by Nisi Shawl
After a moment, Ababuo turned to face her water again. She closed her eyes and allowed the calm waves to release her frustrations. There was no point in being angry at anyone, and jealousy was simply unacceptable. What sense did it make to envy a dead man? She who lived every day hoping not to die.
Ababuo didn’t realize that someone had walked up behind her until they had been standing there a full minute or longer. She turned and saw the mayor’s wife in her colorful attire. The woman had a way of showing up unannounced. “I thought I saw you here, Nantew yiye.” The way most people spoke her title was scornful, but on this woman’s lips it was lovely, valuable.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry? You were here first. I’m Serwa. We weren’t properly introduced the other day.” The woman looked back toward the festivities. “My son. He was a fisherman.” Ababuo nodded. She figured the woman simply needed to talk and it didn’t matter who she spoke to. “All we have left of him is his wife and unborn son.” A tear fell from the woman’s face; she wiped it away quickly. “Why are you here alone?”
“I like the water.”
The woman stared at her. “I’m sorry for you, Nantew yiye. I saw you go into the coffin shop the other day…and I was curious. There are so many rumors…about you. The things you can do. But still, I pity you.” The woman wasn’t being rude. Ababuo had experienced worse things than being pitied by her neighbors.
“Have you ever thought about escaping? Leaving all this behind?”
Ababuo didn’t answer for a moment. Perhaps Miss Serwa was testing her loyalty to the people of Accra. “Why would I do that?”
“Freedom, dear! Everyone deserves that.”
◊
Miss Serwa came for her that evening. Something had gone wrong in the delivery of the mayor’s grandson. Perhaps the woman had known something was wrong, or perhaps it was simply a coincidence that the two had met prior to this. Ababuo supposed it didn’t matter.
The woman walked into her room without the benefit of a knock, then closed the door before her caretaker could enter. Ababuo stood to her feet and let the woman speak: “I will not take from you without giving.” She paused for a moment, was silent as Ababuo had been earlier, lost in thought. “Most people can’t offer anything in return, so they suffer without coming to you. But I offer you freedom if you help me tonight. I will take you away, help you escape, if you save my son’s son.”
The city passed by her automobile window in quick, bright flashes that were almost unrecognizable. When Ababuo reached the house, Miss Serwa took her hand and led her to the room where the doctor stood over the mother, his hands between her bloody legs.
“What is she doing here? I told you none of that witchcraft while I’m here.”
“And I told you, doctor, that you do not make decisions for me or my grandson.”
“Send her away, I warn you.” The man was angry. He stared at Ababuo as if he had never hated anyone more in his lifetime than this girl.
But before he could speak again, the pregnant woman screamed and pushed, her face bloating with air, her eyes bulging in pain and fear. After a moment, the baby slid into the doctor’s hands, its breathing rushed and rapid. Without a word to inquire about her child, the mother closed her eyes, unable to hold them open any longer. She and her son were in distress; neither would survive. Ababuo could sense it from where she stood in the doorway.
“Send her away,” the doctor demanded again.
Ababuo looked up at the mayor’s wife, untwined her fingers from within the woman’s grip, and walked over to the mother and child. All she had to do was save the kid and get whisked away to freedom. That word sounded so sweet, so peaceful.
As she reached the other side of the room, the doctor stood and moved out of her way, as if she carried the plague. Ababuo touched the mother’s stomach, feeling the blood and energy flow too rapidly from within her. The baby was just as bad. His head was warm and his mind was unfocused, cloudy. Ababuo could sense the life slowly drain out of his body. Ababuo could not save them both.
Thirteen. That was it. That was how many souls she was allowed to save, both dead and alive. She had only two left within her to save. But she had to save one for herself. She had sacrificed enough. She hesitated for a moment. Without giving it another thought, she grabbed the child, placed her mouth over his, and sucked all of the illness and cloudy residue in his mind away. She held the child to her, her entire mouth covering his nose and lips. She breathed in, feeling all of the sickness within the child enter her body, fog her soul, overwhelming her senses. He was so tiny in her hands, so cold and scared. Newborns, she had learned, understood little and feared nothing but light diminishing from their too-new souls. When she released him, he began to cry, loud and strong. Miss Serwa smiled and lifted the child from her arms, hugging him. Crying, she laid the baby in his mother’s arms and caressed the woman’s face. The dying woman did not move, or hear her son screaming within her arms.
“You must go.” Miss Serwa kissed Ababuo. “My men will take you to a secluded farm. You can stay there as long as you want. Thank you.” She looked back at the screaming child: “I’ll take good care of him.”
Ababuo walked to the door, stopped, and looked back at the mother still unable to hold her child. Then her eyes fell on the soon to be motherless child. She had lived thirteen years without a mother. A caretaker was no substitute. Before she could regret her decision, she ran to the bed and took both the mother and child into her arms. She placed her mouth over the woman’s nose and gave her life away. Death slowly left the woman and entered Ababuo, her body becoming weak. When her knees gave out her body slumped to the floor. She drifted away before knowing whether to regret her decision.
This was her thirteenth. The same number of years she had been allowed to live, only to die and not be buried in Ghanaian soil, but burned, as if a witch in punishment.
◊
The mayor’s wife carried Ababuo’s body down stairs and laid her on the sofa. The following day she commissioned a fantasy coffin for Ababuo. A sarcophagus: such a lovely, tiny thing, reminiscent of those of Ancient Ghana’s kings and queens. Miss Serwa had only one requirement: that the coffin remain buoyant in shallow waters for no less than thirteen days, keeping her promise not to bury Ababuo in the soil of Ghana. The mayor, his wife, and their family celebrated in a private ceremony by setting Ababuo’s body to sail on the waters of the small waterway which led into the Volta River, so that when the earth quaked only the depths of the sea life felt it and mourned for this beloved and simultaneously unloved child.
Holding Hands with Monsters
Haralambi Markov
I learn early that some children are born to be stalked in the dark.
The monster comes when the last light in the house is turned off. He smells of musk and forbidden thoughts. I fear him first as he makes his entrance from below the bed. He sounds like a breath pushed through an unstable telephone line: hazy, warm, and ripe with the threat of some danger that leaves me wet and marked with gooseflesh.
Then I see the light from his eyes as he slides from underneath: bright and golden like the sheen of crumpled candy foil wrappers, sweet and inviting.
Don’t look at him as he leans over and smacks in your ear, waiting patiently.
This is how you survive the night. This is how you survive the monster in the dark.
Something I’ve had to do for years now.
◊
A rustle comes from behind my back.
I’m a grown man now. I live alone in a small apartment with a small bedroom that doesn’t allow me to place my bed against either wall, unless I want to sleep beneath the window or block the bedroom door.
The sheets peel off my back and the bed creaks underneath the additional weight, trying to find a new shape to accommodate the second person.
The monster.
It’s the first time he comes to bed and he’s not bothered by the lam
p on my desk in the corner. He’s human, or at least that’s what he feels like when his skin touches mine and our legs entwine as if they’ve belonged together since before the kingdoms of eras past rose to power and fell. His breathing finds a steady rhythm, lapping at the small of my neck.
This shouldn’t be real, couldn’t be real, and I imagine my therapist in his crisp pants and a white shirt that’s somehow so tight around his chest the fabric around the buttons warps until tiny crescents reveal his skin and hair underneath. His words ring clear as if he says them to me right now: Monsters don’t exist. Open your eyes. Confront what you think is there. Then the Latin words flow from his mouth, scientific poetry that transforms into colored pills in orange bottles—rattling in my hand as I chase away my demon.
Monsters aren’t real. I relax my eyelids in preparation to fight, reestablish my boundaries and claim my bed back. A chilling breath laps at my nape again and I squeeze them tighter, until it hurts so bad it feels as if I’ve gone blind.
His breath is cold and sharp and reminds me of those winter games my father and I used to play in the park near our house—a small plot squeezed between several apartment buildings where the winds would fall, wild and sharpened by their January travels. The gusts would bite and freeze, have you pant with frosted exhaustion and pray the electric heater would chase their bite marks off your flesh.
Nothing happens that first night. The monster lies spooned against me cold as a corpse, but I catch my breath every time I try to make my lungs work. My heart pumps faster than I have ever known it to. I want to tear the sheets and run; every muscle twitches with the desperate desire to escape and although I freeze, my insides burn with the strain to keep myself from screaming. This tension stretches into infinity.
I let a steady breath out, eyes squeezed shut, and wonder what changed. How did the monster change? He’s behind me and I mustn’t see although I want to, so I let my body act as a pair of eyes. Yes, there’s the cold, but against my skin I feel every line cut through me. Fuzzy hair presses against me and his chest is firm, rigid, and tough. Perhaps he’s chiseled, or taken with rigor mortis.
That’s not how I imagine it would happen. There are no teeth. No hands wrapped around my throat to turn me around and face him. No dirt-stained nails that crumble soil on the sheets to pick my eyelids apart and look into his eyes. Acknowledge his existence. End it all. That first night sleep doesn’t come. Nor does it come the following nights for he joins me every single time afterwards, pressed against me, the big spoon in the relationship and technically I am up all night with a man in my bed.
I joke around the office about him, index fingers always at the bags under my eyes. Every mention of him makes him more real at night; the bed dips lower under this newfound weight, this unholy gravity he accumulates from my words. I don’t perform so well at work, though.
Harsh computer light punctures my eyeballs until all the boxes in the spreadsheet fill with a nauseating shade of red, like diluted menstrual blood. And when I rest my eyes at my desk I see a face outlined. I catch it as I blink and the thought that I’d actually see his face scares me into blinking less and less. Infection claims my eyes by the second week, and I’m given a sick leave. The company doctor fails to hide his surprise at my condition and I feel less again, like those times in high school when all the other kids knew what I was. It never had to be spoken. It never had to be admitted. They knew. An instinct told them I was off and now the same happens here. The doctor spreads the news about my infection faster than a used needle spreads a blood disease.
In the meantime I learn how to sleep with the monster that comes into my bed every night. He continues to spoon against me. Sometimes when I go into the bathroom and the lights in my bedroom are already turned off, I can spot the shape of him in the bed, patiently waiting for me to assume my place in front of him. I can see the golden glow cast on my pillow. That’s when my breath catches again and I consider sleeping in the bathroom, but that never happens. I turn off the switch and I close my eyes, the one rule that’s saved my life for so many years looping in my mind—Don’t open your eyes. Those are the nights when I bump into furniture and stumble into my bed, which is colder than normal. It’s always cold as I lie on my side and wait for him to press against me, his breath a regular meter, a constant, the throaty beating of a clock in the dark. He smells of a fresh grave, which I feel is where I belong. That thought is too scary, though, and my therapist, whose shirt is still too tight around his chest, recites his verses in Latin again. I want to trust him. I want to believe he’s capable enough to remake me, to rewrite my chemistry, to reconfigure my brain. Make me not hurt. Make me not hide.
He tells me to imagine the monster’s breath is the breeze on the pier during a visit to the funfair with my family on a late summer afternoon. Imagine the lamps and the carnival music, the smell of greasy carny food and chatter of people who speak of love, affection, and brighter futures. Imagine all these layers over this breath that hisses like the ocean before a storm and reeks of sweet rot.
I try and try.
Sooner rather than later I catch pneumonia and a nasty ear infection. I can’t explain the truth about how I got them. The doctors can’t explain it themselves. As a patient I’m guilty, defeated and yellow.
“We’ll get you fixed up, bro,” my brother says with forced cheer as he arrives with packed suitcases. He’s the younger one, yet life somehow has assigned him as my caretaker. Always there to mend my life, the sinking boat. No matter how much I empty it, it continues to fill and sink. I can’t talk to him about what’s happening. When we were little and he used to trust me, I’d tell him about the monster, but childish interests don’t last, and my stories held his attention less and less until I stopped talking.
“Are you all right?” He breaks the cheerful act eventually. He has that hurt look that says “I can’t go through this again.” “Answer me honestly. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Is this your new way of hurting yourself? Like that time….” He can’t even say it, say I swallowed a whole bottle of pills.
No. I shake my head, too sick to form words. The pain and exhaustion catch up with me. He goes into my kitchen to play vigil, while I lie in my bed wrapped in blankets. The monster doesn’t show for a month while my brother is here on leave; an act of kindness he’d remind me of in the future. I should be in a hospital, but I don’t have enough to pay for the bills, so my kind brother takes care of me day in and day out. I gradually get better, but then he leaves.
He has a family now, one that doesn’t come with baggage as heavy as mine and I’m alone in my bedroom, without a job or a future. After the eye infection, I’ve lost the endurance to stare at screens for too long and all I have to do all day is to stay at home and sleep. The monster keeps me company, his limbs intertwined with mine.
Sometimes he nuzzles at me and I feel his nose like an ice cube, circling at the small of my neck until I’m stiff with pain. Every morning and every night I spend hours in hot baths. I boil water and pour it in just to feel my blood rush and the pleasant sting as it scalds me.
I fear hypothermia might settle in.
Soon he progresses from doing nothing to foreplay. His fingers creep down my waistband and I shiver from the touch. It doesn’t matter if I cover myself with a blanket. He always finds a way and he’s there, resting his hand on my cock. Fingers play until I get hard, because by then I am used to it and I hope for the touch of his fingers. In the dark, they feel like icicles so I can’t say if they’re stubby and fat or long and bony. All I feel is the freeze, but they still get me excited. I still get hard.
It’s been a long time since anyone dared touch me and eventually I turn to lie on my back, so the man-monster-freak leans over me, his cold hard chest pressing on my left, his face resting in the nook of my neck. I look out when I’m sure I can’t see his eyes and my body gleams a golden hue, as if I’ve embraced a neon liquor store sign.
Stubble rubs my neck raw as he moves h
is face with the rhythms of his hand. I come in his grip and he brings his hand to his mouth first before presenting his half-licked fingers to mine. The nails, sharper than anything I’ve ever come in contact with, cut my lips as I accept the offering, and my mouth fills with the taste of life and death at the same time: savory, sweet, and bitter. His digits are cold and he doesn’t seem to mind when I bite down to the bone and grind my teeth sideways in a cruel game to get them to warm up. Pain apparently doesn’t register with him. His breathing doesn’t change. My tongue plays with his nails, my tip lacerating on them until my mouth fills with the taste of blood and it’s not bad. Whatever this is.
My brother calls to see how I am. Somehow I sound better. As if the nightly emissions with the monster have given me some measure of health. The lies I tell my brother make him stop calling. Yes, I’m fine. Yes, I’m healthy. Yes, I’m looking for a job. So easy to tailor a reality that couldn’t be more different, but I do feel happy and I have grown to expect the hours the monster spends with me. His breath changes now as I run my hands all over his body and touch him the way he touches me. His cock hardens in my hand, which goes against everything I know of dead bodies, because technically he is dead. I can see the death in the mornings when he is gone and the sunlight shows the stains. The smell doesn’t bother me. Neither do the sounds when we fuck. I dream of his kisses. First limp and tentative, later hungry and violent. Devour me, I scream at him and he does, in a way. He sucks and bites on my flesh, tender from a lifestyle behind the computer screen, down and down until he takes me whole in his mouth. I run fingers through his coarse hair, which is tangled and snags when I try to roam, but that never disrupts his rhythm.