Butter Honey Pig Bread. Francesca Ekwuyasi

and it still pains me. Sometimes rage threatens to tear itself out of my body in a sharp scream; sometimes fear freezes me to my bed for days. It still makes me nauseous, makes my skin crawl so that I want to slither out of it. Sometimes I nod at the memories and let them pass as quietly as I can stand it.

      It was a Saturday night, and there was no light.

      Sister Bisi and the gateman were outside with their torchlights refuelling the generator. I thought Aunty Funke was at night vigil. She usually went on Saturdays, but it turned out she was downstairs the whole time. I think my mother was in her room on the second floor, but I hadn’t seen her since Thursday. I was afraid of her then. Taiye and I were in my bedroom, the room we had shared at night since I can remember. She was lying under the bed with a torchlight, reading out loud a story from Goosebumps about a living ventriloquist doll. It was supposed to be frightening, and Taiye read it in a low, growling voice to scare me, but I think she was more afraid than I was.

      The door was open. I saw Uncle Ernest stumble up the stairs, looking dazed. I felt like there was ice water running down my back, and I sat up quickly. He had never come up that early before.

      “Ibeji,” he said softly.

      Taiye stopped reading the moment she heard his voice.

      “Only you on this whole floor?” he asked me from the stairs, looking around at the two rows of closed doors on either side of my open one. “Na wa o,” he muttered, and curved his lips down in an exaggerated frown. “Am I talking to myself?” he shouted toward me, quite suddenly very annoyed.

      “Sister Bisi sleeps here with us,” I lied.

      My body was a block of cement when he leaned against the door frame.

      “Ehen? Where is she now?”

      “Downstairs on-ing the generator.”

      “Why is your torchlight on the ground?” he asked, apparently unable to see Taiye beneath the bed.

      I felt bile rising hot from my stomach when Uncle Ernest came into the room and shut the door behind him. I started to shiver when I smelled that nausea-inducing drunkard smell coming off his damp, wide body.

      “You’re not allowed to come inside our room.” I meant to shout it, but my voice came out small.

      It paralyzed me when his face changed, contorted hideously with rage, his eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his mouth twisted into a sneer.

      “So this is what happens when your mother is a madwoman, and there is nobody to train you, abi?” His voice was a low growl. “Talking to me as if I’m your mate.”

      He put his face close to mine, and when I recoiled, he grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the bed. I felt his damp palms on my skin. Bile dribbled down my chin, but I couldn’t move.

      “Please stop,” I squeaked.

      “Shut up.”

      He clamped a callused hand over my mouth and shoved his other hand under my nightie. He jammed his fingers inside me, and I bit hard against the sharp pain that shot up through my body. He withdrew his hands and threw a blinding slap against the side of my head.

      “Useless girl,” he muttered.

      I screamed, and he covered my mouth and nose with his big palm so that I couldn’t breathe. He pushed my nightie up until it was bunched under my chin.

      I remembered my arms, and I flailed them, scratching his face until he removed his hand from over my face. I threw myself onto the floor and screamed. I cried for Taiye, but she didn’t come out from under the bed. Her eyes were wide-open circles, both hands covering her mouth, as if to keep her terror from pouring out. She started to move toward me, she reached her hand toward mine, but we weren’t close enough to touch. I screamed her name like a question, a plea.

      The roar of the generator poured into the room, followed by a flood of light. Uncle Ernest backed away, his bloodshot eyes darting around.

      Suddenly, Sister Bisi was there, her breath heavy from running up three flights of stairs. She snatched me from the floor with a strength I didn’t know such a soft body could contain. She held me against her, backed away from him. I clung to her while she dragged a sobbing Taiye out from under the bed and took us downstairs to her room. She locked the door and propped a chair under the handle so it wouldn’t budge, even when Aunty Funke banged and rattled it, shouting, “What is all this? What are you crying for?”

      But Aunty Funke, she must have figured it out, because by morning she was sobbing quietly at the door. She knocked and said, “Abeg make I follow them talk.”

      “Him don go?” Sister Bisi asked through the door, opening it only when she heard an arrested “Yes” from Aunty Funke.

      Sister Bisi said to Aunty Funke, her voice soft but possessing unmistakable undercurrents of rage, “If I see am near this compound again, I go call police. E go better if you sef comot.”

      Everything moved in molasses that day. I sat on Sister Bisi’s bed for several eternities. Aunty Funke left with Uncle Ernest. Taiye stopped shivering and fell asleep. I wailed in the bathtub while Sister Bisi poured warm water from an orange plastic bucket over my head, soaking my braids. I was engulfed in a pitch-black hollowness; it swallowed me whole. Ever since before our father died, since before our mother retreated far from us, I knew without a doubt that I would never be alone. My Taiye was my quiet partner, closer than my shadow, than my own skin. But on that day, I called her, and she hid.

      “Taiye didn’t come out.”

      I had nothing else to say.

      2

       Honey