Butter Honey Pig Bread. Francesca Ekwuyasi

this very thing that endeared her to her lovers. The magnetic gravity of the planet that is her.

      Among her friends, it wasn’t uncommon to hear: “You like her? Of course you do. Everyone likes her.”

      Even when she was callous about the intimacies she shared like cheap sweets, the women she chose made excuses like, “She’s just a bit broken.”

      Lovers, Taiye’d had many. Too many. She found herself too lustful, too gluttonous. She desired too much. She recognized her weakness for these particular vices early in her life. As an eight-year-old, she quietly consumed helping after helping of beans and dodo, jollof rice, eba and egusi soup. She ate everything, until her stomach stretched well past its limit, and only pain and nausea forced her to stop.

      “Oliver Twist!” Sister Bisi would marvel. “Even as you dey chop nothing dey show for your body.”

      It was true; Taiye was a lanky and wispy child. She grew into a lanky and willowy woman, but she never outgrew her voracious appetite.

      Lucky lucky. Your sister would kill for that figure.

      “It’s as if you eat and your sister gets fat,” her mother said once, finger on her chin in mock seriousness.

      One moment on your lips, always always on Kehinde’s tummy.

      It was a joke—of course it was a joke—and it was a ridiculous notion. Where Kehinde was lush with soft curves, generous hips, and ample thighs, Taiye’s skin clung tightly to lean muscle over her athletic frame, narrow hips, statuesque shoulders. This was the extent of their physical difference; they were identical otherwise. They had the same deep dark complexion, the same wide-set brown eyes, the same disarming lopsided smile. Disarming, in part, because it was lopsided and opened to reveal a small gap between their front teeth. Taiye would learn later than Kehinde the effect that particular use of that smile could have on people. Soft manipulation.

      But every time Kehinde pinched the soft flesh of her belly, or her round cheeks, the plumpness of her upper arms and frowned, Taiye felt deep remorse for her gluttony.

      When Taiye was ten years old, she learned about the seven capital sins. It was at Catechism on Saturday, just after the six p.m. Angelus bell had rung its heavy song, and the sun had begun its slow, reluctant descent. The resting sun cast an orange glow through the high dusty windows of the children’s Mass hall. On Saturdays, the white plastic chairs that were usually arranged to face the altar were stacked up high against the stained white walls. And without the lace-covered altar as a focal point, the high-ceilinged hall was exposed for what it was: dusty, old, poorly maintained.

      Taiye sat beside her sister on a long wooden bench that they shared with seven other fidgeting children. There were three more benches in front of them and two behind. All filled with squirming but silent preteens. Sister Augustina was teaching, and they all knew better than to speak out of turn.

      “Okay,” Sister Augustina said, adjusting the rose-patterned scarf tied tightly around her head. “We are learning about the seven capital sins that Father Raymond preached about last Sunday. Does anybody remember what they are?”

      Eager hands flew up.

      “You, Kunle.” She pointed at a stout, chubby-faced boy in the second row.

      “They are the sins that God doesn’t want us to do,” Kunle said, his voice scratchy.

      “Yes, thank you, Kunle. And which sins are they? Someone else? You, Uche.”

      Uche hadn’t raised her hand; in fact, she had been falling asleep, her head rolling slowly forward. Jumping when she heard her name, she said, “Sorry,” high-pitched and trembling.

      Sister Augustina looked expectantly at Uche, who stayed silent, her chipped teeth gnawing at her lower lip. Tears pooled in her eyes, defying gravity, until Sister Augustina said in a stern voice, “Uche?”

      “I don’t remember!” Uche wailed, and the tears poured down, to the laughter of the whole class.

      “Olodo!” Sister Augustina scolded. “Okay, I will tell you this time, but make sure you remember tomorrow at Mass.”

      Vigorous head nods from a chastened Uche.

      “The seven capital sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Do any of you remember what they mean?”

      Kunle piped up, “Greed is when you want to eat all the biscuits, even if they’re not your own.”

      “No, that is gluttony,” another child interjected. More students jumped in, a small uproar as they scrambled to give the right answer.

      Sister Augustina whistled to seize their attention and placed a finger across her lips. Silence. She defined each of the seven deadly sins, starting with gluttony, and then, halfway to lust, she hoped she wouldn’t have to explain it.

      Of course Taiye noticed. “What about lust? What does it mean?”

      “You people are just small now, but when you are a little bit older, and you girls start liking boys”—Sister Augustina wagged her crooked fingers and made her eyebrows jump in a suggestive dance, raising groans and nervous laughter from the class—“and you boys start looking at girls’ nyash, that is lust. Remember that God doesn’t like lust.”

      Another, louder, eruption of laughter.

      Taiye felt a prickly rush run from her chest to her cheeks. Was it lust, the thing she felt when she saw Patra winding her hips in slow motion in the “Worker Man” music video?

      Lusts of the flesh, rotten girl Taiye.

      THAT EVENING, after Catechism, Taiye pulled out the navy blue Oxford English Dictionary from the row of Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes stacked against the wall by the bathroom door in her parents’ bedroom. Her father was sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed, still in his navy blue suit and round tortoiseshell glasses, pawing through a stack of papers on his lap. He worked even on Saturdays.

      “What are you doing, Baby Two?” he asked, without looking up from his papers. A Yoruba man, he believed the lore that she was the younger twin. That even though Taiye was born first, her sister, Kehinde, was actually formed first and had merely sent Taiye out before her to make sure the world was fit for their arrival.

      “I’m looking for a word,” Taiye responded. “What are you doing, Papa?”

      “I’m looking for some numbers.”

      Taiye flipped through the sepia pages of the old dictionary, all the way through to L.

       Lust

      Pronunciation: /lʌst/

      Definition of lust in English:

      noun [Mass Noun]

      1. Strong sexual desire

      1.1 [In Singular] A passionate desire for something: a lust for power

      1.2 (usually lusts) chiefly Theology A sensuous appetite regarded as sinful: lusts of the flesh

      This was how Taiye learned that she was sinful.

      IT WASN’T JUST PATRA’S DANCING that let Taiye know that her desires lay on the left side of expectations. There was also the quickening in her chest whenever she saw Isabella. Or smelled Isabella. Or heard the dulcet melody of Isabella’s voice. They had been neighbours as children and went swimming together at Ikoyi Club. As sixteen-year-olds, during the haze of teenage melodrama, Isabella stopped speaking to Taiye. An abrupt ending to a long-time friendship. Isabella never explained, but Taiye suspected that she’d known something of the warm rush that dizzied Taiye whenever Isabella smiled in her direction.

      Thirteen years and many lifetimes later, Isabella was engaged, but she’d been writing and phoning Taiye almost incessantly since they’d run into each other at an Afrobeat concert in Freedom Park.

      It was an uncharacteristically