Hi Friends,
I think it's high time I did something quite different from the self-reflection and opinionated articles I am used to. Fiction is really what I live and breathe. So yes, I will be reeling out a lot of the creative stuff I write, alongside other timely articles. This first short story, which will run through four or five series, is titled Fruits and Fornication. It would really appreciate it if you criticise the work. It would help me become a better writer.
Here goes:
From Portrait Photos
Rukayat loses her name almost at the same time she spews from her beneath a shy girl born out of fornications and a muted marriage. She gives the girl a name, Enitan, but the girl does not have a name for her. It is only when the girl becomes four that she comes to call her like others do, Ìyá Eléso. By this time, the girl is already tailing Fruit mother, already losing her own name to the sing-song beckons of Omo Eléso. The girl has a bland face, like a still photo blurred to a near state of invisibility. Yet it is hard to miss how much her life is sported with colours and preferences, just like everyone else.
She doesn’t want to, like every other person, trek through the dusty valley of Ashaye Taiwo Street or sights the gaping canal near Bible Pattern Church before getting to school. It leaves her breath soaked in choky gasps, causing the staple pap she drinks every morning to evaporate quickly. She does not like the shallow swamps, yawning potholes, and clawed shrubs that do damage to her frilly socks and make everybody in class call her Omo gutter. She likes to look fine too; to wear those pinkish gowns during holiday lessons like Nike does so that the senior boys in Primary One can also pinch her cheeks, pull her shy hair and say to her like they say to Nike, “I will marry you when I grow up. We will sleep on the bed and do Mummy and Daddy together”. Just like Nike, she wants to suck her lips in defiance, “Leave me jare, my mummy says I will marry the President of Africa”.
From Portrait Photos
She also wants to put slight lipsticks on her gaunt lips, spray her mother’s perfume on her small brown-black body…
But the one she calls mother does not spray perfume or wear starched matching Ankara clothes like Nike’s mother, Ìyá Ѐkó, does. The only thing she does best is carry baskets and baskets of fruits, fit log-like legs with dark, thick slashes behind the palms into Dunlop slippers and walk around all the nooks in the areas of Obawole and Haruna, displaying her wares of dirty oranges and sickle-shaped bananas to brisk edgy faces who know how to spell money better than the names of their firstborns.
The only place they do not parade their rusty wares and ragged wears is Bridge-side, where the Okada men pose laxly on wooden electric poles waiting for sweaty workers coming up the expansive bridge that hovers above stagnant water with historical indentations of teeming green algae; where beer parlours like planted blobs of shoe houses are scattered all over.
Fruits can sell anywhere but not on Bridge side.
It is not that Bridge side, with the entire mad people littered on its edges displaying bodily monstrosities- coagulated hairs, slippers breasts and erecting phalluses- during the day, is all that bad. Even the Agbèrò boys sagging dirty boxers; belching holy hallucinations induced by the many bottles of Guinness Big Stouts; and crying out Ótalénu to all young girls swaying big buttocks and breasts, they still don’t make this place impassable.
It is the sight of one person that totally irks fruit mother and causes her to pass lethal instructions to her daughter,
“The day I see you near Raining Dollars eh, na dat day you go use Ewédú stick do high jump.”
This doesn’t stop the girl, though, from peering at him every once in a while when they pass through Kay farm, directly opposite the bridge.
At least, despite being the leader of the Agbèròs on Bridge-side; the one who mostly sags dirty boxers and holds beltless trousers from the under. Despite being the menace yellow Danfos avoid and the hoarse mutated voice nobody wants to hear. Despite having nostrils and mouth drowned in cigarette smoke and thick uncombed beards reeking with residues of every other day. Despite sitting always on the low bench of the Ogogoro seller screaming
“You, throw me one shot... everything, put Chelsea…add Agbo Black too”, he is still her father.
Well, father he may be to one impoverished girl, he is husband to nobody. Not even to a fruit woman that massages her body with Aboniki after every day’s wilderness journey, shares a meal of bread and sugared water with her daughter and lies on the bed, waiting for a man sinking in alcohol to pounce on her and drown her with him in loveless sex.
It is not the disgrace of seeing this tasking sex-mate spread his shame on the lines of the peopled streets that make her see him as less of a husband, it is his flirtatious acts, his irregular slaps and punches, his barbarous prowling after anything in skirts. “I mean,” she usually says,
“after all the jigijigi every night, to still dey carry woman about, that one na nonsense na. The day I catch am with woman with my korokoro eyes like this, na that dey he go see my red eyes.”
Painting by Arsalan Naqvi
The day she will manage to come back early from hawking fruits, dragging alongside an exasperated daughter who has been sent away from school yet again, is the day she will find her husband sprawled on their only sofa with the landlord’s young wife beneath him; both of them creating odd voices like intoxicated performers. She will shout, show her red eyes and stiffen tears. There will be enough pleas from the neighbours who insist that there is nothing new under the sun; that she should spank her husband with her left hand but draw him into her beneath with her right hand. They will blame the landlord’s wife more; saying she bewitched Raining dollars, just like she bewitched the old landlord.
This doesn’t stop Fruit mother from stowing pots, silks and rage into Ghana-must-go bags, and stomping out with her daughter whose budding breasts hurt like a throbbing cut from her mother’s rough pulls. The neighbours sneer at her openly, saying she has no right hand with which to draw in anybody. Only stumps. They don’t know of the fire burning in Fruit mother’s beneath; of the pus and the small sores spurting out from it; of stylishly scratching in the public, releasing masturbatory moans; of the difficulty in urinating and how she came back early only to bare her vagina to the wind and let fresh breeze still the storm secreted within.
To be continued
Please comment and upvote if you find it pretty interesting. Thanks.