The masquerades sway beside him, silent.
When Pauly’s mother asks for a strip of the red aso-oke, Pauly starts to cry.
“Why are you crying?” she asks, folding herself to sit next to him on the floor. She strokes his head; the smell of her stale sweat mixed with the smell of the lubricant she uses for her sewing machine envelops him.
“It’s not fair!” Pauly says.
His mother leans back, away from him. “Not fair?”
“They don’t like it,” he explains. “They didn’t like it when you cut before.”
“Did they tell you that?” And when he doesn’t respond to this, his mother goes on: “They are yours. You can do what you want. What will a little bit of fabric hurt?” She turns to look at the masquerade beside the TV. “Look at that thing.” Her voice sounds breathy again. “It probably has up to forty yards of aso-oke on it. I’m asking for only half a yard, Pauly.”
Pauly cries harder. He can still hear the snip of the first cut, can see the way the masquerade tilted afterward. “I don’t… want you… to do it.” Hiccups punctuate his sentence.
“See, it’s a big woman who wants this dress that I’m making o. She is Iyaloja of Balogun. Do you know what that means?”
Pauly shakes his head.
“It means that if this goes well, we’ve made it. I get an in with their market association. Look, Pauly, don’t you want me to spend more time at home? Don’t you want Ekene and John to come over, instead of you always going there? This single mother life is so hard, Pauly, I just want us to be happy. I want things to be easier for us both.”
Pauly cries some more as he nods, and his tears blur so that the scissors going through the red aso-oke look like a knife slicing through blood.
On the way to his cousins’ house, Pauly begs his masquerades to dance.
The masquerades bend and rise, as if bowing again to Pauly, but they do not jump and twirl and somersault this time. They sway, at first slowly, and then faster. They sway left and right, their heads almost touching the ground before they go in the reverse direction. The feathers do not spread out in glorious performance; they droop behind the wooden head. The cowboy hat has a crooked rim. The silver face doesn’t reflect the sun; the slits darken. There is no crackling of raffia, no clinking of beads; there is silence as they move through this muted dance, this slouching, mournful dance that makes Pauly want to cry. “Stop,” he whispers, and they do.
When he gets to his cousins’ house, they are dressed to follow him home. Apparently, his mother has called ahead, mentioning a surprise.
They all walk back to Pauly’s house, using the major roads. Pedestrians stop to stare and frown at these wilting masquerades. Pauly wishes his hands were wide enough, that he were big enough to protect them from these looks, to gather them into his arms and console them.
In Pauly’s living room is a new TV. It is flat and slick and takes up most of the wall. The masquerades glide to their corner, which is now half of what it used to be. Pauly flinches at how cramped they look, feathers sticking into aso-oke and aso-oke cloaking raffia and raffia tangling with feathers. But the TV comes on, and for the first time, the hues on the TV are brighter than Pauly’s three masquerades.
Pauly’s mother knocks on his room door and he knows what she wants.
“It’s the governor’s wife, Pauly!” She sounds excited, her voice pitching higher as it reaches Pauly through the wood.
He doesn’t respond. The masquerades are by his toys. They are still swaying, but barely, like they are tired.
“I just need a few feathers, my darling boy. I’m doing a neck detail that will stun everybody! This is it, Pauly! I can feel it. Our lives are about to change!”
Pauly climbs down from his bed, softly, so his mother doesn’t hear his movements. He slowly pushes Lego aside so that there is space to sit in front of them. He buries his head in his palms and they all bend, his masquerades, they swoop low and around him. He can feel all their textures tickling his neck, brushing his arms, rubbing his head.
“Are you sleeping, Pauly? I know you’re not sleeping. Open this door! You’re being disobedient! You’re ignoring your mother!”
Pauly stays quiet in the cocoon of his masquerades.
“I just want what’s best for us, Pauly.” She knocks again. “Okay, I’ll make you pancakes for breakfast in the morning and we can talk about it.”
His mother shuffles away and Pauly remains in their embrace. He knows now that it will never end. A feather here, two yards of aso-oke there, three more raffia threads—until there will be nothing of them left.
Pauly lies awake that night, watching the beads of the aso-oke refract stars across his face. He listens to the ssshhh-shhshhh of the rustling raffia masquerade. He traces the stories on the feather masquerade’s skirt. Pauly doesn’t sleep.
At first morning light, Pauly and his masquerades slip out of the house. It is a somber walk to the bush where Pauly first encountered them. The security guards of Alele Estate are asleep on duty. They walk past their snores.
Pauly stands opposite his masquerades in the bush. A bulb behind the mosque shines light through the dim dawn, glinting off the beads, falling on the woven texture of the aso-oke, highlighting the colors of the feathers.
“You have to go,” Pauly says to his masquerades. He has to stay with his mother, be her obedient son, but why should they have to sacrifice themselves for an ideal lifestyle?
The masquerades do not go. They sway in front of him.
“We are your masquerades,” they say together, whispery and silky and reverberating.
Behind Pauly, the muezzin’s call to prayer rings out, a long-held note rising and dipping.
“Then you have to obey,” Pauly says. “You have to go.”
Still, they don’t leave. They shuffle closer to Pauly, sinuous, silent.
“You have to go!”
“We are your masquerades.” Their movement intensifies, becomes faster. They dip left then right. “We are your masquerades.”
“Please, go.” Pauly’s voice breaks into a whisper.
The fluid, drooping dance slows down and they bow, the tops of their heads brushing Pauly’s; they crowd in, textures and patterns and colors surrounding the boy.
The rustling starts when they move away from him. Pauly doesn’t want to watch, but he forces himself to. At first, they just keep swaying, slower, but then the raffia masquerade twirls and the feathers on the third masquerade rise, pointing in all the directions, and there—the beads are clinking again. The masquerades somersault and spin and contort, tones blurring, threads swishing, free and full, dancing into the morning sun.
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