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i.

Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were falling off her face from her chin knocking against her chest.

All this had to be because of her unusual behaviour in my room after the traditional marriage ceremony two days earlier. She couldn’t still be ingratiating herself with me, could she? She had lost her spirit, the keenness to her gaze, the lift to her head and shoulders; things she’d carried with her even whilst facing my rejection. Qualities that were veiled from those who didn’t know what to look for, and which also grew intense when they were targeted at something. Like the day I had been pulled onto her path, and the several times in the four years I had spent aware of her. A connection not unlike a band tying me to her.

“Obidiya,” I said. “Hope you’re all settled in? Nsogbu adịghị?”

“Ee, aunty.” She nodded, her glasses slipping farther down. “Thank you, aunty.” Her voice was the softest I’d ever heard it.

I expelled a quiet sigh. The best thing was to wait for this to pass. Whether in a month, six months, one year, or five years from now, her eyes will never be able to hold the scales in. Not in a marriage involving a man like my husband. Not in any marriage at all. But I wouldn’t be the one to tell her that. I had paid my dues. Though I’d married her, she and I were not friends. We did not have to be. The talking that mattered had been done before and during the marriage rites. I wanted to put as much space as possible between me and her. I could stop myself from being further enticed if I kept to myself.

“Ngwanu. Dede anyi will bring in the rest of your luggage.”

My husband bundled in with her bags as if on cue.

It had taken one trip back to Onitsha, where we lived, to move everything she owned, rickety sewing machine and all, with her in the backseat of the car. From her father’s house in the village, where we held the traditional wedding, and then from the apartment she shared with her brother in Orlu. Five hours later, with the sun an imposition in the sky, she was in a new home as unfamiliar to her as the middle of her back. Interesting, how convenient it was for one life to be uprooted and then replanted; I’d almost forgotten how little you took, how little you owned, when you moved into a man’s house.

I promised to fix this if she married me. Us. My husband. Give her enough if she agreed to be his second wife in name and bear me children, give me sons. I had promised her a lot of things. A monthly salary until she decided she was done having children; a new Singer sewing machine, which arrived yesterday; contacts for her tailoring business, something I was already doing but could stand to do more; a completed university education, whenever she was ready to pursue one again, a promise that wouldn’t end even if I died. I was not her last husband, the childhood sweetheart who had gone and done the very thing.

She was going to have all that she could ever want. I’d make sure of it. Maybe I was doing more than necessary for a stand-in wife. But it wasn’t as if I married her with the purest of intentions. I was massaging my guilty conscience, as my father had said when he refused to accompany us to the door-knocking ceremony that was part of the marriage rites. But it made no difference. My husband welcomed everything with the eagerness I knew he would. Irrespective of my father’s words, I hadn’t done anything terrible.

I knew the limits of what I could grasp with my hands.

What did it matter then? If I took small pleasure in the water caught in my cupped palms? I could have that, at least. I could watch it drain out of the gaps in my hands, a vicarious exploit for my parched throat.

My husband offered Obidiya a smile that made his craving for her evident. His attention voyaged up her legs, lingered on her shoulders, scouring every inch of bare skin her dress didn’t conceal. When he used to look at me like that in the early years of our marriage, I thought his desire undue and testing to entertain. It wasn’t that he had a voracious appetite, as I’d heard some of my peers complain, but that his appetite was, to me, a dirty plate in a pristine sink I’d just cleaned.

However, it was a duty I had to see through. One I couldn’t ignore, not forever, because it brought in pests in the form of family meetings, and kinsmen and friends who wanted to drop in and have a word. Which had never happened to me, of course, though I’d received the wayward advice here and there. But I was familiar with the dreadful stories. As a result, whenever I sensed the stirrings of trouble, I did something about it.

I started to fuck my husband more when tongues began to wag nearly two years into our marriage with no children, after I was sure that there was nothing medically wrong with either of us. When my fabric and ready-made clothes business took off, I bought him a mint Volvo 240, poured money into his timber and iron business, and mentioned, where people were listening, that the money I made was his at the end of the day, or thanks to him. I also made sure to give him a share of my earnings every month, which funded his wandering and show-off lifestyle, and I never failed to put his facile feelings and needs first because I, Justina Nwakaego Okwuchi Ufondu, was a good wife.

If it meant mothering Cletus rather than forming a partnership. I could be incestuous if it saved me from being spousal. I’d realised that much when my father dangled Cletus in front of me to cover up what he thought was both our shame. And I’d been performing this role ever since. Fifteen years to be precise.

It was because I knew my place that I’d married, for my husband, another woman; a beautiful one with a training college certificate, who oversaw two successful businesses, temptations and doubts be damned. I had paid the hefty bride price and the bill for the extravagant marriage ceremony. Things Cletus would not have been able to afford on his own.

It was because I was a good wife that he could stare at the new wife the way he currently was. With her lovely oval face shaped like an ornate hand mirror, a feline pair of eyes rendered guileless by her glasses. She was the colour of pastries baked for just the right length of time, browned with care. Her hair was styled in hot iron curls that fanned out atop her forehead, the rest layering atop each other; still new and fresh despite the stress of the days before. She was wearing makeup; brows drawn in, giving her countenance an alluring arch, her plump mouth lined by pencil and filled in with gloss, which highlighted the pink middle of her lips. She was as breathtaking as she’d been on the day of the traditional marriage. That first night in my room. That hot afternoon on an unassuming day, four years ago, in 1983. 

My hands ached as I looked at her. They smarted from my want, my heavy supplication, amid the hotness in my chest. Despite knowing better, despite my best efforts to circumvent it, I had thought: I am not the one she did this for.

And had been disappointed by the thought.

Obidiya offered Cletus a half-smile, shifting in her perch on the bed. It would take a fool to miss what Cletus was saying with his eyes.

“Obidiya,” he began, tittering to himself as he’d recently started to do whenever he said her name aloud, “you are officially welcome to the Mbah household.” He cleared his throat. “Obidiya Cletus Chukwudi Mbah. It rolls off the tongue well. Nwunye n’enye añụlị.”

Obidiya ducked her head. She righted her glasses before they slipped off her nose. “Thank you, Oga Cletus, and thank you, Aunty Justina, for your help and for welcoming me with kindness.”

Cletus nodded his approval. “Yes, Justina is a good woman,” he said in English before slipping into Igbo again, “Ezigbo nwanyị. She will assist you if you need anything. If you have any questions or difficulties you can always go to her, as the senior wife, or come directly to me, as your husband. Even if it was Justina that married you, I am here to provide for all your needs as the head of the house.”

“Thank you very much, Oga Cletus.” She let her smile grow, staring up at him with innocent devotion. She nodded at the right places as he sent empty platitudes her way.

Me, I just stood there. Maybe I was smiling, I don’t recall. I know that my face developed an ache from holding whatever benign expression I had on. And that the words “good woman” were tolling like church bells in my head. A warning. A line that I had crossed, whose infraction I wasn’t even aware of until Cletus gave it form.

A good woman did not wish that the new wife she married for her husband would look at her the way the new wife was looking at said husband.

A good woman would not think, as she had followed in the wake of her husband’s gaze on the new wife, of putting her lips to the new wife’s legs, her maiden voyage, hers. She would skim, with her fingers, the burnished coating of those legs, brown and glossy from pomade, like expensive confectionery. She would explore beyond the hem of the dress, her fingers pressing down on lush thighs; it would be a journey she’d never tire of embarking on. A good woman did not have those thoughts. She would fight them, as she’d been doing for the past fifteen years, for the past four years. She would not let them take root, and she would certainly not think of marking, with her teeth, the new wife’s bare shoulders.

Her spirit would not be in disarray because her husband was claiming what he had a right to. What she’d done for him. A good woman was content with her place. She respected it, resigned herself to it like she always did. She would not think, she would not entertain the thought at all, that she’d married the new wife for herself.

 

ii.

“Did you hear that Nkiruka married a woman?”

Rosaline broke this news to me, six weeks before the traditional marriage ceremony, in the manner of a shaken bottle of soft drink whose cap had been unsealed. She must have been carrying it since the weekend, when I didn’t open shop so I could visit my twin daughters at their boarding school. The words were out of her as soon as she crossed the store’s threshold. I checked the clock above the entrance: almost fifteen minutes until five. She must have come the moment she dropped her bale of okrika clothes for the day. She grabbed a chair by the side of the entrance and brought it over to the table where I sat reviewing my stock count in preparation for a new shipment.

“Madam Justina, did you hear me? I said Nkiruka that sells hotel down the road married a woman for her good-for-nothing husband.”

I looked up from my ledger. “Anụla’m, Rosaline. Good for her.” My tone was indifferent. So was my outlook on the situation. I could count the times Nkiruka and I had crossed paths in the five years since I opened my shop in the neighbourhood. I didn’t care for the food she sold. There were other people on the street who cooked hotel, for when I was hungry and didn’t bring my own lunch. I didn’t care for her person either; she was one of those cantankerous women who had an opinion on everything, including things that weren’t her business, and was not acquainted with the notion of keeping some of it to herself.

Rosaline chortled. “This is why I like you, Madam Justina. You don’t know how to judge somebody.” She scanned me with the fond, lenient air of a parent dealing with a naïve, middle-aged offspring. I knew she was thinking of how we came to be friends. Two people who should repel each other the way a wet cloth smothers a small fire. Me, with my geriatric and quiet but aloof civility, and maybe a practised pleasantness if the situation called for it. Rosaline, with her youthful and well-meaning, but intrusive cheerfulness. Which she’d almost lost when she turned up pregnant a year ago and became an object of scorn to Nkiruka and her ilk. All of them had been fixated on something not only as pointless as Rosaline’s lack of a husband, but also on the fact that she didn’t know who the father was.

Perhaps my hand had slipped while pouring out a basin of dirty water in the direction where a group of them were seated and talking in a way that made it clear Rosaline, whose kiosk was next to my shop, was the topic of conversation. Perhaps I had said something about dust, and how it was in my eye when I gave Rosaline a look of solidarity. It was impossible to know. But Rosaline decided she did, and had adopted me into a friendship ever since.

She pushed her face above the ledger, preventing me from glancing down. “You know the girl she married. One small girl like that, inukwa. She just finished secondary school. She thinks putting someone in the house will stop her useless husband from jumping from place to place. That’s why she picked someone young. And cheap. Does she even have money to marry a correct and mature woman? Ebelebe.”

Her expression twisted into one of disgust. “Women are marrying women to get sons and secure their family line. Nkiruka, too, wants to follow them. I know an aunt, whose only son died in the war, that married a woman to help her preserve her family name. This is how the culture is done. Not for people like Nkriuka, mbanu.”

And, beyond a doubt, not for people like me.

The bitter stirring in my chest surprised me. Marrying another woman in the way that Igbo people did wasn’t something I’d ever considered. Even though, like Rosaline, I too knew a relative, or a friend of a friend, who had done so before.

It was customary, natural; their reasons for doing so. Mine, to the average Igbo person privy to how I thought about other women, were not. My need for that kind of relationship was not. It was better to not have the need at all; hold the conviction that it was out of my reach, like a zealot’s belief in their chosen deity. The way I’d learned at twelve, with Ophelia Dike, the subject of my first infatuation. And the way I’d learned at nineteen, with a short-lived romance, and my father’s shame.

I nudged Rosaline’s face away. I swallowed my bitterness and ignored the tension deep within me. I was about to speak when footsteps came from behind. Obidiya emerged from a shelf of folded fabrics. Rosaline had distracted me. I’d forgotten she was here.

“Good afternoon,” she greeted Rosaline. “Aunty Justina, I’m going. Thank you for letting me use your restroom.”

She was on her way to the evening lessons she taught at the small private school in town. She’d dressed simple for it: sandals, a chiffon blouse tucked into a pleated skirt that stopped below her knees. But I was still in her thrall. The matching singlet she wore under the sheer material bade my eyes to the arc of her bare skin, pretty arms and graceful shoulders underneath that white. I wanted to bury my nose in the crook of her neck, imprint the talcum powder she wore against my own flesh, inhale her scent, floral, vanilla, a perfume she wore often, like it was the thing I needed to breathe.

A bead of sweat rolled down her neck, and I could taste the salt on my tongue, the water bead dispersing in my mouth, in spite of my wish to keep it a little longer.

She looked at me for a long moment after she finished speaking. Her gaze raked over my face, slid lower, and then back up again. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking; the corner of her lip might have twitched. Then she walked out the door.

I turned around to find Rosaline watching me.

My heart jumped, a heavy thud in my chest. But I did not avoid her eyes.

It was just looking. She couldn’t have noticed anything, I thought, even as the clench of my fist turned painful. Rosaline’s expression softened. She gave my fist a lingering squeeze. She smiled, conspiratorial.

“That girl will make a good wife, won’t she?” she said.

 

iii.

I was in the process of ridding myself of my blouse and double rapas, the clothes of the quintessential Igbo woman that didn’t feel like me. I’d loosened my ichafu and taken off my jewelleries, yet my head still pounded. As though the thumping music from the traditional marriage ceremony had burrowed in. I reached for the towel in the bowl of water on the dresser, about to begin wiping off my makeup when the door opened. Through the mirror, I watched Obidiya walk in. She was still wearing her marriage regalia. If anything, she’d retied her ichafu and touched up her makeup. I turned to give her a confused look.

“Obidiya, ọ̀dịkwa mma? Did you miss your way?”

It was a pointless question. We were in her father’s house. She couldn’t have been mistaken. Her head was bowed. She approached me in slow, careful steps. When I saw what she cradled in her hands, a decorative hand fan shielding the top, my heart lurched forward. I tried to pull back, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. So long as the dresser wasn’t a portal I could escape into, I never stood a chance.

“What are you doing, Obidiya?” My voice was a wisp of air.

She pressed in close to me and knelt. She lifted the glass she carried towards me, the coral beads on her wrist clacking. The fan was moved away, and I found myself face-to-face with the watery white liquid in the cup. Obidiya raised her head. Her gaze was steady, open. She was beaming. I stared at her, puzzled. Why would she be presenting me with palm wine? Enacting a traditional ritual for an Igbo bride and groom? One she’d performed with my husband.

“Obidiya, are you trying to cosy up to me?” I gave a false laugh. “You don’t have to seek my favour. We are not in competition. I married you, but Cletus is your husband. We can share him. Hapụ ìhè ị n’eme.” I offered her what I hoped was a teasing smile, despite the unease brimming inside me, at Obidiya’s behaviour, but also at the tangy taste of the lies on my tongue. But the words were out there now, floating between me and her. I didn’t know how to unmake or remake them.

I didn’t know anything other than fear and duplicity.

Obidiya drew back. Her mouth fell open. “I—”

A soft knock sounded at the door, and I jumped away from her. My knee hit the cup in my attempt to put distance between us. The palm wine spilled over her hands and blouse; the chair I’d been sitting on scraped a protest across the concrete floor.

“Aunty Justina, Aunty Obidiya,” the voice of her parents’ house help came from behind the door, “Dede Cletus is asking for Aunty Obidiya.”

She rose to her feet. She placed the cup on the dresser and shook droplets of palm wine from her hands. She tilted her head at me, her eyes narrowing slightly, and then, without another word, she turned and left, the door closing behind her.

My heart was still trying to escape my chest. I couldn’t stop trembling. Even though I kept telling myself that I did nothing wrong. Obidiya and I hadn’t been in a compromising position. The house help hadn’t come in. Everything was fine. I was not nineteen anymore. My father was not looming over me, after pulling me off the girl I had been kissing in the parlour of his house. My head throbbing from the blow he’d dealt me first.

And yet I could see his face, nostrils flaring, breathing as though he’d overcome a great hurdle. A year later, one filled with silences and disapproval as thick as a dense forest, Cletus would be his solution to what happened. I took it because what other prospects were there? A simple shop clerk with a secondary school certificate and little money, lacking the support of her sole parent, had no future that didn’t lead to marriage.

His expression transformed into the one he bore when Benedict, my brother and the first son, and I had gone to inform him of my plans to take a wife for my husband.

“You want to corrupt our tradition and corrupt that innocent young girl! But I will not stand for it. I will not allow you to commit an abomination in my name!”

Benedict had to hold me back, hold me together. He alone, apart from my father, knew what really happened sixteen years ago; he’d been just as helpless as I was. Nothing he said would change my father’s mind. Things may have been harder if not for him. He’d provided a part of the capital that helped me establish my business. And he didn’t care for what reason I was marrying another woman, so long as I was happy and it was what I wanted. I hadn’t needed my father to come. Cletus and Benedict, and Chijioke and Chimaraoke, the twins I’d raised in place of my late mother and sisters, all male relatives willing to accompany me for the customary door-knocking ceremony, were enough.

I just wanted to be my father’s daughter again; his only living daughter. But I had been arrogant, thinking I could soften him. That time would aid me in achieving what the war had been unable to do in taking two daughters and a son from him.

Perhaps my arrogance hadn’t even begun at that meeting. But rather, when I let Rosaline’s words take hold of me (and she’d been so pleased to have a hand in the union, hugging and congratulating me at the wedding). I had let those words harness my infatuation with a girl almost ten years younger than me, accumulating on my suppressed want from the past fifteen years. So that it burst out of my mouth, a geyser at my father: “I have gotten married like you wanted! I fuck a man. Like you wanted! Had children. Like you wanted! Can I not have just this one thing?”

I glanced down at the palm wine. Was it possible to think that Obidiya had no other motive? That presenting me with palm wine was her acknowledging me as her true spouse? As is customary? As should be customary? I found it impossible to know. I had no idea what Obidiya had been thinking. If I were the one reading meaning into something I desperately wanted to be true. I reached for the cup. I brought it to my lips. It was supposed to be sweet, fresh, but it burned through my throat, forming a bitter pool in my stomach.

 

iv.

The image I observed in the mirror was a ritual that brought me joy, especially since my marriage to Cletus. Even though this recent purchase was oversized, its sleeves falling over my fingers, wearing a smaller size was a worse, more distressing experience. Like the suits were rejecting both my gender and fatness, insisting that fat, small Nigerian men didn’t wear suits at all. Like they were scorning me for buying them in the first place.

I adjusted the lapels and smiled at myself in the mirror.

I imagined that the trouser hems did not sweep the floor, that the sleeves lay at perfect positions, that the suit had been made for me. I felt buoyed by this dream. It could be possible; I only needed to find the right suit. As a young girl, I’d seen the incredible picture of Gladys Bentley in a ripped-out page of a magazine, the source of which I’d been unable to trace, wrapped in the roasted corn I had bought.

Soon I started to build a collection. From used books shops, from government libraries; cut out and photocopied pictures until they bulged between the pages of an old diary. I knew the names of some of the women, recurring motifs. Marlene Dietrich, Stormé DeLarverie, Jackie Shane. Women living beyond what they’d been told by society that they were allowed to be. If only I could be as brave.

There was a rattle at the door. I knew it was Obidiya behind it. I made sure to lock the doors in my house, at least. She’d been with us for three weeks now, fitting into the routine of the household. Thankfully, I don’t think much changed in her weekday life. Except where she prepared to leave for work and come back at the end of it. She had her own room in the four-bedroom house, but I knew she spent time in Cletus’s. I had told her to take her time with the attempts for a child, to let me know whenever she was ready to try again for a university degree. I ensured that I kept out of her way.

The entire thing felt anticlimactic. As though the water had drained out of my hands quicker than I expected, and no more was forthcoming. But my hands remained cupped, drying out in the emptiness. My throat was still parched.

I ran my hands over the suit jacket. I walked to the door and opened it.

“Aunty,” she began. “Oh,” she said when she looked me over. Her eyes leapt to my face, searching. I tried to stay still, fingers gripping the jacket’s sleeves, internally beating back my fear, my father’s voice. We were alone in the house. Cletus had gone on one of his many work trips. “Your suit looks nice,” she said, slow and heavy, the taste and consistency of honey. “Would you like me to fix it for you? Not for free, mba!” she rushed to add. “I actually came to you because I need…lessons.” She coughed into her hand. “I don’t think it’s going…well. With Oga Cletus and me. I was hoping you could help me?” She peeked up at me from under her glasses. “Teach me how to…do it? We’re not competing…okwa ya?”

I held her gaze for a long moment. She stared back with bashful eagerness.

That’s all she’d been since I married her into Cletus’s household. Eager to please. Eager to be of help. Eager. Self-effacing. Very unlike the woman I thought I knew.

Except that night in my room with the palm wine.

I’d returned to it several times, to her expression, and the one that replaced it when the lies fell out of my lips. The final look she’d given me. After she moved in, she’d turned her amenable behaviour towards Cletus. Bright, intense, so that the behaviour started to feel spurious. Once these thoughts had occurred to me, they refused to retreat, eclipsing my jealousy. Because the times I’d been at my most pleasant were when I was trying to appear benign, convince the other party into complacency. But I wasn’t the one Obidiya was working to convince.

I couldn’t fathom why she was doing it. She didn’t love Cletus, that I knew. Then I had a thought, deceitful, that all this might be for me. That she wanted me. This thought took, quickly; I could stem my wanting no longer. I wanted to know. I wanted her behaviour to be what I ached for and could allow for it to be if I wasn’t so bound by fear. It would kill me, this precarity. So, I had opened the door, and had met her in an ill-fitting men’s suit.

I wanted her to set me loose.

“Please fix my suit.”

The longing quivered my voice, swept it low. I was nothing but an imploration.

Obidiya smiled, wide with delight. She nodded.

She returned with her tailoring materials while I waited on the bed like a new bride. She took off her glasses, placed them on the bedside table, and pulled me to my feet, her fingers trailing my hand, my wrist, touches I couldn’t feel through the suit, but an insinuation all the same. They slid over my palms, and the sensation shocked through my whole hand. She hooked her fingers onto mine, fleeting, before letting go to guide me to the mirror.

She began to take my measurements, a strip of space between us. The tape around my midriff brought her forehead close to my lips, my breath ghosting her hair in return for the scent of the rosemary in her hair oil. She wound the tape around my bust, pulling it from underneath my armpits until it rested atop my chest. She tightened her grip, tugged me flush against her, and lowered her head to nudge her nose to mine.

Her eyes fluttered closed. Her lips skimmed my own, parted them; the warmth of her breath was a promise against my waiting and open mouth. Then she was gone, her bearing coy. I held in my protest. Though I knew she could see the anticipation I was steeped in. She eased up on the tape, turning it this way and that, her fingers brushing a suggestion across my chest. I tried not to gasp, or fall forward from how weak my knees had become.

She took note of the sleeves, the length of the jacket, her knuckles scraping down my back. I fought the urge to arch against her touch. She measured the span of my legs, from my waist down to the end of my feet, dropping to her knees to do it, her face turned up at me, wide-eyed, with lips slightly parted. She moved between my legs. Her hands grazed along my backside, towards the fly of the trousers. I spread my legs a little wider as a sigh escaped me. A corner of her mouth lifted. She deftly finished the rest of the measurements, noting everything down in the book she’d brought with her.

She examined me again in the mirror. Her hands glided down my arms.

“Dike mara mma. You’ll look good when I’m done, aunty,” she whispered in my ear, her nose nuzzling my skin. “You should imagine it.”

My attention jerked to her face, to her soft and open countenance.

That was when I fully understood. All the things I had missed. The clues I had chosen not to see because I was too afraid. Because I lived in a world that had taught me to be afraid. That was the reason I’d fallen for Obidiya in the first place. That quietly fierce woman of four years ago, drawing parallels between the Shagari administration’s treatment of Ghanaians and Gowon’s treatment of Igbo people, leading the men who supported the mass deportations into an intellectual dilemma with her harmless questions. All because they’d underestimated her in her unobtrusive sweetness.

My attention didn’t leave her face when I said: “I imagine it,” as the perpetual squeeze in my sixteen-year-old heart and, perhaps older, relented. Something unlatched within me to let the staidness waste away. A new fullness was replacing it, buoyant and warm. “Obidiya,” I said, my voice needy, promises begging to be kept.

“Felicity.”

“What?”

“My English name. For you, aunty, my true husband. Felicity Obidiya Amaechi.” She smiled at me, then paused as though remembering something.

“Please wait for me. I’ll be right back.”

I turned back to the mirror as I waited. I thought of a suit that finally fit; a future rather than a dream, something I could touch with my hands. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t notice Felicity come in. I watched her in confusion, and it took me some time to understand what was happening, until she came to stand beside me.

It was an unassuming white dress, something she might have worn for some special occasion. Buttons spanned the length of it, the sleeves were puffy in an old-fashioned way, the lower half flayed and responding to any movement. She was holding a bouquet; ixoras and red calla lilies growing at the front of the house. She was unadorned, not by makeup or jewelleries, not like at the traditional wedding, her face a little shiny from Vaseline.

She looked beautiful, and I could stand there, staring at her forever, and never tire.

She studied us through the mirror, leaning her head against mine, which knocked the glasses she’d put on again at some point during her trip somewhat askew.

We said nothing for a long time, staring at each other.

Then she laughed, a sound filled with glee, and I wanted to hold it forever, too.

“Your turn, aunty,” she said, pulling me towards the bed. “Show me everything.”

 

v.

Felicity’s grandfather’s homestead has an udara tree in the heart of the compound. When she and her youngest brother—third in a family of six in which Felicity was the last—were children, he’d climb up the tree while she stood under it, for the chance to collect some of the fruits. But the problem was that udara aren’t meant to be plucked. You waited for them to fall, then gathered the fruits. Interrupting this process gave you udara that shrivelled up your mouth, a remonstrative sort of bitterness.

Felicity and her brother came up with a system.

They wouldn’t pluck the udara, no. Obiefuna would give the tree a light shake, and the ones that fell…well, were meant to fall. She remembers, once, of standing under the tree, her hands outstretched, head tilted up in expectation. An udara had dropped right into her cupped palms. She’d wiped it on her clothes and bit into it without hesitation. 

It’s the same situation now, finally lying between her husband’s legs.

Years of hints because she wasn’t certain of her suspicions about the quiet, assured woman. Her impatience because this pillar of a woman, tenacity and constraint in the way she held herself, appeared too content where she was. Even when, sometimes, she looked at Felicity like a fruit eager to drop, like Felicity was also the harvest. Before that fateful day at the boutique, Felicity had already decided to take the initiative, to be more forward, discard the uncertainty that hampered her, and hampered the two of them.

The sweetness explodes in her mouth.

Felicity holds the one she’s wished for and predestined in her hands, fingers grasping smooth skin. She laps at the juices. She slides and rolls the seed around with her tongue. She’s not thinking of fertility or children, as standing under an udara tree is also supposed to provide. But she carries that one fruit close to her chest. Even as she eats it up—flesh, skin, and all, divine taste on her tongue, blessed juices spreading across her mouth.

 

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ADA NNADI is a queer Nigerian-Igbo writer and editor living in Nigeria. Their work has appeared in Tor’s African Risen, GigaNotoSaurus, Anathema, and Omenana. Their story “Tiny Bravery” co-won the 2020 Nommo Awards in the short fiction category and appeared on the 2019 Locus Recommended Reading List. They are currently working on an upmarket lesbian novel that’s a blend of fantasy, romance, horror, Igbo and Christian mythology. Ada hopes that after their two master’s and a PhD, the Nigerian Psychological Association will NIPOST them the ability to read minds, like all psychologists before them. Ada will one day be the mother of many cats, two birds (because that’s the closest they’ll ever have to getting a pet dinosaur), a ball python—and maybe a big dog. Find her on Instagram @horneddaughter.

Featured image by Mariano Rivas, courtesy of Unsplash.