Bisola turned to the attendant. “So will I feel baby kick now?”
“Of course!” The attendant took one of Bisola’s hands and placed it over her stomach. Bisola waited for the familiar thud. She moved her hand all over, thinking the restarted heart may have shifted with the force of all that spiritual activity. She waited some more. “Osei, come and feel...”
But Osei was already beside her, feeling too for the thud. Suddenly he said, “Yes! Yes!”
“What?” Bisola stared at him. “You feel it then?”
“Thank you. Oh, thank you!” Osei was now at the door, where he had left the half-empty food flask on the floor. He grabbed it and pushed it at the attendant. “Thank you for helping us.” Then he was out of the office in a flash.
The attendant was laughing. “All this for me?” she asked, holding onto the flask with both arms.
Bisola called out to Osei. She hurried after him, past the anteroom where the crowd calmly shifted in their chairs, past the corridor with framed words of hope, and past the thick sweat of clamoring desperation in the reception lobby. Outside, she didn’t try to talk to him until they got to where he had parked the motorcycle. He had chained it to a massive, useless chunk of metal that once belonged in the factory. As Osei unlocked the chain and rolled out the motorcycle, Bisola saw that he had his face turned into his shirt collar. He was sobbing. But he still gripped the handlebars like he was waiting for her to embark. Bisola didn’t come close. The silence of the late night, except for the sounds of the ruckus from the lobby a distance away, bubbled in the rift between them. Finally she said, “It’s all for a miracle. And miracles cost more, my husband. What would you have me do?”
“Bisi. Oh, Bisi,” Osei mumbled.
Bisola approached, climbed onto the back seat, and anchored the cycle with her weight so he could get on with ease. It was then she noticed that the smell filling her nose was not his oranges or hair grease, but the lingering fragrance of incense from the tub.
“But it’s also like a hospital, not so? I’m their open farm and can’t run from the cutlasses and knives.” She shifted her weight on the motorcycle, placed a hand on the last spot the attendant had positioned it on her stomach. “We will go home now, wait for the oil to drop in the morning. And we must never, ever be late, my husband. The oil will drop. You’ll see.”
Eden
by Uche Okonkwo
Obalende
Madu had never reached into the back of the videocassette cupboard: that dark, dusty place where the films were older than God. But today, bored and desperate not to rewatch another film — Nneka the Pretty Serpent, Terminator 2, Mortal Kombat — with his sister Ifechi, he got on his knees in front of the cupboard and thrust his hand in, taking out the first tape he touched. The cassette had his father’s initials on its side, written in black ink on a strip of adhesive paper.
Ifechi peered at it. “What film is that?”
Holding the cassette up to his face, Madu read the title: A Taste of Paradise.
Ifechi hesitated. “Madu...” she warned, “it’s Daddy’s film.”
“So what?”
Madu stood and took the tape out of its case, noticing, through the clear plastic in the cassette’s center, that both spools had almost an equal amount of tape around them. He slipped the tape into the player and pressed play.
“Won’t you rewind it?” Ifechi asked.
“Let’s see what kind of film it is first.”
They waited as the familiar whirring sound started from the cassette player. Then a massive penis filled the screen.
“Jesus!” Madu shrieked, jumping back and away from the TV without taking his eyes off it. His sister stood frozen, watching the screen like it would rip her into a million pieces if she dared to turn away. For a while, the only sounds in the living room were the hum of the cassette player and the creaking of the ceiling fan as the blades turned. The old TV was acting up again — there was no sound. Madu crept toward the set and brought his palm down against its side twice, sharply, like he’d seen their father do many times to get the speakers to function. It worked. They heard moaning sounds carried on waves of fluty background music.
Two white men, one white woman, a white bed, white walls, a white floor littered with long-stemmed red roses, all the more stark against so much white. The woman lay writhing on the bed, her legs spread wide as she touched herself. Ifechi, distressed to find that the exposed flesh between the woman’s legs was the same pink as her best pinafore, decided that yellow was her new favorite color. One of the men straddled the woman’s head and she took his penis in her mouth.
“She’s licking it, sha!” Madu cried, his mouth hanging open.
The second man, who’d stood leaning against a wall watching the other two while he stroked his penis, bent to pick up a rose. He held it in one hand, and with the thumb and forefinger of the other he stroked the rose’s unnaturally smooth stem: up, down, then up and down again. He kneeled between the woman’s legs and took the hand he found there, sucking on each finger like she’d dipped them in chocolate. Then he trailed the flower up the woman’s thigh.
“Hei!” Ifechi said as the rose stem disappeared beneath the patch of blond pubic hair between the woman’s legs. “Is it not paining her?”
“It’s not paining her,” Madu replied without looking at his sister. “She would have told them to stop.”
“Madu,” Ifechi said, with a nervous glance at the door, “what if Aunty Hope comes?”
Aunty Hope ran the small hair salon downstairs, and she looked in on the children while their parents were at work. It was also her job to make sure that the children did not mix with the urchins, as their father liked to call the happy, unkempt bunch that ran about the neighborhood most afternoons, rolling tires down the streets.
With the children on holiday, Aunty Hope had to check on them more often. Some days she would march them down to her salon and have them sit there for hours with their books. Aunty Hope’s moods were tied to the frequent and unannounced NEPA power cuts: happy when there was power, surly otherwise. Like many of the residents and small businesses in their Obalende neighborhood, Aunty Hope could not afford a generator.
Sometimes Aunty Hope would invite the children to watch her work. Ifechi liked watching her comb creamy white relaxer into the women’s hair and felt a malicious delight when they scrunched up their faces as it started to burn. At seven, Ifechi was not allowed to have her hair relaxed. She longed to turn ten, like Madu. She would be a big girl then.
“Go and lock the door,” Madu said now, his eyes still on the TV. Ifechi stayed put, frowning and shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Madu spun around to face her. “Ifechi, go and lock the door, and stop acting stupid!”
Ifechi stomped to the front door, locked it, and returned to her place, her brother’s glare following her.
“Idiot,” he muttered, before turning to the TV again.
Ifechi was finding it hard to breathe. The room seemed to get warmer, the air thicker, as the minutes passed. The woman on the screen was on her hands and knees now, one man behind her, the other in front. “I don’t want to watch anymore,” Ifechi said, her voice hoarse with unshed tears.
“Then stop watching,” Madu said. “Silly baby.”
Ifechi did not turn away.