Hoisting onto the tiled sill in front of a window that lets in no light, Ilyana fires up a cigarette, and pushes smoke from her nose in lean, controlled wisps. She picks at the crust on her infected lobes. She adjusts the dollar sign earrings that dangle to her chin and smooth the angles in her face.
The door swings open. Farnaz cringes into view.
“Forget the limp,” he said when he caught Kambi’s eyes settled on that unfortunate leg. “This one here works like a jackie.” And she did. She was worth the five thousand naira agents’ fees Kambi paid the gateman. And the three thousand she gave the gateman for her family every month. The girl had never given Kambi any reason to complain until two days ago.
Outside on the porch’s front steps, I can hear my niece Andrea cry and cry and my father yelling at the T.V. that’s playing his favorite game show Wowowee—you know the one, where scantily clad, fair-skinned girls dance to American pop music as an older pinay from the barrios steps into a tank with floating money, catches as much as she can with a broomstick, and everybody laughs. I can hear my sister on the phone as my aunts surround her, harping, barking orders in Tagalog. The wedding is in three days.
Cameras. Lights. His face on television, pinched, distraught, out of control as he wept. He had never intended to break down in front of all these people, but the horrible loss of his one-year-old son, an infinitely vulnerable baby, pushed him to it. He had shaken her on camera. Taken her by the shoulders, shouted. Her face blank when they played it back, white in the glare of the lights,
I will climb my mother to Heaven, he said to himself, tittering, mumbling, unafraid to walk the dusty streets of Gbarnga day or night even during the riots because his mother, the woman who loved him, the woman he found years ago after coming home from the market with no chicken but the head of a cassava fish a merchant had thrown to the dogs and found boys no older than himself, six or seven, Charles Taylor’s boys singing, dirty, ransacking their house for food and clothing, chanting He Kill My Ma, He Kill My Pa, I Vote For Him.
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