Black Sunday. Tola Rotimi Abraham

sounds like he is annoyed and impatient. He must be unhappy with me. This is our house, I should not just stand there like a fool while these boys laugh at us.

      “Which is easier? Stones or concrete? Where will we get concrete from?” Peter continues. It is hard for him to say concrete, so he is making everything worse.

      “Okay. Do you want to help with the bird trap, then, or are you still digging your nonsense hole?”

      “Just shut up. With your scanty hair like an abandoned mop.”

      Now everyone is laughing at tall-skinny-dreadlock guy. Peter just walks away, into the house. Not even glorying in delivering the perfect insult.

      A gentle wind stirs in the cashew tree in the middle of our yard. It is becoming evening, the warm humidity is being replaced by the cool breeze. When the boys stop laughing to begin sorting through nails and wood pieces, I continue standing where I am, watching the wind make the leaves dance. I notice a lizard, I think it is the same one that was in Stanley’s yard, dash up the tree.

      The boys have gathered wood pieces of different sizes. Some the length of a walking stick, others short as a pencil. Skinny-dreadlock guy sits under the cashew tree and gathers all the materials to himself. He starts to arrange them in a pyramid-like pile. When he figures out the arrangement of sticks that makes up a perfect pile he splits them up in pairs, giving one pair to each boy.

      “Take. Look for stone. Knack these two together,” he says.

      Peter comes out of the house but doesn’t speak to me. He walks right to skinny-dreadlock guy and sits next to him. I do not know what he says to him, but he looks like he is apologizing.

      When Peter was younger, he was so slim (even slimmer than dreadlock guy), his head was huge, his legs were super short. I called him Mr. Big Head Small Body because he looked like those cartoons in the Sunday paper. He hated it, but I couldn’t stop. The more he protested, the more I enjoyed teasing him. One day, Father showed him a picture of a lion in a calendar and said: “That’s who you are, son, a lion. A son of a lion is a lion.”

      A son of a foolish man who loses all his money to fraudsters is what? A son of a poor man whose wife leaves him is what? A son of a man who runs away, leaving his children with his mother, is what?

      Father should see Peter now. He is no longer tiny. He is tall, almost as tall as I am. His head is bigger and harder. No one can tell him nothing.

      I watch the two of them talking. Then skinny-dreadlock guy picks up three sticks, he sets them in position, he makes a shape like a small letter t. He starts to nail them together. Peter reaches out to steady the longer piece underneath. The nail goes through both pieces of wood and into the thin skin between Peter’s thumb and his forefinger.

      “Oh my God.”

      “Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry.”

      We are all scrambling. The nail, the t-shaped sticks, are stuck in Peter’s hand, like they are sprouting. We surround him. We hold him down and pull it out. There wasn’t blood before. Now there is a lot of it. There is a lot of blood. Someone wipes it with his shirt. Another grabs a fistful of sand, pours it over the wound. The blood stops rushing out. Someone tells Peter to shake his hand. As he shakes it sand and blood fall to the ground at his feet.

      I see the lizard fall off the tree, race over to be next to Peter, lap droplets of blood as they fall to the ground. I look in its eyes and see myself the way it sees me. I am dark and dusty like a school blackboard, my head is bigger than the rest of my body, my hands are tiny, plastered to my side. The lizard stops to look at me. He is nodding again and again. I think the lizard is laughing at me. I am sure of it.