot of burning incense and a strand of omu nkwu between their lips - flank him. They go round your casket three times. The chief priest chants. Then, he pauses to mark your body with nzu. He beckons on Innocent to come forward. He takes a rusted ring from his bag and slips it onto Innocent's finger. He takes another one from the bag and slides it onto your finger. Then, he takes his right palm and stamps it to yours. "By this, the two become one: flesh and soul. And the soul of our daughter can now find rest." Half the crowd bursts into peals of excitement. But your father and mother stare ahead, as though they're strangers in this world. For the first time, Chisimdi looks away and cups his face. His chest and shoulders quiver. Your brother draws him into his chest. You look away for a moment, sniffling. Minutes later, your parents rise from the chair, and everyone walks to the mouth of the grave. Gradually, the men lower your body into it. Your father is the first to hurl a shovelful of earth into your grave, gazing at the casket for too long with misty eyes. Your mother steps forward with the women, crying as she says, "Ga nke oma. Go well, my child." She shovels the sand into the grave. Then your brother.
Your husband and son are the last on the rollcall. Your chest trembles when your boy holds the shovelful of sand and says, "Mummy, I love you. I love you so much." Your eyes swell with tears.
When your husband clenches the shovel, and says, "Even in the afterlife, I'll still choose you," you don't cry. Something settles in you. The well in your eyes dry. You look sideways, at the whirlwind gathering in a corner, spinning empty cans and papers around. Some people rush into the house to take cover. You float towards it. Then you halt, looking at your family one last time, before giving yourself over to the whirlwind. It sucks you into its bosom and ferries you over the fence, into oblivion.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/hHuAYBi
via IFTTT
Comments
Post a Comment