Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

Farouq stayed in the kitchen after breakfast to help Taiye clean up. I probably should have done the same, instead of running up to my room like I’ve done after every awkward conversation, but here I am again, in my childhood bedroom, trying to recall why I’ve chosen to come home after all this time.

Farouq comes in just in time to keep my thoughts from quietly devouring me. He finds me sitting cross-legged on the vanity, with my back resting against the mirror. Only a week in Lagos and already, he is burnt and browning. He is also clean-shaven. “You decided against the beard, huh?” I ask, reaching out to hold his face. He sucks his teeth like I showed him. “It’s too hot for all that jor,” he says in a poor interpretation of a Nigerian accent and Yoruba vernacular.

“Good honey from Abeokuta!” He smeared a spoonful on a soft slice of Senegalese bread. The honey sank into our tongues, a deep earthy malt flavour that didn’t exist in the glass jars of imported honey we bought at Goodies Supermarket. Taiye took to ripping off hunks of bread and dipping them into a shallow bowl of honey that our father set on the dining table for us. Between mouthfuls, she asked about honey, about bees and their hives, about beekeepers.

Our father answered all her questions with the sincere solemnity of a priest and plenty of laughter in his eyes. Then he placed a heavy volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the table in front of her, the entries for honey and bees marked with two yellow wooden rulers. “Read, Baby Two,” he said.

“It’s all here for you.”

“Banji,” Kambirinachi said from where she was already perched on the bed. “Mm-hmm?” he responded, avoiding her gaze. “What music do they have?” she asked. “Erm …” He fingered the collection of cassette tapes and vinyl records. “Bob Marley, Manu Dibango, Angélique Kidjo, Ebenezer Obey, King Sunny Adé, Stevie Wonder … there’s plenty.” “How about Manu Dibango?” Banji pulled out the record Soul Makossa, placed it gingerly on the dusty turntable, and dropped the needle.

By the time he turned around to face his bride, she was already dancing where she sat.

Taiye turned toward the small tea shop at the back of an old Marriott Hotel, with the words GOOD TEAS displayed in large grey lettering across its bright red awning. She walked inside, smiled at the blue-haired woman at the counter, and scanned the wall behind her for a list of teas. “We have smelling samples on the wall over there,” Blue Hair said. Taiye stood, holding small glass jars of tea to her face, mmming at the feast of aromas, losing herself in the green tea section for nearly an hour. On the adjacent wall: black tea blends. She selected a sample jar of lapsang souchong and the deep earth, glowing fire smokiness blossomed ideas of smoked rice, chicken marinated in the potent brew, a glaze made of tea reduction with honey and fish sauce. Taiye, eyes closed, nose buried in the jar, a half smile on her face, was oblivious to the woman watching her with amusement.

And when the woman threw her head back in laughter, her hood fell to reveal a short tapered Afro with a sharp undercut. As if she was suddenly aware of Taiye’s gaze, the woman turned in her direction. When her eyes settled on Taiye, she raised a thick brow and offered a small smile that illuminated her fine-boned features.

Taiye’s smile in return was much more tentative—feeble, in fact. She was uncharacteristically cautious: keeping to herself at school, keeping off dating apps, keeping away from most of her favourite vices. Yes, she routinely got profoundly stoned alone at home, masturbated to the kind of hentai that made her confident she was a disgusting pervert, and ate copious amounts of meat and pastries. But the point was that she did all this alone. No cocaine with strangers, no shrooms with new lovers, no booze with beloved friends, no sex with anyone but herself. No one to abandon, and no one by whom to be abandoned.

Of course, Taiye thought, when she saw the woman from the tea shop and the ferry. The woman stood addressing the overflowing community room on the third floor of the public library. With all the seats occupied, many people stood against the white wall at the back of the room, and others sat on the carpeted floor at the front. As Taiye walked in, the woman said, “I just want to start by acknowledging that we are on unceded Mi’kmaq territory.” She pushed up the sleeves of her white button-down. “I would like to request a moment of silent reflection on the violence and injustice that Indigenous peoples have suffered historically and currently face in this country.” The woman’s voice was silver smoke; it carried through the crowded glass-walled community room, which fell silent at her request.

“The students presenting today have shown incredible dedication, resilience, curiosity, and care in their research.” The woman couldn’t seem to keep still: she nodded as she spoke and her hands moved from the folded cuffs of her sleeves to the pockets of her tapered burgundy corduroy trousers and back again. “These papers have themes ranging from analyses of race and space in Nova Scotia to queering Indigeneity. From racism within queer spaces to gentrification of Black communities in Halifax, and many of the in-betweens.”

With her eyes still on Taiye, and an expression of amusement on her face, the woman continued. “We’re grateful to be hosted by the public library today. It’s an opportunity for many of our students to engage with the community outside of campus.” She took a sip of water from a glass on the stand before her.

The room erupted in applause as a student took the woman’s place at the front of the room and said, “Thank you very much, Professor Colette.” Taiye’s eyebrows shot up. Of course, the woman who’d incited that visceral pull in her gut was a fucking professor. “And thank you to the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology for organizing this conference. My name is Amara Patrick, and I’ll start this presentation with a clip from a short doc titled Come from Away, Who Gets to Stay.” The student gestured to the white projection screen behind her. “This project is part of my research on Blackness and belonging in Nova Scotia.”

“ANEMOIA” IS A WORD I FOUND A FEW YEARS AGO ON a website called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. I scribbled it in my journal, and in the years since, when I started taking my art practice seriously, I would write it all over my canvases before priming. Because even though I couldn’t taste the feeling at the time, I knew that I knew it, that I’d felt it before.

THE PARTY ROARS ON AS THE SKY DARKENS, lit by strings of soft orange fairy lights and torches that emit a light scent of citronella. Afro-electronic rhythms pulse through the warm night air. Farouq and I wander through the garden, squeezing between the impeccably dressed and heavily perfumed bodies of Isabella and Toki’s guests.

We walk past the buffet table, grazing on peppered gizzards, crispy spring rolls, and charred skewers of chicken suya.

“Na so I been tell this my friend, ‘O girl, if you get sense you go stop to dey wear pant go man house.’ But she no like to dey hear word,” the light-skinned man says, tugging on his right ear for emphasis. “This kind world where we dey,” he continues, with hand gestures I identify as femme only after I notice the black matte varnish on his nails, “these men dey use their girlfriend pant dey do juju, dem dey try teef person destiny.” The group carries on in riotous laughter, and I attempt to translate for Farouq between bouts of my own laughing.

“He’s saying he has this friend, and he keeps trying to warn her to stop wearing underwear when she goes home with the men she’s fucking with because some men do juju with women’s undies.”

“That’s a thing?” Farouq asks too loud so that the light-skinned man hears him and replies, “Yes ke, it is something o! Who oyimbo be dis?”

“Ah, where dem come from?” He laughs. “I didn’t even see them sit down. Me, I’m Star.” “Good to meet you, Star,” Farouq says. “I want to hear more about this juju.” Juju in Farouq’s accent sounds like joojoo, and that’s enough to stoke more laughter. “Ah, Kehinde, your oyimbo bobo wan sabi do joojoo for you! Na to run now!”

Isabella watches Taiye walk away, and then she slaps Star on the arm. “You see that?” she asks, her voice climbing in pitch with each word. “See as she dey look am, as she dey look her husband? You no fit buy am, that look, you no fit buy am for market.”

“When I told my mother what was happening, she said that it’s because I haven’t suffered in life, because I’m half-caste, and everything has been easy for me. So any small trouble and I just want to kpeme.” She draws a finger across her throat before bursting into a bout of breathless laughter that veers on hysterical. “Half-caste?” Farouq asks me in a whisper.

I think the music is louder than Isabella’s cries. I’m reasonably sure that most guests are unaware that their host is presently in the volatile throes of an emotional meltdown. Still, I scan the party from where we sit. Yes, a few furtive glances shoot our way, but otherwise, most guests seem cheerfully unaware.

Then there is Toki, sitting among a handful of friends on white wicker garden chairs, drinking cognac from small tumblers. He is looking straight at Isabella as she trembles in Star’s arms. His face gives nothing away, his features neatly arranged, opaque.

Inside Kambirinachi, they began their painful separation: monozygotic twins form when one zygote splits into two embryos. Monoamniotic twins develop when an embryo does not divide until after the formation of the amniotic sac. The splitting is excruciating, but neither will remember it acutely. All that will remain is a disorienting echo of the wound that the twins would spend a lifetime attempting to locate. Monozygotic twins are physically identical because they share identical genes; they may even have similar personality traits. Patience is not one of the personality traits that the twins shared; for example, the twin that would be named Kehinde was eager to be born. She coaxed her counterpart, the one that would be called Taiye, to share her enthusiasm for the world into which they would soon be spit.

But, you see, because of this thing we call love, Taiye would always concede to Kehinde. So, five weeks too soon, upon Kehinde’s request, Taiye burst forth from Kambirinachi to see what awaited them, and Kehinde eagerly followed.

She breathed deeply and found a rag to mop up the amniotic fluid. She hummed a soothing melody, Baby’s song, knowing all too well that these were different beings altogether who were tunnelling their way through her body. She was a portal.

She hummed Baby’s song and paced around the kitchen.

She sank to the floor, still humming Baby’s song, until the tightness in her abdomen passed, and then she rocked herself back and forth in preparation for the next one. The second contraction was slow coming, so she got up and swayed to Baby’s melody.

A picture of Aunty Akuchi smiling in her kitchen, and a black and white one of her father leaning against his bicycle, dwarfed by a row of tall palm trees behind him, stood side by side against the small kitchen window over the sink. Against one of the living room windows, Kambirinachi placed a faded picture of her mother in a bright blue gele. By the other window, she put a picture of river Orisha Osun’s shrine, which she took at Oṣogbo sacred grove when she visited with Banji three years before. Leaning against the bedroom window above their bed was a picture of Banji on their wedding day; his smile was electric and yanked her back to that day in his family’s compound. She smiled at the memory just as the second contraction doubled her over again. When it passed, she resumed her swaying.

Banji returned home in the late afternoon to find Kambirinachi on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor. She was cushioned by a mound of towels and blankets, a plastic jug of cold water stood by her face, and by her side a few feet away, sat a large bowl of steaming water. Banji looked at his wife, stunned. It took a moment for the scene to arrange itself with meaning so that he could make sense of what he was seeing. The splotches of bloody fluid on the kitchen floor brought it all into clear focus.

Banji protested while obeying, too shocked to register that the hot water was burning his hands. He returned to Kambirinachi just as she was pulling Taiye out from between her bloodied thighs. The screeching newborn entered the world with her tiny hand clasping her sister’s. Too hesitant to separate them, Banji held Taiye, in awe, while Kambirinachi pulled out the rest of Kehinde.

“I want to call you sometime, or text, whatever. What’s your number?” “Give me your phone,” Taiye replied. She laughed at the brick of a phone—a relic from the early 2000s—that the woman handed over. Taiye fumbled with the tiny keypad and typed in her number. “Call me,” she said, handing the phone over. “I will,” Salomé replied, and smiling, she headed out. “HEY, THIS IS SALOMÉ, uh, from the Odette. I’m calling to … um … invite you to an event, uh, this Thursday at the North Memorial Library. It’s a monthly Black film series thing at seven p.m. Not school related at all, just a … uh … thing. Um, yeah, we’re watching Daouda Coulibaly’s Wùlu, it’s a Malian film, should be good, I’m rambling. Yeah, I hope you can make it, and … I’ll get off the phone now.”

The film was brilliant and devastating, entrancing Taiye with its astute storytelling. It was a skilfully executed roller coaster of a narrative that had Taiye quite literally perched on the edge of her plastic seat. Yet, even in the partial darkness of the auditorium, she was still acutely aware of Salomé’s warm body next to hers. She wanted to pause, magnify, and live in the split seconds when their arms brushed against each other.

If she could climb down the throat of an orgasm and rest, eternal, in its belly, and if she could sink into and be sealed beneath every delicious bite of every delightful thing—oh, how she would, she would, she would. But life pushes forth, persistently, the afterglow of even the most transcendent climax will fade; every tasty thing is digested and turns to shit. Mundanity is persistent. Periods must be dealt with, blood rots, dishes must be done, everything tarnishes and ends. It’s just that beginnings are so seductive, the promise of possibilities.

She didn’t avert her eyes when Salomé turned. Instead, she leaned in closer and whispered, “Probably weird timing on my part, but I’d like to take you out for a drink sometime, if you’re not terribly busy … or dinner, or whatever you’re into?” Salomé’s big smile accentuated the dimple at the top of her right cheek. She chuckled and said, “I don’t drink, but I’m very into dinner … and whatever.”

Hey, hey, super last minute, but Hachim and I are going to see the crows now-ish. Interested in joining? Taiye smiled wide. Sure! Then added: Are these actual crows? A band? An art performance? Haha! Actual crows!

She looked up from her phone, her lips chapped from the cold wind and curved into a bashful smile.

“What do you think they’re saying?” Salomé asked, taking a sip. She was wearing the floral embroidered DESTROY WHITE SUPREMACY cap. She handed the jar back to Taiye.

WHILE SLEEP EVADED HER THE NIGHT BEFORE, Taiye had filled a bowl with cleaned wrinkly dehydrated shiitake mushrooms and a potent brew of smoky lapsang souchong tea, fish sauce, tamari, rice wine vinegar, and honey. Upon returning from seeing the crows with Salomé and Hachim, she found her mushrooms reconstituted into plump, firm caps, which she sliced into thick ears and set aside.

Taiye ran cold water over a half cup of brown rice, and then toasted it in a pan of hot coconut oil until a nutty fragrance wafted up to indicate it was time to add water.

Salomé took in the view of the small sparsely furnished space. A low platform bed, with a wide colourful swath of aso oke draped over a white duvet. Beside the bedside table, sat stacks of cookbooks: Larousse Gastronomique; Joy of Cooking; Classic Indian Cooking; The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa; Mastering the Art of French Cooking; The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook; Ottolenghi: The Cookbook; The Complete Caribbean Cookbook; and Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed.

Then Salomé asked, “What do you like?” “I … I don’t really know.” “Come on,” she kissed her earlobe, “tell me.” “I—” Taiye hesitated, shook her head, and chuckled. “I like you.” “Oh.” Salomé’s face softened. She held Taiye’s gaze for a long time. At the core of it, for Taiye, it was a simple matter of closeness. Two people, sometimes more, feeding a hunger to touch and be touched, kissing, naked—it was the intimacy of it that she found most arousing. Though varied, her appetites weren’t terribly sophisticated. Beyond the fact of pleasure, it was merely the thrill of being with someone.

“GOD, I USED TO BE A MESS,” Salomé said. “I mean, I still am, in many ways, but … I was probably about your age when I had Hachim; he’s almost nine now. Hachim’s other parent and I had been together for a while, and we were pretty open, but, fuck, I definitely managed to violate the few boundaries we had. I was, um, consistently fucking people on her ‘no’ list. I was using a lot, too, and lying about it. I mean … I loved her, it had everything to do with my shit and not her, but still, no one deserves to deal with that.” Salomé shifted her gaze from Taiye’s face, nervously chewing her bottom lip.

“Anyway, they were really supportive during the pregnancy and birth. And we’ve been co-parenting ever since. It sounds wildly cliché probably, but it changed me … like it didn’t make me better or anything, it just made me want to be better. But I also knew that I had to get properly clean. Like, if my body was going to be a halfway decent home for a growing fetus, and then if I was going to be a halfway decent parent, I couldn’t be doing coke and fucking around with pills or whatever … anyway, I guess that’s why I got sober.” Salomé smiled at Taiye. “That was the question, right?”

“Thank you.” She planted a kiss on Taiye’s forehead before saying, “I’ve had a really good and really unexpected time with you this evening, Taiye.” She scanned the floor for her discarded jeans and underwear. “I’d like to see you again, like as soon as possible.” She pulled her T-shirt over her head and stuffed her sports bra into the back pocket of her jeans. “Likewise.” Taiye stayed under the aso oke and waved shyly at Salomé as she left. She touched the warm spot where Salomé had kissed her forehead, left her fingers there as she fell asleep with thoughts of belonging with a woman like that, with a family like that.

HOLD IT GENTLY, THIS HUNGRY BEAST THAT IS YOUR HEART. Feed it well. Taiye awoke to Our Lady’s words. The apparition sat at the edge of her bed, bathed in ethereal light, smiling sweetly at her.

She moved slowly to the kitchen, feeling the weight of her body on her feet, the stretch of her legs with each languid step. In the kitchen, she made a pot of zobo, a tea of dried hibiscus flowers, cloves, dehydrated ginger, lemon, cinnamon, and honey.

They met at a small café named Grind on a side street off Gottingen. Taiye found Salomé sitting at the counter in a black velvet T-shirt and slim-cut khakis, sipping from a bright yellow espresso cup. “Isn’t it a bit late for caffeine?” Taiye asked, pulling up a bench beside her. “Hey.” Salomé put her cup down and leaned in to kiss Taiye on her cold cheek. “I have some papers to grade,” she chuckled, “so I, um, so I need this.”