Temper

by Nicky Drayden

  Chimwe and I flinch at the word lesser, like a small bolt of lightning has pierced our hearts. It never used to bother me, but after going so long without hearing it, it sears fresh all over again. Chiso catches herself, looks out at the murky horizon.

  “And now Father is sick. This plague has been taking its time with him. I don’t know whether to be thankful for that, or resentful. Either way, I can’t stand the howls of his pain, so I spend most nights here. I know it’s awful of me, leaving him there with Mother, all alone like that, but . . .”

  “I want to see him,” Chimwe mumbles.

  “I hate to break up this little reunion,” Nkosazana says, edging into the room and into the conversation like she’s always been here. Maybe she hadn’t given us as much privacy as I’d thought. “We’re already behind schedule. Besides, you can’t just walk in there and expose yourself to the sickness like that!”

  “He’s my father,” Chimwe says. “I have to see him.”

  “If you catch the disease and bring it back to Akinyemi . . .” Nkosazana warns.

  Chimwe stares at me for a moment. Mind grinding. I shake my head, begging him not to say it, but he does anyway. “Then I’ll stay here.”

  “No,” I rasp. Akinyemi needs Chimwe. I need Chimwe. Without him—without his advice, his encouragement, without his fortitude, without his love—there’s no way I could have made it through these past few years. “You’re mine, too,” I tell him. “Nearly as much mine as you are hers.”

  Chiso’s eyes cut to mine. “You know?”

  “Know what?” Chimwe asks.

  “We’re siblings,” Chiso says without pomp, as if she were relaying the weather. Terribly bland weather. “You and me and Auben and Kasim.”

  “I . . . How long have you known?” I ask, dumbfounded.

  “I don’t know. About since I was really able to look into a mirror. Eight, maybe nine? I studied our features—all four of us—for hours on end, comparing them with the old portraits of Dad hanging at our grandmother’s house until I was certain. I worked up the nerve to ask him about it. Got this in return.” Chiso turns her chin up, points to a small scar right above the smooth jawline once covered in stubble. “His Gabadamosi ring caught me here. Never brought it up again. To anyone.” Chiso’s eyes are apologetic, but relieved. I guess it makes sense, looking back. Eight or nine is when Chimwe and Chiso turned from our cousins into our tormentors. I remember the weird staring.

  “You should have told me,” Chimwe snivels, then locks his eyes with mine. “You should have told me.” He pulls away from me, like mine is the bigger betrayal. He gets up, makes a pronounced curve away from Chiso as he walks to the door. “I’m going to see my father.”

  “Wait,” Chiso says. “You’ll need some of these.” She tugs a couple of layers of garlic-wrap off, and the smell . . . I tell you, the smell is not pleasant. A few moldy-looking cloves tumble onto the ground. Chiso wads the rags up and tosses them to her brother. “Wrap that against your skin. Probably best to wet it first. It’ll keep the sickness from spreading. When we’re back at the house, you’ll want to cover your face really well.”

  Chimwe nods, as if he’s just gotten instructions on how to bake a proper milk tart and not to save his life from plague, then disappears through the door. Chiso waits thirty seconds, then follows, leaving Nkosazana and me alone.

  “I guess we should finish up, then start on our way back,” she says. She takes a sip from her canteen before offering it to me. I shake my head. “We’ll have to quarantine ourselves for a few days when we get back, just in case.”

  I hear what she is saying, but the words breeze between my ears. My father is sick. Dying. His is the fabric that has run silently through my life, at least the human part of it. It sits in tatters now, loose, severed threads that could have been something beautiful that connected us all. I try to hate him for the ill he has brought to our family, but my temper refuses to roil, and this time, in the pits of my bones, I know it has nothing to do with Nkosazana’s proximity tempering the god within me.

  “Hello?” She knocks on my skull. “Anybody home? I said we need to get the rest of the supplies and ditch this hellhole. We’ve got four more stops.”

  I nod. “You’ve got four more stops. You can handle it yourself, right?”

  “What? Wait—” she calls after me, but I’m already bolting toward what’s left of a cracked pane of glass overlooking this gray and decrepit city. “You can’t—”

  “I’ll meet you in two hours, back at the school,” I yell at her. Glass breaks and rains down with me as I’m falling and the demon within stirs. Right before I kiss pavement, the fog in my mind clears and the skin at my shoulder blades rips apart, making way for wings to unfurl. The winds catch me and soon the clouds embrace me, and I soar above the devastation, back to the home that has brought me so much hurt, and promises that it is not yet done.

  The pristine white brickwork has gone gray, drifts of ash bank in the multicolored glass windows. I fold my wings nicely, and out of habit, I wipe my claws on the front mat, but do not bother to hide myself. Aunt Cisse would see straight through the facade anyway, and Father—I want him to see me.

  I knock. I wait. Chiso and Chimwe are still a good thirty minutes away by foot. Aunt Cisse answers, a mere sliver of the woman she once was, mummified in the same smelly sashes Chiso had worn, cheeks sunken, eyes dull, hair graying with worry at the temples. She tenses at the sight of me, for the briefest of moments, then steps aside to let me in. “I’ve been allowing the devil into my home all these years. No reason to start denying him now. You’re here to see your father, I take it?”

  I stare at her, mouth agape. “Are there no secrets left in this family?”

  Aunt Cisse sucks her teeth. “They say it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride on the day they get married. You know what’s worse luck?” She stares at me. This isn’t a rhetorical question.

  “What?” I ask, not sure if I want to know.

  “The bride seeing the groom atop her sister twenty minutes before she’s supposed to walk down the aisle wearing the most spectacular designer gown in front of three hundred of her closest friends and family, that’s what. Stood there a whole thirty seconds, and neither one of them noticed. I always thought you were their punishment. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I mutter. The house looked bad from outside, but inside it’s a crypt. Quiet. Cavernous. Walls that had born witness to celebrations and fighting sit silently now, like dead bones holding up the structure that once teemed with life.

  “He’s back there. You should go now, if you want to see him.” While he’s still alive, she’s implying. Aunt Cisse moves to offer me a garlic-scented sash, but decides against it. I’m sure I’m above such illnesses, and if I’m not, I totally deserve to catch it. I’m guessing she thinks the same thing.

  I stand still in the doorway, looking around the room—curtains drawn, lights dimmed, curling wisps of smoke rising from shallow bowls filled with obi powder, supposedly meant to deter the demons that brought sickness and death.

  “Oh,” Aunt Cisse says, following my gaze to the loose incense. “Should I put those out?”

  I shake my head. Obi powder is not what is keeping me from crossing over the threshold. It makes me sniffle, but that’s about it. I’d inhaled a whole jar of it back in that other life, when all my problems consisted of trying to impress a girl with wu dolls. It’s the smell of what lies beneath that ragged, cloying scent that worries me. I smell him, my father . . . but it’s all wrong. Bent and bruised and battered. Like fruit gone to rot.

  I’m trembling as I take his bedside. His eyes are crusted over. At first I think that I am too late, but then his head turns, and he smiles like he’s glad to see me. “Finally,” he rasps, his voice like wind in the reeds. “Death comes.”

  “I’m not here for that,” I say. “It’s me. Auben. Your son. This is what I am. This is what the truth looks like.”

  “No . . .” My father
wails. Flails. “Icy Blue,” he screams. “Take me! Take me!” Aunt Cisse runs in and holds his wrists. Father is frail, but there is more fight left within him than I’d guessed. He pants like a rabid mongrel, then bays into the bitter full-moon night.

  “Can you hold him?” Aunt Cisse says. My hands swap with hers, and she wets cloths and presses them to his feverish skin until the baying subsides. Finally, he slips into a deep sleep, then his breathing shallows. His pulse goes thread thin. He no longer needs restraining, and yet, I can’t let go.

  “He was the first one to hold you, you know,” my aunt says, not bothering to look up from her nurse duties. “The midwife wiped you off, took one look at you, and handed you to him before going back to deliver Kasim. I stopped hating him in that moment. Good Grace, the way he smiled at you. You were perfection. The way you glowed. The way he glowed. It was all so serene, so . . . so perfect, and I knew no child I could give him would match the intensity of that moment. The mind does certain things to protect itself. To delude itself. I turned my blame to Pabio. If he hadn’t been running late to the ceremony, his presence would have tempered your father’s lechery. I hated him more for it each and every day.”

  “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask my aunt Cisse. Never in my life had I seen her go two sentences without breaking into a yelling fit.

  She looks at me, smiles balefully, then coughs daintily into a lace handkerchief. She opens it up to reveal a spot of blood. I shake my head. And with that, she steps closer to me, tips up onto her toes, and she kisses me full on. I try to hold it back, but the cold slips over my lips, then over hers. Her body goes rigid in my arms, her shallow breath turns to crystals at the edges of her mouth. I move her into bed, next to my father.

  Then I sit with him for half an hour, pressing cold towels to his forehead as he mumbles incoherently, interspersed with writhing and howling and spitting. I cannot let my cousin see him like this. I cannot let this image be the last thing Chimwe remembers of his father. Our father. My uncle Yeboah, the man who first held me in his arms, who loved me in the best way he could. I break his fever with a single kiss.

  I’m still standing over him when I hear Chimwe’s cries. “What did you do to them?” he says, pounding his fists into my back. “What did you do?”

  Chiso hovers in the doorway for a moment, then decides to risk the pain. She’s at her mother’s side, fingers crunching the ice crystals formed over her skin, hoping her touch would force life back into that cold, cold corpse. Chiso crumples from the pain of proximity, and Chimwe falls to my feet, begging me to fix it. To put things back to how they were.

  “We have nothing!” Chimwe cries. But he is wrong. They still have each other. I cannot give life, but I can rearrange it. I raise my hands, feel intently for the gossamer strings that tie Chiso and Chimwe together. They are fine, much finer than the webs that hold the universe together. A billion strands could take up the fraction of the width of spider’s silk. I feel for them, and then I begin to knot them, weaving them together with such intricacy that no one, not even Kasim, would be able to unravel them again. There is screaming, and lots of it, some of it coming from my own agape mouth, but when I am done, when the fabric Chiso and Chimwe share is whole and right again, I exhale, and fall to the floor.

  Half-lidded and drained of energy, I watch them as they realize what I’ve done. Immediately, they hug each other, making me aware of my own tattered fabric. I feel a loss. Chimwe was almost mine. Almost. But almost is not enough. Not for em, nor for me.

  Sooner or later, I will have to face Kasim.

  I can’t cry. It’s not some dumb macho thing, either. I hurt like hell right now, my heart rubbed raw. My father, gone. My aunt, too. I still taste her on my lips, breath foul from worry and regret and bitterness. Just traces of my saliva had frozen her over, head to toe, but death by Icy Blue’s kiss pales in comparison to the schoolyard rhymes about the damage my tears cause. Of course, they might not be true. But they probably are.

  So I repress. Pretend it’s not that big of a deal. Just a couple more deaths to add to my tally. I whistle as I walk the desolate streets to keep the images at bay. The rheumy eyes swollen in their sockets like marbles. The pattern of burst blood vessels like red lace doilies sitting upon their skin. The sound of icy slush forcing its way through their veins. Despite the risk of being noticed, I whistle a little louder.

  When I arrive at our old school, I cringe at how much it’s degraded. The windows are boarded up. The tangle reeds Nkosazana and I used to sneak kisses behind have turned to rotten mush. The awnings have collapsed in several places. The door is ajar. Nkosazana must have gotten here first. Inside is dark and musty, rodents scatter past my feet.

  Past the doors to the drama department, a chill sets my arm hairs on end. Of course, I dare not go in, but the entirety of this school, the entirety of this whole city reminds me of the demon-studded disaster that happened backstage that day with Ruda, so long ago now. I hurry past, the clack of my loafers echoing through the halls.

  “Auben?” I hear Nkosazana’s voice, and immediately my fears are laid to rest. She’s calling from the cafeteria. I duck inside the double doors, and enter the gray expanse of shadows. Tables where students once clamored for a seat to inhale whatever slop the servers had tossed upon their trays now sit uncomfortably vacant.

  Nkosazana takes one look at me and laughs. “Oh my, where did you find this?” She touches the sleeve of my school ciki, but it dissolves away, revealing smooth human flesh beneath. She withdraws her hand, watching curiously as clouds of silk threads reform my sleeve again.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. It felt right, I guess. For old time’s sake.”

  Nkosazana grins. “Too bad you couldn’t do that trick back in school. Would have saved your mother a fortune in uniform fees.”

  “Nah, she would have just found something else to complain about. It was rough being her son. I can’t imagine how awful it’d be to work with her.”

  “She’s . . . headstrong,” Nkosazana says after the slightest hesitation.

  “In the same way a typhoon is headstrong,” I laugh. “If you tell her she’s being stubborn, she takes it as a compliment!”

  “Ha! Remember the time she decided to drop her voice an octave because she thought she’d be taken more seriously, and she went hoarse after three days?”

  “Yes! Not complaining. It was nice having a break from being yelled at for leaving the mafi carton out on the counter. ‘All I’m asking is for you boys to put it back in the icebox so it doesn’t spoil!’” I say, mimicking Mother’s horrid falsetto. I’ve got tears rolling down my cheeks, and Nkosazana’s laughing so hard, she’s holding her side. Her guard is down, and it’s really nice, just enjoying her company.

  “Oh, honey, come here,” she says, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbing at the corners of my eyes. But then my mind starts churning, memories align, and I stop laughing.

  “Wait a minute. That happened before I met you.”

  Nkosazana blinks a few times, then stiffens. “I know. You told me all about it. Went into so much detail, it was like I was there.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t,” I say. Nkosazana used to always change the subject when my mother came up. Never cared to even meet her, even though I’d met her parents a dozen times.

  “I promise you did,” Nkosazana says resolutely, then pats her duffel bag sitting on the lunch counter, suddenly all business. “I got all the items on the list. So did things go okay with your dad?”

  “It went okay,” I lie, trying to ignore the weird air now between us.

  “If you want to talk about it . . .”

  “I don’t. I just need to rest for a moment. I’m famished.” I turn from her, and rummage through the empty kitchen cabinets, finding nothing but cobwebs and dust. The whole place has been scavenged over. Then I see it. An old dented can tucked beside the industrial ovens. I run to it, wipe my hand through the dusty label. Curry Paste, it reads. A year and a
half past its expiration. I flex a claw and turn the lid to metal shards. I dip in, slurp it down, ravenous. Like a beast.

  “Auben!” Nkosazana cries.

  I straighten up, alert. Suddenly aware that she’d called me several times. I stare at her.

  “What?” I say, realizing how foolish I must look. “Sorry, did you want any? It’s just paste. Only gone a bit off.”

  She shakes her head then nods toward me. I look down at myself, pristine ciki now covered in bright red sauce, like I’d been in some sort of bloodbath. Blood.

  “I’m not craving blood,” I tell her. No craving for blood, but the hunger is still as savage, like someone is trying to rip my stomach through my throat.

  “What does that mean?” she asks.

  My hand is back in the can before I can answer. I scoop a few more times, but then find it easier to chug the whole thing. Hunger releases its grip, just enough for me to compose myself. Nkosazana comes to my aid with a stack of napkins, carefully wipes my face, my lips, and uses several more to clean my clothes. She laughs as she wipes, cloth briefly going to skin everywhere she touches. Devil turning human.

  Everywhere she touches. I look down, thread clouds swirling between my thighs. All those thorns and barbs that made physical intimacy between us impossible are gone, replaced with a respectable shaft of thin, veined skin. Her hand lingers, a moment too long, then she licks her napkin and goes after a spot of sauce on my lapel.

  “I thought you wanted to stay focused on the job,” I manage to eke out as fabric returns, along with the barbs it conceals. Concealed. It’s not doing such a great job of it now.