Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

She used to be much sweeter, softer, kinder, but it’s impossible to go through that particular brand of hell and stay untouched.

Thickening one’s proverbial skin can only be a natural response to the causticity that life sometimes visits upon us. But there is a unique type of hardness, a single-minded drive to thrive through whatever the fuck, to tear through whoever, to get what you want, that levels everything so that nothing is sacred. Someone else might call it sharp, masculine, capable of getting anything done. But I knew Toki when we were children, and if you ask me, something happened between then and now that took some light away from him. Perhaps it’s just what happens when we grow up. Could he look at me and come to the same conclusion?