The children rushed from spot to spot, shrieking and stretching their limbs toward the light. But just when they thought they’d got it, the light would move away and they would laugh out their frustration. The light was all they could see, and they followed wherever it went, sometimes bumping into each other and their father.
At one point their father directed the beam of light to a spot close to his feet. As the children rushed forward, Ifechi in front, Madu bumped into her, sending her face into the region of their father’s crotch.
Ifechi felt her cheek make contact with her father’s penis through his shorts, and she straightened up at once. She stifled the urge to run, to cover the offending cheek with her palm. She glanced at her mother’s dark form on the couch; it was still. Had she seen? Ifechi tried to find her father’s face in the gloom, certain that he knew. But he was still moving the light, and Madu was still running and screaming.
When their father was ready to let someone win, he chose Madu. Their father picked him up and spun him over his head, both of them laughing while Ifechi watched with remorse from her place on the ground.
When the dreams first started — dreams of thick pubic hairs in many colors, and breasts with dusky, hard-looking peaks that he imagined would taste like cola candy — Madu had considered telling Ifechi about them. But how would she help? All she knew how to do was cry. Madu did not consider telling his parents: his father would send for his whip, and his mother would make him kneel with his hands raised for hours, and then command him to fill a twenty-page notebook with the words, I WILL NOT BE A BAD BOY.
In this latest dream, a woman looked up from the penis she’d been painting with her tongue, turned in his direction, and stared into his eyes. She smiled and beckoned with an index finger. Madu woke up to find his heart pounding and his penis straining against his pajama bottoms. He glanced at Ifechi’s bed across from his and, satisfied that she was asleep, felt the unfamiliar hardness with a tentative hand, awe and dread churning inside him. When Madu noticed that it felt good touching himself, he shoved his hands under his pillow, squeezing his eyes shut as he murmured Hail Marys. After twenty slow recitals Madu’s penis went back to normal.
He let out a sigh and slept like an innocent.
Madu and Ifechi were watching Pussy Palace that afternoon — with their parents at work, the front door locked, and Aunty Hope busy in her salon — when the TV screen went dead. Like people emerging from a cave into daylight, the children looked up at the ceiling fan that was slowing to a stop above their heads. They were thinking the same thing.
“Don’t worry,” Madu said, as much for his own comfort as for his sister’s. “NEPA will bring back the light before Mummy and Daddy come back... Don’t worry.”
The hours passed and the electricity did not return. The tape player stayed silent and stoic as Madu examined it with angry eyes, pushing the eject button over and over, lifting the player up from its stand, turning it upside down, rubbing the top of it, as though to coax it into spitting out the cassette.
“Hei, God...” Ifechi prayed-sang every few minutes, trying not to cry because she knew it would annoy Madu, “please let NEPA bring back the light before Mummy and Daddy come.”
But by six thirty when their parents returned, all the praying and glaring had neither caused the electricity to return nor the cassette to eject itself from the machine.
All evening, Madu and Ifechi tiptoed around their mother while she made dinner. They offered their help with sweet smiles and worried her with questions, which she answered with a slightly tortured air. When she’d had enough she waved them out of the kitchen with a stew-covered ladle.
As the family sat down to eat, Madu and Ifechi exchanged nervous glances. When their father cleared his throat to say grace, they lowered their eyelids but kept their eyes open, watching the candlelight play on their parents’ faces.
The children picked at their dinner of boiled yams and tomato stew with much ceremony, making their cutlery clink busily against the ceramic plates. But their mother wasn’t fooled.
“Why aren’t you two eating?” she asked.
“We’re full, Mummy,” Ifechi said.
“Full? When you’ve not even eaten anything?” Their mother frowned as she reached forward and felt their necks with the back of her hand, Madu’s first, then Ifechi’s. “Are you not feeling well?”
“We’re well, Mummy,” they chorused. Not feeling well meant visits to the hospital and injections. They shoveled down their food.
Before their mother could make more of a fuss, the ceiling fan started to turn, sending the flames of the candles into a mad dance. The house hummed with the sound of working appliances. The children sat very still while their mother stood, with a grateful sigh, to close the drapes and turn on the lights.
“My friend, blow out the candles,” their father scolded Madu. “Or is your mouth too heavy you’re waiting for the fan to do it?”
After dinner, their father settled down in front of the TV for the evening news while their mother did the dishes. Madu and Ifechi stayed up in the living room with their father long after their mother had gone to bed, watching over the tape player and the evidence inside it, pretending to be taken with the documentary that was showing. It was only a matter of time; their father would get up to go to the toilet, or to get something out of his room.
After the documentary, their father looked at Madu and Ifechi, as though noticing their presence for the first time since dinner.
“It’s almost ten,” he said. “You two go to bed.”
“Daddy, please, we’re not feeling sleepy yet,” Ifechi begged.
“And we’re still on holiday,” Madu added.
“Did you hear what I just said?” Their father leaned forward in his chair. The children got up and shuffled out of the living room, then hid in the doorway peeping at him. Without taking his eyes off the TV, he called out, “Madu, Ifechi — if I come out and find you still standing there, ehn...”
The children ran into their room and lay down in silence, listening for sounds from the living room. They thought they heard their father moving about and hoped he was going to bed. But they didn’t hear any doors open or shut.
“What if Daddy...” Ifechi whispered.
“Shhh!”
Apart from the thumping in their chests the children could hear nothing. They lay quiet for what felt like a very long time. Soon, Ifechi began to drift off to sleep. But the next sound wiped every trace of sleep from her eyes and almost stopped her brother’s heart.
“Madu! Ifechi!”
Ifechi felt hot liquid seep between her legs and she clamped her thighs together. “Madu! Daddy is calling us,” she whined.
“Shut up,” Madu hissed. “Act as if you’re sleeping.”
“Madu! Ifechi! Come out here now!” Their father’s voice was closer; they could hear his footsteps approaching their door.
“Madu,” Ifechi pleaded.
“Shut up and close your eyes,” Madu said. “Don’t say anything.”
The children’s bedroom door flew open, ricocheted against the wall. Their father filled the doorway.
“Both of you, get up right now!”