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while Ekene went to set up their new life. Chika stole a glance at Mary from the veranda as she watered the hibiscus garden, her hair tied back in a frayed knot, wearing a loose cotton dress in a faded floral print. She looked like home, like something he could fall into, whirling through her hips and thighs and breasts.
Chika reached out and took her hand. “I’m not starting anything, Mama.” She scoffed but didn’t pull her hand away. They sat like that, another picture, as the evening pulled across the veranda and sky, and something boiled slow and hot in Chika, thrumming at the back of his throat. This was before Vivek, before the fire, before Chika would discover exactly how difficult it was to dig his own grave with the bones of his son.
That morning, she was wearing an orange cotton dress; she looked like a burning sunset, and Chika knew immediately that his story would end with her, that he would drown in her large liquid eyes and it would be the perfect way to go. There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart. Kavita looked up and smiled at him, and somehow Chika found the liver to ask her to lunch. It surprised them both when she said yes, as did the affection that unfurled between them in the weeks that followed.
told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull, made Osita hard with desire. “Take it off,” he snapped instead, his throat rough. “Put it back before they catch us.”
He should have known, Chika told himself as Kavita screamed in grief, Vivek clutched to her chest. He did know. How else could that scar have entered the world on flesh if it had not left in the first place? A thing cannot be in two places at once. But still, he denied this for many years, for as long as he could. Superstition, he said. It was a coincidence, the marks on their feet—and besides, Vivek was a boy and not a girl, so how can?
He was the one leaving me alone with my mother, who felt like a hammer instead of a person.
Maybe that’s where the bright, high-spirited woman De Chika talked about went; maybe she’d been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered.
What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God?
It had been years since he’d chipped my tooth, but Vivek still fought a lot, just with other people now. He had a temper like gunpowder packed into a pipe, a coiled-up strength that had developed with time, and because he was thin and quiet, no one expected the violence to explode out of his frame the way it did.
The man had thought Osita was too drunk to resist, but Osita was much taller than him, much bigger, and powered by senseless grief that was ready to evolve into rage. He’d held the man by the throat and punched his face with his free hand in a flurry of short sharp blows that split the man’s eyebrow and washed blood down his cheek. The darkness came back, and the next memory was of the man stumbling out of the door holding his clothes against his chest, swearing loudly.
The whole time in Port Harcourt, Osita had fucked only women—it had been like that since Vivek died. It felt safer, as if he wasn’t giving any important parts of himself away: not his soul or heart, just his body, which didn’t matter anyway. The stranger’s assault felt especially violent because of that, and Osita was glad he’d beaten him up.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
by Ayi Kwei Armah.
I kept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. Beauty.
I wanted to be as whole as that word.
Vivek isn’t even looking at the camera. His eyes are cast off to the side and his chin is lowered. Aunty Kavita has her arm around his waist; she only reaches his shoulder. My father and uncle are standing next to each other, brother by brother. My mother is smiling so widely you can’t help but look at her, like she’s determined to crack her face in half. We fit easily in the frame, all of us together.
“We will pray for him,” my mother countered. “The forces of darkness will not triumph! No, he is not lost. He cannot be lost.” I could already feel her beginning to whip herself up into a holy frenzy.
come and behave like this.” “He said he can’t sleep. That the dogs don’t disturb him and he can feel breeze better from the tree, some rubbish like that. When we asked him to start making sense, that’s when he stopped talking. Mary, I don’t want the neighbors to see him like this.”
My mother perked up. “Afraid? Did he raise his hand to her?” I flinched. She was wondering if he was like me. The last time she tried to slap me, I caught her wrist and forced her arm down. It was only through the veil of my anger that I finally saw the pain and fear in her eyes.
They had shaved his head while he was up there, and I joked that he looked like a refugee from Niger, one of those children always begging in the markets. We went to the river to swim, and when he took off his shirt, there were small round scars dotting his ribs. I asked him what happened, and he looked at me as if I wanted to fight him. Cigarettes, he said. From the senior boys. And then he jumped into the water and splashed me even though I was still dressed. We swam until my clothes dried on the banks.
It was all a lie. There was no girl in Nsukka. I’d made her up on a call with my mother once, and her happiness was too great for me to deflate it with the truth. Instead, I pretended to be private about it so I could avoid the questions. It allowed her imagination to construct the perfect daughter-in-law, and I didn’t have to talk about anything else; she could carry the whole conversation just based on that alone.
Vivek came in, closing the door softly and kneeling beside the bed to light a mosquito coil. I kept my eyes on the page as the match rasped into fire, through the breath he released to extinguish it. The lamp made my book glow a dull orange that spread faintly to the walls. The rest of the room was halfway in shadows, swallowing Vivek in grayness as he pulled off his shirt and folded it, then took off his jeans and hung them in the wardrobe.
“When you’re hiding something,” he said, “don’t cover it up with something weak, something that can be blown away easily. You need to protect your secrets better.”
“Ah, no vex,” he said, sitting up and reaching for my arm.
“Why are you so afraid? Because something is different from what you know?” My cousin folded his arms and leaned his back against the headboard of the bed. “I’m disappointed, bhai. I didn’t think you’d be one of these closed-minded people. Leave that for your mother.” “Fuck you,” I said, and grabbed my pillow off the bed.
softening her voice. “But you know how these men are. The boy is slim, he has long hair—all it takes is one idiot thinking he’s a woman from behind or something, then getting angry when he finds out that he’s not. Because, if he’s a boy, then what does it mean that the idiot was attracted to him? And those kinds of questions usually end up with someone getting hurt. Ekene doesn’t
“Cigar or igbo?”
Kavita listened in mounting disbelief. Surely this couldn’t be the same Mary she’d known all these years? Impossible. She’d always been religious, but this was something different, something that smelled like rotten meat or madness.
wasn’t the time or the place, and besides, there was a tendril of shame unfurling into a leafy plant inside her.
I wanted to stay empty, like the eagle in the proverb, left to perch, my bones filled with air pockets, but heaviness found me and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t shake it off; I couldn’t transform it, evaporate or melt it. It was distinct from me, but it hooked itself into my body like a parasite. I couldn’t figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was just my life—if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging their flesh off their bones.
The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days.
it was as if somewhere within the walls of Vivek’s room, allegiances had shifted, unseen pacts had been made, and Somto and Olunne had stepped out carrying Vivek’s secrets in the elastic of their ponytails. It was clear they had no intention of sharing what had happened, so everyone sat awkwardly in the parlor for a bit until Rhatha took the girls home.
enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over. I had looked for ways to break out of it—sleeping outside, trying to tap life from other things, from the bright rambunctiousness of the dogs, from the air at the top of the plumeria tree—but none of
had really made any difference. So I was giving up; I had decided to give up.
“It’s none of your business,” I said. I didn’t know why their kindness was making me so spiky.
Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it’s hard to believe in a better alternative. Besides, it was true that all of us used to be friends, even though it was years ago, when we and our lives were simpler. And now they were being nicer to me than anyone had
sugar dragonfly off the cupcake, popping it into her mouth. That was how we found each other again, in a blocked-off room filled with yellowing light: two bubblegum fairies there to drag me out of my cave, carrying oversweet wands. I don’t know how deep I would have sunk if not for them. I wish I’d told them more often how much that mattered to me.
We’d fought a lot when we were younger, but that was nothing special: I fought with almost everyone because I was slim and some suspicion of delicacy clung to me and it made boys aggressive, for whatever reason. Some people can’t see softness without wanting to hurt it.
He reminded me of the senior boys from when I was in boarding school, their complete assurance that it was well and right for me to provide them with pleasure, an assurance so solid that nothing they did shook up who they believed themselves to be: boys who could not be broken, boys who broke other boys and were no less for it.
Vivek laughed. “It makes me look like what, bhai? Like a fag? Like a woman?” I waved a hand, embarrassed. “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I was going to say it makes you look different, that’s all.” Even me, I wasn’t sure if I was lying. I wasn’t sure what I thought. My cousin folded his arms and smirked, which annoyed me. “Come on,” I said. “It’s not as if I would lie to you.”
There was something different about him, and it had nothing to do with how he looked on the outside. It was something more insidious, something coiled in his eyes that I’d never seen before. For the first time, I felt afraid around him.
They had a whole list of jams they were going to make: guava, mango, pawpaw jam. Maybe even some marmalade. Maja had dragged Juju into it, buying a bag of large green guavas—the kind Juju liked, crunchy and white on the inside. But Ruby suggested it might be better to make it with the other kind of guavas, the small, soft ones with pink or yellow insides, so Maja had sent Juju to Ruby’s house to collect a bag of them. “We’ll try it both ways and see which one works better.”
She had been looking at girls that way, with an interest in the texture of their flesh, for some time, but she was always afraid that they’d catch her and see into her head, into the places even Juju was a little scared of seeing.
Juju rolled over to her side as well, facing him. “I don’t tell her everything,” she said. Vivek looked at her, and his eyes were soft and dark pools, floating under long lashes. “We don’t tell anyone everything,” he said gently. They were lying close enough that Juju could feel his breath drift against her cheekbones. Suddenly the air seemed full of secrets, an iridescent bubble surrounding them.
He started going to Mama Ben’s food stall more and more, sitting at the round plastic table with cardboard folded under one leg to balance it.
mammy-water
running again. He had to save his wife. He couldn’t imagine losing her because he’d been with that woman, who had clearly wished evil on Chisom from the beginning. Who knew what she had put in his food? After all, he would normally never behave like that, going to another woman’s house. She must have done jazz on him. It had to be. But now he felt as if he’d broken her spell; now it would be okay. As long as he found Chisom.
Ebenezer looked at his wife and the determination hammered into her face. Her tenacity, he realized, was something he could learn from. How to stand in the face of actual fire and not run,
how to do what it took for them to survive because she’d decided to. She could have been hurt, could have been killed, but she had done it anyway. Ebenezer felt ashamed at how hard he’d been fighting her about seeing a doctor. She had packed up the things, not knowing how she could carry all of it, simply because she was ready to handle that part when the time came. Now the time had come and he was there, as he should have been, as he always should have been. Why should she be carrying anything by herself when he was her husband?
Most of the market burned to the ground that day. It was years before the government got around to rebuilding it.
