Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  CROWS ROOST IN THE LATE SUMMER, FALL, AND WINTER; they gather from many many kilometres to form collective night perches. In Halifax, they flock, in small groups, in pairs, or alone, just before dusk, to perch in the trees near Mount Saint Vincent University.

  Taiye was on one of her routine walks around the city, looking through the wide windows of The Page bookstore on Spring Garden Road. As she read the colourful titles of new releases, she felt her phone vibrate in her coat pocket.

  Hey, hey, super last minute, but Hachim and I are going to see the crows now-ish. Interested in joining?

  Taiye smiled wide. Sure!

  Then added: Are these actual crows? A band? An art performance?

  Haha! Actual crows!

  She looked up from her phone, her lips chapped from the cold wind and curved into a bashful smile. She caught her reflection in the window, saw Our Lady wink at her, and then stepped into the bookstore to wait for Salomé to pick her up.

  So there they were, Salomé, Hachim, and Taiye, the three of them bundled up, leaning against the warm hood of Salomé’s car. Their heads craned toward the darkening sky, which was awash with a stream of cawing crows flying into the trees just ahead of where they stood.

  “Incredible, eh?” Salomé asked.

  “Yeah, incredi-di-dible,” Hachim replied.

  “Yeah …” Taiye said.

  For decades, thousands of crows had congregated in those trees, scuffling and filtering down through the branches as the late arrivals forced the early birds down to lower limbs, cawing an incredible cacophony all the while.

  “It’s how they share information and find mates,” Salomé explained.

  “That’s c-cah-cute,” Hachim replied.

  Salomé chuckled, and Taiye echoed Hachim, “It is cute.”

  Now, Salomé reached into the canvas tote on the hood of the car, pulled out a small jar of brown liquid, unscrewed the metal lid, and handed it to Hachim. She retrieved another similar jar and asked Taiye, “Would you like to share?”

  “Please.” She took the warm jar from Salomé. “Hot cocoa?”

  “Yup.” Salomé was, again, reaching into the canvas tote. She offered Hachim then Taiye bright orange strips of dehydrated mangoes from a wax paper bag.

  “Thank you,” Taiye said, exchanging the jar of hot cocoa for a small handful.

  “What do you think they’re saying?” Salomé asked, taking a sip. She was wearing the floral embroidered DESTROY WHITE SUPREMACY cap. She handed the jar back to Taiye.

  “Th-they are s-s-saying, ‘Save m-me a spot!’” Hachim replied.

  The navy sky was rapidly deepening to black. The crows’ music was dimming. They populated the bare trees like black leaves dancing in the cold late-winter breeze.

  “How was your d-day, Taiye?” Hachim asked, turning to look up at her.

  “Good.” Taiye smiled at them. “The class I was supposed to have got cancelled, so I job-searched a bit and walked around.”

  “It was a n-nice d-day for walking, sunny.” Hachim seemed to Taiye like a child who spent a lot of time with adults.

  “It was. How was your day?” she asked.

  “I went to th-the D-d-discovery Centre with An-Annie.”

  “Annie’s their sitter,” Salomé added.

  “What’s the Discovery Centre?”

  “It’s so cool!” Hachim exclaimed. “There’s, there’s a me-m-meteorite from Mm-mars, and a, um, a Meg-Megalodon sh-sh-shark jaw, and th-the tallest m-man in the—in the wor-world!” Their face filled with an excitement so endearing that Taiye giggled with them.

  “It’s a children’s science museum,” Salomé said, just as her phone began to ring. She smiled at the screen and announced to Hachim, “It’s your other momma,” before she flipped it open to answer the call, “Hey Jaz.”

  Salomé’s smile quickly melted into a frown. She said, “We’re looking at the crows … no, love, today is Wednesday, you said Friday.” She walked a few steps to the left, away from Taiye and Hachim, and conceded, “Okay, okay, fine, I’ll um … I can bring him down. Halfway? Yeah, okay … okay, okay. My love to your parents. Drive safe.”

  She returned to them with her lips pressed together. “Hey, I’m really sorry, I have to take Hachim down to the Valley.”

  “B-but I’m with-with you until F-friday,” they protested.

  “I’m sorry, baby. Jaz mixed up the dates, but, hey, Oma and Opa are down to see you.”

  “B-b-but, it’s s-so late, Sal!”

  “I know, I know.” She squatted down to match their height. “But that’s why we have to head out now.” To Taiye she said, “Hey, I’m sorry about the abruptness.”

  “No worries.”

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “Yes, please. I’m not sure how to get back from here.”

  “Of course, um, can I hit you up when I’m back? Maybe we could grab that dinner if it’s not too late.”

  “Yeah, yeah, let me know when you’re back.”

  “It shouldn’t be too too long. We’re meeting up halfway between here and—” She chuckled. “Sorry, you don’t care.”

  “I do, actually,” Taiye said, and climbed into the car after Hachim.

  WHILE SLEEP EVADED HER THE NIGHT BEFORE, Taiye had filled a bowl with cleaned wrinkly dehydrated shiitake mushrooms and a potent brew of smoky lapsang souchong tea, fish sauce, tamari, rice wine vinegar, and honey. Upon returning from seeing the crows with Salomé and Hachim, she found her mushrooms reconstituted into plump, firm caps, which she sliced into thick ears and set aside.

  Our Lady tapped her on the shoulder.

  “What’s up?” Taiye pushed a knife through the thick middle of a large sweet potato.

  What are you making?

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been meaning to use this tea.” She cut the sweet potato into cubes. “I’m going to stir-fry the mushrooms, roast these potatoes, maybe make some brown rice … What do you think?”

  Are you even hungry?

  “Not really …”

  Our Lady laughed. You had a nice time with the prof?

  “Yeah, cut short, though.”

  Taiye ran cold water over a half cup of brown rice, and then toasted it in a pan of hot coconut oil until a nutty fragrance wafted up to indicate it was time to add water.

  I think she’s calling.

  “What?”

  Our Lady pointed to the bedroom, where Taiye’s phone was rattling on the red bedside table. She rushed out of the kitchen to answer the call.

  “MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE,” Taiye said to Salomé as she let her in. “I’ll only be a moment.” Then she disappeared into the bathroom to change out of her sauce-splattered T-shirt.

  Salomé took in the view of the small sparsely furnished space. A low platform bed, with a wide colourful swath of aso oke draped over a white duvet. Beside the bedside table, sat stacks of cookbooks: Larousse Gastronomique; Joy of Cooking; Classic Indian Cooking; The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa; Mastering the Art of French Cooking; The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook; Ottolenghi: The Cookbook; The Complete Caribbean Cookbook; and Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed. And many many potted plants: tiny clay pots of succulents, hanging spider plants, devil’s ivy with vines cascading down the sides of the planters, purple variegated wandering inch plants.

  “You have a lot of plants,” Salomé shouted so Taiye would hear.

  “Yeah,” Taiye replied. “I try to get one every time I go to the supermarket.” She walked back into the living room in a fresh T-shirt and an oversized cardigan. “It’s a bit obsessive.”

  “Cute.”

  “Me or my plants?”

  “Um, both.” Salomé laughed bashfully.

  They stood by the closed front door and considered each other.

  “Are you okay?” Taiye asked.

  “Yeah, sorry.” Salomé ran a hand over her head. “I just hate saying goodbye to my kid.”


  Taiye nodded.

  “I mean,” Salomé continued, “don’t get me wrong, it’s really convenient being a part-time parent. Goodbyes just always feel really hard.”

  “I’m sure.” Taiye stepped closer. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all good.” Salomé leaned in when Taiye touched her hand.

  “Is this okay?” Taiye asked, rubbing her thumb in light circles on her forearm.

  “Yeah …”

  “When next do you have him?”

  “Next week …”

  They stood that way for a slow moment, Salomé considering the scar on Taiye’s chin, Taiye refraining from taking Salomé’s fingers to her mouth.

  Then Taiye asked, “This …?” her fingers running up and down Salomé’s arms, their faces a breath away from touching.

  “Yes,” Salomé said, barely audible. She leaned her face closer to Taiye’s for the kiss they’d both been keenly awaiting.

  It was an upsurge, their kiss. Tongue licking tongue, prying lips apart to the steady rhythm of longing. Their bodies pressed together; Salomé’s back pushed up against Taiye’s front door. A crescendo.

  Then Salomé pulled her face away. “We should talk … a bit … like at a restaurant or … somewhere …” she said, catching her breath.

  “Sure.” Feigning nonchalance, Taiye shrugged and stepped back. “I’ll just grab my coat.” But she didn’t move any farther away.

  “Yeah,” Salomé said, firmly holding Taiye’s gaze, not moving away either. “Or,” she continued, “we could just ride that first impulse …?”

  Taiye nodded and launched forward. They were kissing again, fiercely. Who can say how much time passed like that, Taiye’s knee wedged between Salomé’s thighs, both their hands groping, seeking the warmth of bare skin? Salomé’s hands moved under Taiye’s shirt, touching her breasts, digging into the soft skin of her back. Taiye pulled away and asked, “What do you like?”

  “Uh …” Salomé sighed. “Like, um.” She bit the corner of her bottom lip.

  Taiye smiled encouragingly.

  “Well, I like being bossed around … a bit,” she said finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah … you?”

  Taiye ignored Salomé’s question and stepped away from her. “Cross your arms over your head,” she said firmly. When Salomé hesitated, she smiled and added, “Now.”

  Salomé obeyed, a startled smile spreading across her face. Taiye grazed her teeth on the hot skin of Salomé’s neck. She pushed her shirt and sports bra up over her chest to reveal small breasts, dark nipples pierced with tiny gold hoops, a quarter-inch thick vertical line tattoo bisecting her torso from midway down her sternum to just above her navel. She kissed Salomé’s breasts and fumbled with the metal buttons of her jeans until Salomé broke her bondage to help Taiye undo them.

  “Hands back up,” Taiye commanded.

  Salomé eagerly obliged.

  Then Taiye sank her hand inside Salomé’s jeans, seeking her clit, where she rubbed her fingers in firm circles until she felt warm wetness.

  “I want to … may I go down on you?”

  “Please, yes.” More of a moan than two distinct words.

  Taiye fell to her knees, licked, and sucked, and flexed her fingers inside Salomé, until the woman came, trembling and calling on her god.

  AFTERWARD, TAIYE FED SALOMÉ THE STIR-FRIED RICE and marinated mushrooms. For dessert, frozen cherries, warmed in the heat of their mouths before biting into sweetness. Then they were kissing, that same urgency.

  Then Salomé asked, “What do you like?”

  “I … I don’t really know.”

  “Come on,” she kissed her earlobe, “tell me.”

  “I—” Taiye hesitated, shook her head, and chuckled. “I like you.”

  “Oh.” Salomé’s face softened. She held Taiye’s gaze for a long time.

  At the core of it, for Taiye, it was a simple matter of closeness. Two people, sometimes more, feeding a hunger to touch and be touched, kissing, naked—it was the intimacy of it that she found most arousing. Though varied, her appetites weren’t terribly sophisticated. Beyond the fact of pleasure, it was merely the thrill of being with someone. Being with an entirely separate universe of a person who wanted to be with her in return. And the ways that it could, even if only until the delicious edge of an orgasm, quell the loneliness in her skull.

  So when she said, “I like you,” to Salomé, it held many meanings.

  “GOD, I USED TO BE A MESS,” Salomé said. “I mean, I still am, in many ways, but … I was probably about your age when I had Hachim; he’s almost nine now. Hachim’s other parent and I had been together for a while, and we were pretty open, but, fuck, I definitely managed to violate the few boundaries we had. I was, um, consistently fucking people on her ‘no’ list. I was using a lot, too, and lying about it. I mean … I loved her, it had everything to do with my shit and not her, but still, no one deserves to deal with that.” Salomé shifted her gaze from Taiye’s face, nervously chewing her bottom lip.

  “We’d been trying for a kid, like sinking our savings into IUI, and then IVF, treatments because Jaz—Jasmin—really wanted to carry … anyway, it didn’t work out, so in a last-ditch effort, we did the IUI on me. It took right away. So, of course, karma is a bitch, as they say, and six-ish months into the pregnancy, Jasmin met someone. Like someone she wanted to be monogamous with, definitely a healthier, kinder person than I was. And, like, I couldn’t be mad! You know, after all the garbage I’d put her through, I couldn’t hold anything against her. The woman she met, Corinne, lives in the Valley, so they moved in together, opened up a feminist used bookstore … they’re definitely living some kind of queer fantasy.”

  Taiye took Salomé’s hand as she spoke and pressed her fingers against her cheek, kissing her open palm.

  “Anyway, they were really supportive during the pregnancy and birth. And we’ve been co-parenting ever since. It sounds wildly cliché probably, but it changed me … like it didn’t make me better or anything, it just made me want to be better. But I also knew that I had to get properly clean. Like, if my body was going to be a halfway decent home for a growing fetus, and then if I was going to be a halfway decent parent, I couldn’t be doing coke and fucking around with pills or whatever … anyway, I guess that’s why I got sober.” Salomé smiled at Taiye. “That was the question, right?”

  “It was.” Taiye planted a kiss on her temple.

  “I rambled a bit there.”

  “No, it was perfect.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “I know that’s a lie.”

  “Okay, ask me a question.”

  “Mmm … what’s most on your mind?”

  “My sister.” Taiye’s answer jumped out of her mouth before she could consider it.

  “Yeah? Are you close?”

  Taiye shook her head, and a shadow crept across her face.

  “Tell me about her.”

  “I didn’t talk very much when we were small.” Taiye remembered it vividly. “I had words, I just didn’t … I don’t know.” She shook her head. “So Kehinde would speak for me. She always knew what I needed to say …”

  “Taiye and Kehinde—you’re twins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re not close?”

  “No.” Taiye shook her head again, this time to shake the grief away. “Now you tell me something.”

  “Hachim and I have a secret beehive.”

  “Do you really?!”

  Salomé nodded. “It’s a secret, though.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Salomé untangled herself from Taiye, stood up, and stretched her wiry body, throwing her arms up with a satisfied grunt. She sighed and dropped her head into Taiye’s chest. “I don’t want to,” she moaned, “but I have to go. I have an early
class tomorrow.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thank you.” She planted a kiss on Taiye’s forehead before saying, “I’ve had a really good and really unexpected time with you this evening, Taiye.” She scanned the floor for her discarded jeans and underwear. “I’d like to see you again, like as soon as possible.” She pulled her T-shirt over her head and stuffed her sports bra into the back pocket of her jeans.

  “Likewise.”

  Taiye stayed under the aso oke and waved shyly at Salomé as she left.

  She touched the warm spot where Salomé had kissed her forehead, left her fingers there as she fell asleep with thoughts of belonging with a woman like that, with a family like that.

  HOLD IT GENTLY, THIS HUNGRY BEAST THAT IS YOUR HEART. Feed it well.

  Taiye awoke to Our Lady’s words. The apparition sat at the edge of her bed, bathed in ethereal light, smiling sweetly at her.

  Taiye climbed out of her bed, felt her body, after having been touched so thoroughly for the first time in a long time. She felt her body close to the surface of the skin of the day. Early-morning sunshine poured through the slits of the thin turquoise curtains that hung over the small basement windows. Taiye stood in the stream of sunlight and stretched backward, smiled at the warmth on her belly, the tenderness of her nipples.

  She moved slowly to the kitchen, feeling the weight of her body on her feet, the stretch of her legs with each languid step. In the kitchen, she made a pot of zobo, a tea of dried hibiscus flowers, cloves, dehydrated ginger, lemon, cinnamon, and honey. Then she drew herself a bath and climbed in with her tea and thoughts of her mother. Memories swam in the pit of her mind, deep below murky waters. She feared they bore no good news, so she skipped over them like she’d learned to do after her father died. Taiye skipped passed blurry flashes of Mami with a paring knife, of blood dripping down her own chin, into her small palms. Of being in a dream, and then being awake, in the kitchen, the tile cold underneath her feet …

  The bathwater grew tepid. Ever constant, time wound forward. Taiye turned her thoughts to the night with Salomé. She bit her bottom lip, hard on the right side, just as Salomé had done, and she smiled.

  She smiled all the way to the ferry, all the way across the harbour to Woodside, all the way to her Cold Kitchen class. She smiled through the salads, dressings, and cold sauces course, whipping bright egg yolks with oil with the poise and enthusiasm of a gifted violinist. Smiling all the while, laughing at her crush-induced giddiness.