by Fiona Zedde
“Where are you, Kizo?”
She followed his voice to the small cook room at the back of the house, a room with three walls open to an overflowing vegetable garden. Her brother stood at the preparation table over a big serving bowl of food, scooping the last of the fou-fou from the cook pot. Next to the fou-fou in the serving bowl he already had three portions of seasoned meats wrapped in banana leaves and three apples from his tree in the garden. The fire was out, only dying smoke rising from the smothered logs with the scent of the meal he’d just made.
He looked cheerful and well-rested, skin glowing with sweat from the fire, amusement glinting in his eyes. “Come help.”
Ny took the apples and empty plates Kizo pointed her toward while he carried the hot food into the small common room and arranged it on the table. He adjusted the slats of the window to allow in the dying light but shade them from the prying eyes of passersby.
“Where is Duni?”
He ignored her question. “I hope you’re hungry. I made enough for all of us.”
All? She crossed then uncrossed her arms, shifting restlessly. “Isn’t it too early for the evening meal?”
But a look from him made her sink into the low chair next to the table. She tapped her fingers against her thigh and glanced toward the closed door of the sleeping room. Kizo caught her eye and she looked away, her face turning hot. Ny took a breath to refocus herself, think about other things. From outside, she could hear the sound of bleating goats and a lone voice singing, a herder taking his animals in for the night along the small path nearby.
Even slightly isolated as Kizo’s house was from the bulk of the village, Ny could still hear the noise of its heartbeat, the things that made it live. She’d always loved her brother’s house, the way it sat apart and yet was still part of the village. Like she sometimes felt.
The door to the sleeping room creaked open, yanking Ny’s attention back to where it belonged. Duni walked into the room. “I heard your voice,” she said.
“I’m here,” Ny confirmed with a swift smile.
Duni’s hair was freshly braided, a different style from what Ny had seen that morning. Strain tugged at the corners of her eyes and her bottom lip looked swollen like she’d been chewing on it throughout the day. But she smelled of honey oil, and the kanga covering her from breast to ankle was one Ny had never seen.
It felt like she hadn’t seen her in days when it had only been a few hours. The memory of Duni’s soft skin was seared into Ny’s tongue and hands. She wanted to feel more of it. She wanted to confirm that what she’d experienced the night before was no dream, but instead a reality she could enjoy over and over again.
The wood of the chair pressed into the backs of her thighs as she shifted against it, restless and impatient to pull Duni into her arms, to nuzzle her throat and beneath her breasts for the source of that sweet oil tugging on Ny’s senses, and to pull her back into the sleeping room, down to the mat and press her meaty thighs open and sip on the hot slick of her cho-cho. On the other side of the room, Kizo shared out the food, a smirking smile on his face.
“The weather was nice today,” he said out of the blue. “I wonder if the twins went fishing. They like to catch something fresh when the sun isn’t too hot and it feels like the rain would come. What do you think, sister? Would you like to catch something fresh too?”
He put a bowl of water on the table along with three small hand cloths. Duni stood uncertainly near Ny, looking between her and the empty seat next to Kizo on the couch.
“For the sake of heaven!” Kizo laughed. “Sit on the floor at Nyandoro’s feet. Unless you’re going to start your honeymoon in front of my eyes. In that case, sit far away from her so you won’t be tempted.”
Ny bit the inside of her lip to stem any obvious show of embarrassment, but her face burned anyway. “Kizo, why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m hungry, sister. Why else?”
But once Duni sat down on the chair next to him, he cleaned his hands with the bowl of water and a hand cloth. The playfulness vanished from him.
“People are still talking.” Kizo reached for his bowl of food. “They don’t know where you are, Duni, but they’re talking like they do. They say you’re with your lover.”
Ny, too keyed up to eat, didn’t even look at her bowl. She shook her head.
“Do they think you are my lover?” Duni asked the question, her chin lifted.
“They know better than that.” Kizo looked amused again. “In the meantime, your husband—”
“He’s not her husband anymore,” Ny interrupted.
Kizo shot her an exasperated look. “The man you once shared a sleeping mat with, Duni, has already negotiated marriage with Dabiku. That ceremony will be in three days.”
“That poor little girl!” Duni lost her look of defiance, her face falling into lines of worry and sadness again. “I should’ve refused the divorce, then he wouldn’t be able to marry her.” Even the richest man in the village was only allowed six wives.
Kizo unwrapped his banana leaf, releasing the scent of spiced meat in the air. The succulent juices, a beautiful orange from the palm oil, swam in the shallow bowl. He picked up some fou-fou with his fingers and dipped it in gravy. “Once he said you took a lover and one of the wives supported his story, there was no way you could refuse the divorce.”
“But I didn’t have a lover.” Her eyes dipped to Ny, then away. “Not really. Not until he threw me out!”
“In the eyes of the village, that doesn’t matter.” Kizo glanced at Ny with the same fond amusement she’d been used to all her life. “You have a lover now.” He took a bite of the meat and hummed in appreciation. “Iya will be proud of me for this. I think I finally got her recipe right.”
Ny knew what her brother was trying to do, distract her from things she could not change, focus on the small but still meaningful things in her life. Like him taking care of her woman while the tide resulting from what they’d done rolled over them. She followed his lead.
“Hm. I’m not sure about that.” Ny took a bite of her meat, rolled it over her tongue although it tasted like stone. “Okay. Maybe.”
She felt Duni’s eyes on her, but Ny didn’t risk looking at her for too long. The pain in them was too plain. Too naked.
But Duni wouldn’t let her look away from her misery. “This is humiliating.” She poked at her food, not eating it. “The whole village knows Ibada is a worse person than me. They know! It’s shameful that I’m the one looking for a home and begging for scraps from any table that would take pity on me.”
“You don’t have to beg,” Ny said. “Marry me and that will solve all our problems.”
“Our problems?” Duni crossed her arms. “No. This one is all mine. I won’t be a burden to you or your family. Besides, you have nothing to support a family with.”
Ny and Kizo exchanged a look, her brother lifting an eyebrow in question.
“I do have something. Or at least I will when I marry.” Ny pushed back her bowl and carefully wiped her fingers on a hand cloth. “When I marry, I receive the twenty goats and a piece of land in my family compound. These things are for me, not a dowry. I will marry you and we will build a house together where you can farm our garden and help me take care of our home.” Ny shrugged. “Simple.”
“I told you, I won’t allow you to take me on as your burden.”
“You’re not my burden. I’m in love with you.”
Do you even know what love is? The familiar voice sliced through the confidence of her declaration.
Duni gasped. “What?” Her bowl clattered on top of the table, splashing gravy on its gleaming surface. She looked abruptly ashamed and scrambled to clean the table with a hand cloth. “You barely know me.”
Kizo cleared his throat and stood up. “I think this is my cue to leave.” He picked up his bowl along with an apple, never one to allow a meal to go to waste. “You love birds sort this out. I’ll spend the night with Nitu.” He no
dded his head at Ny. “Sister. Good luck.” Then he was gone.
Once Kizo left, silence dropped around the room like a heavy blanket. His absence was what Ny had so desperately wanted. But now that he was gone, she longed for a distraction from the tension between her and Duni. Ny drew a deep breath and, to buy herself some time, took the seat that Kizo had left empty.
“I love you, Duni,” she said again. “We can marry and work together to build a life that suits us both.”
Duni tipped her head down, plucking at the gravy-smeared hand cloth. Ny watched the top of her head, the swirling pattern of the braids in her hair, moving from the center of her head like the current in a whirlpool.
Her scalp gleamed with health. Ny wanted to touch the thick hair and trace the pale veins of her scalp she could see through the troughs of hair. Although no one outside their family knew it, her papa often braided her mother’s hair. There were many nights Ny had walked through the common room to see her mother sitting on the floor between her father’s spread knees, humming a song while he braided a simple style in her hair and smoothed mint oil into her scalp. Ny had always associated hair combing, hair braiding with intimacy. The feel of love and connection.
She tapped her fingers on the table, nervous, waiting for Duni to say what she wanted. But then, she had never been a patient person. “Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll have me.”
Duni lifted her head. “I know I shouldn’t.” She bit her lip, pulling the lush flesh between her teeth. She was nervous, Ny knew. But the sight of her white teeth sinking into the swollen lower lip made her suddenly, achingly want to touch her. She drew back and laced her fingers together on top of her thighs.
“You’re so young,” Duni said. “You don’t even know how this decision will affect you. We aren’t meant for each other. It’s as plain as the wood on this table.” She laid her hands on the table, palms down on either side of the nearly full bowl and stained hand cloth. “But I’ve never had anything beautiful of my own before.” She drew a deep breath and turned away from the table, leaned close to Ny, and put her hands on top of hers. “I will marry you.”
“You will?” Ny held her breath.
Duni laughed, a shaky sound. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes, I—” Ny giggled, unable to believe Duni actually said yes. She’d been prepared to argue with her all evening, all night. But this… The happiness spread hot and fast through her chest. “You won’t regret this. You won’t.”
“I’m not at the regret phase yet,” Duni said with a faint smile. She gripped Ny’s hands. “This won’t be easy for you. People will say you were the lover that destroyed my marriage, or worse yet, that I took a lover while with my husband and will make a fool of you too.”
“Those people won’t be on my sleeping mat.” She touched Duni’s cheek with trembling fingers. “You will and that’s enough for me.”
Duni stood up and held out her hand to Ny. “Then come, wife-to-be.”
Ny shivered at the word. Wife. She would soon be someone’s actual wife. She would soon have a family of her own, a love that belonged to her and no one else. She took Duni’s hand and got to her feet. Her legs felt like slender blades of grass, unable to support her whole body, not the body of a wife and lover and a woman who was about to get the thing she’d wanted for so long.
In the sleeping room, they sank into the mat together, kissing with a reverence and tenderness usually felt, in Ny’s mind, only on a marriage night. Their mouths pressed hotly together, the heat and pressure and pleasure of their kisses inciting wetness between her legs. But there was no urgency to it. They had the rest of their lives.
Then Duni gripped Ny’s hips hard and pressed a firm thigh against her quim. A sudden wave of overwhelming desire startled a whimper from her throat. She reached desperately for Duni, squeezing her breasts, her thighs, any inch of skin she could feel.
“Yes,” Duni gasped. “That’s good.” She touched Ny more urgently, licking her throat and sucking bruises into her skin, leaving Ny a squirming mess on the mat.
Ny knew she had to be quiet. This was Kizo’s house, and although they expected this of him, she didn’t want to call out Duni’s name though her entire body panted it with each liquid slide of Duni’s tongue over the firm seed of her desire. She bit her lip, clenched her teeth. But whimpers leaked from her throat.
She tightened her fingers in Duni’s hair as Duni moved lower, a snaking incarnation of desire, to lick between her legs. Duni raked her fingers down Ny’s thigh, pushed one leg high in the air and draped it over her shoulder. And Ny, limber from seasons of running, hunting, and climbing trees, arched her back, bending herself nearly in two as she whispered her thanks, her pleas, to the ceiling while Duni took her apart with her tongue and fingers.
She came with the sound of her own voice rattling in her ears. She was still trembling, electric shocks of sensation darting through her body, when Duni spoke, a breathless whisper against her lips.
“I…have a present for you,” she gasped. Then she turned around, sinking her bare and dripping quim to Ny’s mouth. “Put your tongue on me, wife. Please me while I please you.” She bent her head, and Ny eagerly did what she was told.
Afterward, she fell into a dream.
It was raining. The wet slid down Nyandoro’s face and bare shoulders, licking her skin with the sensation of warm tongues. She looked up into the sky and closed her eyes, enjoying the touch of the water that was like the sweet after-love feeling she had in Duni’s arms. Duni who seemed so far away from this place, like she didn’t even exist.
The woman beside her spoke. “If you want her to be here, she can.”
Ny opened her eyes and looked down to a valley. To the large, white building in its center, like a palace from Arabia and attached to many smaller buildings, also white, that spread out in a semi-circle and faced a high stone archway. There was no fence around the buildings, but Nyandoro sensed an invisible border of some sort separating the compound from the rest of the world. Something that prevented those on the outside from seeing it.
“If Duni comes, will you leave?”
“No, I will always be here.” Under the rain, the woman’s mouth curved into a smile.
A feeling of gladness opened her throat. She didn’t know why. She only knew that the stranger was a constant and welcome presence, like the three gold rings on her toes, gifts from her mother for each five-year cycle of her life. Nyandoro examined the feeling, like a bug under glass. Why would she feel this for a stranger? A woman she’d only met in dreams?
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Who are you?” the woman asked her in turn, smiling again.
Nyandoro found herself smiling. This game, question for question, she often played with her brothers. “I think I asked you first.”
“You like games, I see.” The woman actually laughed at Ny. Then her smile faded. “I like it here. I laugh here and it feels good.”
Did that mean the woman had a real world too? Nyandoro wished the rain would stop so she could properly see the woman’s face. She remembered her being beautiful enough to stop her breath. But the rain seemed like a shield of tears, and she did not want to see her coated in a layer of sadness. The woman stood up and stretched, with each sleek and eel-like movement of her body, the rain drained more and more from the sky.
“Did you make the rain stop?”
At Nyandoro’s question, the woman laughed again. Drops of rain kissed her face, her throat, bare shoulders, her belly. The water clung to the cloth that sat on her hips. Her teeth flashed in her face, bright lightning. “Your strength is beautiful,” the woman said. “It will be even more so when you realize it for yourself.
Nyandoro turned to look at the woman. And woke up.
She drew in a deep breath, and almost choked on the smell of sex and sweat. The air in her dream had been different, sharper with a hint of euphoria she always associated with the rainy season. At her side, Duni shifted on the slee
ping mat but did not wake. They had made love late into the night, way past time for the evening meal. The little of the sky that came though the window was dark and the moon was bright in the sky. Night insects squeaked and buzzed. The birds were long gone.
Her parents would start to worry. She needed to go home.
But wouldn’t it be nice to open Duni’s legs and kiss her awake?
She ignored the temptation, but it was a near thing. In the small bathing room, she made quick but thorough work of cleaning herself up. She didn’t want a trace of what she’d been doing to linger on her body. At least not until she had the chance to tell her family what she had planned. To marry Duni. To have a family of her own.
In the sleeping room, she kissed Duni’s shoulder and softly called her name. “I’m leaving.”
Duni made a soft noise of protest, sweet and kittenish, and curled into her lap. “You should stay with me.”
“I can’t.” She brushed a thumb over Duni’s cheek, and Duni shivered into her, smiling. “Not tonight,” Ny said. “But that will be the last time we sleep apart. Afterward, everything will be out in the open and we can spend all our nights together.” Saying the words filled Ny with a giddy pleasure. She kissed Duni’s shoulder again, her mouth.
Smiling, Duni rubbed her eyes. “All right.” She sat up and the blankets fell to her waist, baring her breasts and the bruises Ny had left on her skin. She looked thoroughly loved. Thoroughly hers. Ny kissed her mouth again, breathed in her sleep scent, even the sourness of her breath that was like ambrosia to her.
“I’ll come back in the morning.”
Duni clutched her tightly before reluctantly letting go. “I can’t wait for you to be in my bed all night.”
“Our bed,” Ny said.
“Our bed,” Duni agreed.
Ny left her with a smile on her face, the throb of gladness in her veins.
The night was beautiful in its darkness. Every sound seemed to echo Ny’s happiness, a chorus of sighs as she made her way back to the family compound. The rest of the village rang with its usual evening time rhythms, a lower tempo of noise, wives laughing softly around the yard fires after the babies had gone to sleep, old men drinking palm wine and sharing gossip on the verandah of the lodge. Torches on the front of nearly every house Ny passed lit her way.