Butter Honey Pig Bread. Francesca Ekwuyasi

wooden boards, with an opening just wide enough to swallow her small body and water just deep enough to drown her. Really, anything that would kill her was a doorway. The songs and voices of her Kin were loud loud shouting; it shocked her that nobody else could hear them. They made her accidentprone. The unfortunate thing tripped on stones that weren’t there and ended up with broken bones that couldn’t entirely be explained. She would go to sleep healthfully robust but wake up with blistering fevers. So she learned to think of her father’s smile and to sit still until the voices grew muffled and she could carry on with her adventure of the day.

      Any thoughts of the future worked like a loosened tap that let the voices of her Kin rush out in a high-pressure stream, so she also learned not to think too far ahead. She thought of things she liked about being in her alive body: the smell of dust rising from the ground outside when heavy rain struck the earth, the burnt-sugar coconut taste of baba dudu. She thought of things she disliked: the sound of her mother’s voice when it was hardened by anger—she was angry often—the fervour in the pastor’s voice when he shouted on Sundays—he shouted often—about hellfire, Holy Ghost fire, and God smiting his enemies. She thought backward, about the in-between place before birth and after the hollowing of her body: her home—the place where she could become the things she loved most, where she would join the rays of sunlight and sing sing in sharp tones, high and joyful.

      It struck in her a sadness, the pitying kind of sorrow, to know the things that alive bodies could never be.

      There were lovely things about being alive, she had to remember, like the taste of guavas. Their existence filled her with so much joy that it burst out of her in gleeful laughter. This is how she ate them:

      She found the sharpest knife in the kitchen, hiding it if her mother was near, the woman could shout, eh! She held the blade as far away from her body as her thin arms would allow—because images of her throat, tattered and bloody, flashed through her mind whenever she saw a knife (knives could also be doorways)—and sliced the bumpy emerald skin off, always trying and often failing to make a single long ribbon of the tart rind. After taking delicate bites of the soft pink flesh, shallow bites to leave the grainy seeds undisturbed, until the fruit became a knobby, slimy ball, she would pop the entire thing into her mouth, and spit out the fruit’s tiny seeds, one by one, all sucked clean.

      KAMBIRINACHI DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT ANY FUTURE—how could she?

      Even if she struggled past the voices, she couldn’t have imagined a future that involved leaving Abeokuta, studying fine arts at a university in Ife, meeting a person who would want to keep her, or becoming a mother, for that matter.

      But before all that, how could she know, that day when she found herself in her father’s decrepit Peugeot 504 pickup, that she was being taken to boarding school in Lagos? Queen’s College in Yaba. She would be a QC girl. She couldn’t dare imagine that far.

      So you’ll understand her confusion that day, dazed by the sweltering heat—for as long as they’d owned the truck, the A/C had never worked. Her mother sat in the driver’s seat in a faded adire iro and buba, talking talking.

      “Kambirinachi, you have to behave o! But don’t worry, it’s a good school. It’s far, but not that far, we will visit every two two weeks. Don’t cry, biko, it’s okay.”

      But even as her mother said these words, her voice strained against the jagged emotions she attempted to mask by clearing her throat. Kambirinachi let tears fall freely down her face. She looked to her father leaning against the dusty truck window, his weathered face inches from hers, the smell of chewing tobacco on his breath.

      “Kambi, my girl, be a big girl now, okay? Ebena akwa nwa m. Don’t cry.” He smiled despite his sadness.

      “See you soon, Papa.” Her small voice shook with a question mark. “In two weeks?”

      “In two weeks, my darling,” he reassured her. “If it weren’t for this rubbish car with only two seats, me sef I would be coming with you.”

      Her mother started the car and a blast of heat filled the bottom of the pickup. Kambirinachi moved her legs to touch the Ghana must go shoved underneath the rusted metal of the passenger seat. Her father had filled it with tins of powdered milk, Milo, Golden Morn, and guavas—eight of them, tied tight in a black polyethylene bag. She watched him wave as the truck pulled out of the compound, watched him grow smaller and smaller as the distance expanded between them, waving all along. She waved back furiously, sobbing quietly.

      It wasn’t until he was entirely out of sight, until she thought about seeing him again, in two weeks, the future, that the voices started their song again. At first, a single voice, high-pitched and familiar. And then another. More and more, until they were an overlapping riot of noise. Hard and harsh, relentless waves.

      You won’t see him again. He will die.

      She clutched her ears; they were inexplicably hot. She cried out through her tears, “No, no, please.”

      “Ewo, this girl, you’ve started again. It’s okay!” her mother said.

      Ikenna wanted to be firmer, but the tremor of the child’s voice softened her. She felt warm wetness slide down her plump cheeks, found that she, too, was crying. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, pretending they were only sweat.

       Taiye

      TAIYE AWOKE TO A WARM SLICK OF DARK BLOOD sticking between her lean thighs. Menstrual fluid soaked through her green underwear and made a splotchy maroon map on the orange batik sheets of her bed. In recent mornings, since moving back home to Lagos, she awoke to thoughts of her bees; they lived in an olive-green hive underneath the dappled shade of the palm trees clustered in the backyard. Among the palms, lush bougainvillea cascading over the fence between the neighbour’s compound dropped bright pink paper blooms like blessings upon the hive. Taiye had been romanced by the notion of keeping bees since she was a small girl, so the moment the dream was within reach, she seized it and clutched it tight. And learned hard lessons on loving the living.

      On that particular morning, her first thoughts were of her sister, Kehinde.

      Taiye stretched, breathing in deeply.

      On the exhale, she whispered, “May I be safe,” and hoped that her words would fall upon open ears. Kehinde was coming home with her husband. Taiye hadn’t met him yet. She hadn’t seen her sister in a long time.

      “May I have peace.”

      She peeled off her damp underwear, pulled the stained sheets off the bed, and threw them in a pile at the corner of the bathroom. With a wet washcloth she wiped crusty streaks of drying blood from her thighs, and then inserted a silicone menstrual cup, discoloured to a light brown from many years of use, to catch her period as it left her body.

      With her footsteps muffled by the plush emerald carpet of the hallway, she walked toward her mother’s bedroom. The heavy wooden door squeaked in its tired frame when Taiye slowly pushed it open. Her mother, a soft lump underneath white sheets, was illuminated by slits of light escaping past heavy red curtains into the otherwise dark room. She listened for gentle snores and shut the door quietly behind her.

      “May I have joy.”

      Early in the morning the house existed in a quiet hush, a spell destined to break moments after a power outage, when the generator would roar electronics back to life. Taiye liked quiet. She wondered if, and how much, it would change when Kehinde and Farouq arrived.

      When she’d arrived almost a year ago with intentions to stay, she found the house in a sort of passive disarray. Thick cobwebs hung in dirty grey clusters in every corner. A layer of dust had settled in and covered all the surfaces. Really, the house seemed untouched, as if no one lived there. Hot rage shot through Taiye’s travel-worn body at the sight of the place, because she’d paid a housekeeper to clean and cook for her mother. And when she saw her mother, saw how prominently the delicate bones of her clavicles pushed so taut against sallow skin, saw her sunken cheeks and the utter joy that brightened her face when Taiye appeared, she choked on the gasp that threatened to escape her throat. She’d