Glory be Mercy

I.

Two men, a fridge, and a narrow entryway. The short, stocky man shouted commands from the bottom end of the LG refrigerator. Move left, more left, lift higher. The object shifted with each grunting acquiescence of his companion, a tall man wearing a stretched-out singlet. From the second-floor balcony across, Glory watched the spectacle, a dance of ants with a large piece of stale bread. The ant hole was too small, but the ants were determined for the bit of food, however hardened and hollow of nourishment, to bring their colony happiness.

If the futility of their attempts annoyed her, the smirk on Mama Twins’ face, the look of a woman oblivious to reason, drew Glory into a wave of bitterness. The woman was foolish to put a sizable appliance in a suffocating room receiving only a few hours of electricity daily. But Mama Twins was calmly pleased, righteously accomplished, as she gestured to the hired hands to complete their impractical task. Glory bent backward in her white plastic chair until her right hand held the roughened banister. From that angle, she could see that the push and pull of the fridge had eroded parts of the cement step in front of Mama Twins’ rooms. She would have preferred if the struggle to fit the fridge—still cradled in its carton—made the woman pause, summon shame for her worldly greed, and acknowledge the ignorance of her purchase. Like a balm on a strained muscle, Glory sought relief from the soreness in her chest. She detested the fridge as a virtuous reward for Mama Twins’ merciless work, day and night, as a second-hand clothes trader, to raise the male child who had bought the gargantuan item. The size of the fridge was testament to the depth of her sacrificial efforts, equal to the magnitude of her son’s success.

Mama Twins turned sharply toward her direction, and Glory shrunk. The chair bounced with her from its lean against the railing. She was among many peeping from the heights of their compound building, but she felt caught in the act of ill-will, as if proving Mama Twins right to call a pastor for fervent prayers over the new belonging. Glory wavered, staring through the open door of her family’s home and into the living room where a wide wooden dining table stood bare except for some of her father’s old textbooks and her copy of Senior Secondary School Physics. She could not expect Mama Twins to know that she sincerely meant no evil. Her proud display had simply arrived during Glory’s hour of self-pity.

Glory left her crouch on the balcony and went inside. The dense air of the afternoon had reached the kitchen at the back of the flat. Dishes from the previous night waited for her alongside a muggy smell of food scraps stuck to culinary surfaces. Light poured in from the living room window and stopped at her feet on the threshold into the kitchen. A nagging at the back of her throat informed Glory that there was something better she could be doing than cleaning up after her family. Although she could not assuredly define what it was, the better thing, the shape of it was distinct enough to generate a reluctance to stand over a sink, to poise over a mop, to reach for corners with a broom. Glory wanted to turn around, enter the hallway behind her, past the second door on the left, and sink into her mattress. She wanted to do the thing her mother called laziness, but which she knew as freeing. To spend the humid afternoon under a slow-moving ceiling fan plotting a future where, in the magnanimity of her daydreams, when she would eventually do something with her days, something that was neither dreary housework nor pitiful studying, it would be something valuable, something real. She would be doing exactly what she was meant to do, a thing that would fit her like skin, never to be taken off, hers alone to wear.

This afternoon, like many afternoons, the unforgiving distance between desire and reality brought upon Glory a choice. She had to choose to prove her mother wrong once more. If the woman returned from her salon and found the dishes untouched, the parlor unswept, and no bed turned over in her matrimonial home, she would entertain digging into Glory along old lines. All too familiar insults would be thorough. They would begin with how Glory was testing her. Testing her patience. Then, her language would pierce inwards to Glory’s actions as evidence of a likely innate ineptitude, additional proof of why Glory was unable to pass exams and finish secondary school with a semblance of success. She would land on how she feared Glory’s life would inevitably unfold if nothing changed. At that bend, it often became about Mercy, Glory’s sister. Mercy, who her mother believed, received shine from the heavens because she behaved properly. Mercy, who compared to Glory, if Glory never did try to behave, to organize her affairs in a manner of seriousness, Glory could expect celestial disapproval. Her mother’s frustration, so apparent it drove her to tears as she verbally lacerated her blood child, was not that Glory was irredeemably doomed. Her mother continuously gave sadaka in her name, passing money she pressed softly on Glory’s forehead in prayer to beggars, to truly believe that Glory’s life was over with each outcome of her indolence. Rather, when hurting Glory also hurt her, what her mother wanted to say was I am afraid for you, my baby. I am so scared that life will eat you up and spit you out if you do not try harder.

Her mother’s cuts would reach a crescendo, a mawkish mix of instilling fear and inducing shame, with the invocation of a tumultuous life long before Mercy and Glory. She had lost her parents, Glory’s grandparents, so young. She was left, alone and female, to care for herself and her siblings on the streets of Bamenda, in a time Glory could never imagine from the comforts of their current life. Until Glory’s father found and rescued her from misery. Glory’s missteps on days she does not choose to prove her mother wrong, to apply herself and complete her responsibilities, would also be a matter of her mother’s legacy. An unkempt house with a daughter of Glory’s age at home is a mother’s failure. Shame on her that all she could do for the man who gave her the status of wife and salon owner was to provide him with only one praiseworthy child in Mercy. Her mother needed Glory to try harder, to want more, be more, get more, do more because it would mean she had done her duty to Glory’s father.

The warmth of the tap water made her palms soften and the fist around her heart unclench. Long aware of the distressed blues of their mother-daughter relationship, one the firm shepherd and the other the unruly sheep, Glory chose to act on the dishes the day Mama Twins got a new fridge for the same reason she often did anything for her family: sorrowed by the realization that her life was not just hers. It was also a life that had to accommodate an unfolding agreement between those who brought her into the world.

She began washing the ceramic plates, preferring the ease of soaping and rinsing them. Then the plastic plates, first hers, then Junior’s, then Charles’. She was old enough, seventeen years and three months, to graduate to using her mother’s mismatched China, but she stuck with the heat-deformed smaller plastic plates. She held onto them like she was holding on to being young, agile, and with a willingness to risk a burnt tongue from eating hot food too fast. It mattered less that the amount of food she needed was growing and that the plastic plates were more suitable for Junior and Charles, who, at nine and ten, required only a single serving of semo and vegetable soup to reach satisfaction. Glory did not mind shrinking her bodily needs to accommodate her ornamental desires. She did not mind using something too small for her age, a discovery she ought to share with her mother, her father, and even Mama Twins to release the bitterness flavoring her saliva. But she could not understand herself, much less express why she found accomplishment and even treasure in collapsing her childhood memories into symbols through those inferior plates. The plain white flatness of the adult plates, despite their prized position in the short list of her family’s possessions, promised no sense of adoration for Glory during the mundane act of eating. She just knew she would not be pleased, duly satisfied with the meal, if she switched to using them like she knew she would not enjoy being Mercy.

Less than thirty minutes in, foamy water reached the overflow level marker of the sink, spilled into the cabinet below, and onto the floor where she stood. Glory submerged one hand in the cluttered sink, navigating past aluminum pots, through the clanging of spoons and forks, and around a sharp knife to reach the sink drain. She lifted clumps of food waste into her palm and paused in that position, waiting for the water to empty itself. The sink was too small for the kitchen, the kitchen was too small for the flat, and the flat was too small for the family. Perhaps this nascent sense of suffocation drove their collective ambition, and Glory was supposed to let her awareness of it sweep her into the future. She could succumb to becoming Mercy, who scored high enough on JAMB to place her into the faculty of medicine at ABU. She could attempt to conjure the intelligence and composure of her sister, shepherd herself into studying tenaciously, paying attention to the topics of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and care about becoming someone worthy of her parent’s approval. She could, she could, until she would not because the promise of something else, a poet’s promise of sweeter, dusted her most intimate silences.

Every day, she wished she could name it, declare it to her mother mid-insult, say this is who I am going to become, and let the strength of declaration free her from who they demanded her to be. But until she found conviction in her cup filled to the brim with aspiration, aspiration to be somewhere else doing what she is yet to know but believes exists, Glory had to keep deciding which days to risk a fight and which days to concede; when to permit herself to relax into cushions, and when to be directed by maternal shame and fear. She had to decide every day if to try to be more like Mercy or more like herself, a person wrapping arms around an inkling, driving towards another kind of living, a wilderness, an anxiety that there was no glory in chasing school, that happiness had to look different. Even better, that happiness was doing something far beyond what getting a new fridge could accomplish.

II.

It took a day too long for Mercy to realize she was dead. Time floated by, cinnamon dust in liquid, aromatic, flowery, intense, and lingering. Mercy went about her usual activities: up at 4 a.m. before anyone else in her oversubscribed hostel room, rushing until she found an open lecture hall to watch the sun rise over the vertiginous landscape while hovering over Introduction to Physiology questions, two classes right before and after the Zuhr prayers at 1 p.m., the long walk back to female hostel block B, in bed and lights out before other students returned and dared to urge her to join the evening’s shenanigans, seeking sleep amidst gossiping girls. Ignore, ignore, silence, silence, the routine of a misanthrope.

When she did realize she was dead, it was because an entire day had passed and the usual hunger pang, one of few that arrived to indicate to her she was still a body, an organism with immanent needs beneath a bony frame, failed to do so. Her body was finally quiet. It was just her, the fractional self, moving along in time, yet separate from it. She had never imagined death to be so freeing. She had rarely imagined death at all, a banality in the calluses of a Kaduna childhood.

Birth, she had dreamt. The passage of natality, a rapid abstraction of initiation. In an instant, less time than the snap of fingers, she remembered she was somewhere else, distant from the idea of a human. Next, she was the child of Mr. and Mrs. Itopa Yesufu. Mother’s origins were unclear, perhaps intentionally opaque, although something was intermittently mentioned about the Cameroons. And father? Well, Father talked, did he not. He spoke of his father, Yusuf, a soldier bold enough to serve with pre- and post-independence Gowon. So bold he was that he left his son, Itopa, in Kaduna with his second wife, unmarried but consummated, and returned to his LGA in Kogi when the spoils of militarization waned. In a deliberate and perhaps rebellious fusion of an almost Muslim, almost Hausa identity, Mercy’s father, Itopa Yusuf, would be renamed Itopa Yesufu in Kad Poly. He was that student who had the effrontery to match the brazen pace and wit of the lecturers in the chemistry department. A destined pharmacist, Itopa Yesufu found glory in hospital after hospital, almost ending up at GlaxoSmithKline in early 1983. Then, he injured his foot in a freak accident involving a steel rod and an open construction site. A man who could not walk straight was useless in a lab, he lamented to his children years later, and so, he single-mindedly prepared for a reinvention. A painstaking reordering of the self that would see him choose Mercy’s mother out of the harem of supple ladies he boasted sought after him when he opened his pharmacy. When Mercy was born in 1989, the father she met doled out medication for the array of illnesses plaguing Malali residents. He was bestowed with the honorary title of doctor for being the only Mr-Cure-It-All within miles of the ungwa.

To be the first child of a man who felt his star could have been brighter if only, if only, circumstances had better aligned, came with conditions. Mercy’s primary inheritance was a mantle of greatness. She would end what had begun before her, join the ceaseless search, balance wants with opportunities to attain heights of sheer success. It was easy for her to do this, or at least she had thought it easy when, as she started excelling in primary three, and her father, seeing the shine of what the child could be, squeezed customers at higher prices for malaria medication to funnel into her private schooling. Mercy perceived then, across many mornings of standing in front of a mirror in perfectly pressed pinafores, that all she had to do was bow down and let herself be pushed. To be pushed was to be freed from the wrangling of indecision, of precision in the crafting of identity. Mercy was comfortable with wholly being her father’s daughter because it struck her, with each additional achievement, the years accruing into a clear vision of hard work equaling riches, that there was nothing wrong with living a life laid out for you when life itself was a jumble of coincidences, a series of perhaps, maybes, and could have beens. She was a born cynic dressed in the garb of next generation.

Her cynicism and its mutation into a particular propensity for loneliness multiplied in death. She did not head toward home as any young ghost might be expected to do. The nearest she got to the familiar was Ghana Road, where she settled in the groove of a parapet on the house of a man who fancied himself a far relative of Sokoto royalty. It was a comfortable spot, high enough to feel the touch of wind pass through her otherworldly body but sufficiently close to wistfully observe the stretch of road below. A tournament of desires, Mercy watched like she had never watched. The man leaning into the seamstress who tapped away at her machine. The carpenter too short to paint the top of his rectangular contraption. Was it a bed frame in vertical or the skeleton of a cupboard to line one of the many shops on the road? There was poor Adamu, who received a slap on the back of his head at intervals as regular as the call to prayer. His boss was the owner of the convenience store spilling onto the street. Crates of soft drinks and bags of pure water kept the store’s doors ajar and Adamu in perpetual trouble for not correctly stacking them. The vulcanizer fought with the man who sold engine oil lined symmetrically in sliced halves of plastic bottles. One would think that their enterprises did not similarly depend on the failures of a vehicle. The motorcycle mechanics who never seemed to completely fix anything, each client returning with glee, joy at an excuse to pause for the day, escape from the marauding sun. The young boy who stood alone and sold petrol from a jerrycan. His repeat customer who always only bought just enough to fill a glass bottle of Fanta. The woman who unsmilingly dished out kosai at the beginning and end of each day. The other woman who smiled and dished out kosai and fried yam and undoubtedly had the superior pepper. The people that gathered around them unfailingly. The people that dispersed, closed shops, and stored away their possessions as soon as the sky turned from blue to hyacinth black. A world with its earned revolution of people and things, a rhythm unto itself.

While alive, Mercy had thought her loneliness extraordinary. She had been convinced, through the suppression of many things she wanted to say but could not find anyone to tell them to, that she was, somehow, living a remarkable life. A life that could never be documented, detailed, or shared with as much thoroughness as it was lived. In her perch, her lonesome phantasmal perch, this thinking rearranged itself. Loneliness was a tidy excuse. There were no gods to intervene in the business of living. There were no merchants of desire to trade and fulfill wishes of exceptionalism. How else could she explain the unfolding of Ghana Road, its placid occurrence, the people who refused to be anything but themselves with a frightening regularity. It made her ache. It made her want to smile. It made her realize the duplicitousness of her cynicism. Her life had never been solely about her father and his unrelenting fantasies to exist beyond his failures. If it had been so easy for her to bear the mantle of greatness, why had she often felt angry? Somewhere, in the narrative of her life, as set in stone, as predetermined by all the things her family could not afford, all their palpable aspirations for better, for a reality that cohered around comfort, Mercy had forgotten how to be happy.

Or maybe she had never known. No, that was untrue. There had been a time, however shortened, when she had liked being alive. She had not been unaware of the things to come, so present were the signs of the future. Her father’s late nights at the pharmacy and his extended trips to source medicines in bulk. Her mother’s agitation for her to learn how to sweep and clean properly, agitations for order, for structure in the coming unknown. Mercy’s life was a blueprint of how to work hard to arrive at lasting happiness. Before the lessons solidified and she could not distinguish them from her nature, there had been days of pure joy. Days she spent with Glory and the many children who enlivened their low-cost building. The continuous games of hide and seek, pretend families, sùwe with rectangles drawn on roughened cement. Fleeting, but their bodies had been theirs to play with, to play through.

Her mottling had indeed begun earlier than she would care to admit. She could not remember the last time she had truly spoken to her sister Glory. Their relationship turned sour and perfunctory just as Mercy entered Senior Secondary. She had begun to view Glory as her parents did: someone unwilling to rise to the demands of life, to take complete responsibility for their existence. Where she had long tolerated her sister’s indolence, she had come to find it fatiguing. Less of Glory was more of Mercy. And Mercy was eager to exit their domestic arrangement. She had entered ABU with a forceful sense of relief that it was the beginning of the end of her exertions. She imagined finishing her degree and the arrival of a renewed dawn. One child had made it. One child had done what several generations merely whispered. Mercy had felt that Glory was purposefully ignorant of the stakes of their common happiness. Even if she empathized with her sister’s inclination to be different, to strike another path, it did not seem that Glory really believed in her chosen direction of alterity. When she was alive, Mercy could not imagine another way for them to be themselves. A way that they would survive the roughest edges of their portion without complete sacrifice, without capitulations to excellence. Mercy went in search of Glory because, more so in death, she could not understand how her sister lived.

III.

Between the end of the rainy season and the beginning of harmattan in 2009, when snails came out in droves and crawled against every surface, the small ones so tiny they blended into the mossy green of tiled compounds, and the sky was no more a stormy grey but a light film of dust particles, fog-like but not precisely, for dust never drops into moisture; when the seasons married each other before separating again, Glory and Mercy met. The soft collision between life and death happened as Glory walked toward Junction, that luminous intersection between the main road leading away from Malali and its smaller offshoots, one toward Ghana Road and the other, deeper into the enclave. It was the end of a school day wrapped in a haze of tiredness. Glory walked hunched, looking down, unaware of the cars passing. Tall desert palm trees flagging the road promised her nothing but their eventual disappearance. Since the morning she had been told of Mercy’s death, an announcement that coincided with the riotous laugh of Bomboy, who lived one floor down and was intermittently struck with a case of the giggles, Glory felt immovable, unable to place herself in the grand history of all living things. She could not explain to classmates and friends, teachers and strangers, relatives and visitors to their home, the string of known and unknown mourners who lamented the loss of the promising young girl, a medical student, that there was no direction to her feelings about her sister’s departure from the realm of God’s children.

Trying to place herself on a path in which she would accept events as they happened was like trying to find an assured road to heaven. No one who had arrived at the pearly gates had returned to give excellent directions. No one who was not Glory could tell Glory how to feel about living in a world with no Mercy. The mourners’ condolences were approximations. Sometimes funny in their declarative intent, such as the man who said she should not leave her parents’ side lest they feel they have lost not one but two children, and sometimes crude in their desire to cease the pain, like the woman who said that everything happens for a reason and Mercy must belong to the angelic to die in her sleep. The closest to how she was feeling, the best map of her grief, was of madness. Stupefied undulations between moments of acute clarity that, indeed, Mercy was dead—and she was in pain for the halting of her sister’s life—and absolute disbelief that Mercy was dead because they had unfinished business, their relationship an open and incomplete book of sisterhood. The door had been shut mid-conversation, and no matter how Glory shoved, probed around for lingering assurances of a sister that once existed, a person she once knew, there was no definite proof, not in Mercy’s mattress that lay propped against the wall in their shared room, nor in the few boxes that were returned from the hostel and held her ascetic collection of clothes, books, and shoes a few sizes smaller than Glory’s. Mercy had transitioned from matter to memory, from a vacuous and puzzling presence to a harrowing and abiding absence.

Her parents had surprised her with their willingness to jump and protect the memory of Mercy. She watched them become zealous practitioners of religions she had otherwise barely known. Her mother began attending the ECWA branch that congregated at the Government Primary School behind their building. Sometimes, when ardent praying woke Glory up at dawn, and she intuited that her mother was not at home, and she heard someone shout, Pastor! Pastor! I have a testimony; she imagined her mother’s body responding to the convulsions of belief coursing through the community. What conversations was she having with God about Mercy? Her mother did not entreat Glory to join her, and Glory suspected it was because hers was a private battle. Over the weeks after they had laid Mercy to rest in a quick Muslim ritual, she heard her parents mumbling at night from across the hallway. The event had bound them in a novel understanding of the world’s underbelly. They did not believe Mercy’s disappearance from their lives had occurred naturally. Vigilant to the way hope can be snatched, the apple of an eye eaten by worms of evil, they had become warriors. Where her mother found God in a church, her father began extended consultations with a series of bearded Mallams whose heavy perfumes left a trail of scents long after their departure. They would come in the early evenings, just before Maghrib but right after Asr, and he would lead them into Junior and Charles’ small room, where she suspected a prayer mat was laid and potential enemies identified. She witnessed her father begin drinking from a bottle filled with a dark, inky fluid, a ritual she was also not invited to partake in. If Glory was doubtful about the usefulness of her parents’ response to losing Mercy, how she wished they had assembled to cry rather than diverged to pray, she did not say anything. She could not say anything. She thought it tender to maintain her role in their blooming desire to protect themselves and what was left of their family. Glory felt merciful in keeping her quiet and playing the part of the child who was still here.

She thought it was an uncomplicated role. A matter of remaking dreams, where she would decide to be as much of Mercy as she could while bringing joy to her parents through the simple virtue of being alive. It conjured a previously lacking energy towards her schooling, where she spent the last few weeks before the end of the second term and the beginning of the third and final term before the WAEC exams, trying to hold on to what her teachers had shared. In the past, she had been averse to listening in classes because she thought the teachers not only drab in their droning on about things she would never need beyond the walls of their classrooms but also cruel in their criteria of what it means to be a good student. The teachers were sweet on those who nodded to them like dogs and held the words from their mouths like drops of gold. Glory, who could barely please her parents at home, certainly would not please strangers at school. Except for one rare moment in her academic life, when a youth corps English teacher took an active interest in her thoughts on the passages they read, Glory held no hopes of liking school. Mercy’s death willed her to try again. She sat in the front of the classroom and tried to listen, to acquire what she lacked by summoning the persevering legacy of Mercy.

To believe, to choose to believe in a story, in an idea, the shape of anything, is to descend into doubt. The time of Glory’s dedication, as a potential extension of Mercy, of her role as the child who was alive and will therefore seek to be as good as the child who died, was filled with uncertainty like she had never known. She had isolated herself from herself. Taking in unspoken expectations left her looking at a stranger in the mirror. The stranger who hunched and waded toward home, feeling both trepidation about what she would find and relief that school was moving farther away. The stranger upon whom Mercy’s ghost will visit and join to walk in step.

Mercy looked at Glory with the eyes of a mother hungry for information. Her sister was the same size in flesh, soft as always around the waist, but shrunken in spirit. The maneuver of a ghost conversing with a living being was only as complicated as minds made it to be. Mercy’s spirit was open, for death leaves little room for lies, but Glory’s was wound as tightly as a honey badger caught just before it burrowed into its hole. Mercy had to find a way to get her sister to release, to let go of her worries long enough to overwhelm her, to flood her consciousness with provocations that would reveal a shared reality.

Mercy searched the stretch of road as they approached Junction. She needed an oddity, a strangeness to unmask the stranger, to prevail over the moment and break Glory out of her self-involved ruminations. A security man sat outside an open gate, eating a plate of rice and stew. Cars parked haphazardly on the road indicated an ongoing event at the house, possibly a naming ceremony or the first greeting between the families of a future bride and groom. The man, tasked with ensuring the security of the occasion, seemed unbothered by the budding chaos at his front step. Instead, the plate of food drew his attention to such great heights. Mercy found the movements of his mouth hilarious, an exaggerated chewing motion where his jaw rotated in large circular motions, each spoonful larger than the last. Glory should have noticed. Instead, she wound through the cars blocking the pedestrian path and continued. Mercy needed something that would take Glory out of herself long enough for a door to open in her spirit through which Mercy would enter, an encounter.

Her lucky break came with a man and his cow. The herder, dressed in a matching blue Kaftan and cap, stood by the side of the road while the rest of his herd, beasts in colors from brown to pure white, grazed behind him on a plot of land where a building once stood but had now become mere foundation. All except one of his herd attended to their evening meal. The exception was a young calf that stood next to the herder, at almost a foot taller, as he washed his mouth with a chewing stick, making attentive motions of up and down, in and out. The man and his cow did not touch. Nor did it seem like they cared for the presence of one another. But there was something within the image of a man and a cow upright next to each other, as one would imagine an animal so wanting for a parent would stand next to another of a different species. There was something in it, a framing of companionship, that would beleaguer even the most distracted of minds. Glory stared, puzzled at what she was seeing. She looked at something stranger than her thoughts and feelings. She looked long enough for Mercy to brandish her ghostliness, merging with the air around them, and to send one message to her sister divided by the thin veil that is between all that is living and all that dies, between seasons of rain and their cousins of drought, between those we know and never understand, and those we do not know but seem to completely understand.

Glory was overwhelmed. She burst into tears just as she passed the man and his cows. Mercy’s ghost had done what it needed to do, entrapping her sister’s malaise long enough to greet her through memory, to peruse the entirety of her being with a newfound curiosity. They both remembered who they were and why it mattered, no matter how brief, that they had been related as sisters. Even if they were born into a world that spun faster than they could make sense of it, with a mother who scares and a father who pressures, all in the name of love, even if they eventually could not ignore how different they were, Mercy more willing to concede to the brutishness of survival and Glory only able to say yes to her immediate pleasures, even if theirs had been a relationship marked by the tragedy of wanting but not having, of desperately seeking life beyond the circumstances they had been born into, beyond the days in that house in Malali, they had found delight, perhaps surprise, living with each other.

IV.

The oil was too much, and Edna liked it. Each time she dipped the large metallic cooking spoon into the pot of stew and stirred it left and right, the spoon came out dripping, not with the mash of tomatoes and peppers that made her stew paste, but a sheen of oil so viscous she had to tap the spoon on the edge of the pot several times to release the excess. From the small square window of the anteroom that was her kitchen, Edna saw the crying girl approach the gate. She knew the girl had been crying because only tears made a person walk like that, languid steps with hands gripped across the torso. The repressed sobs she heard and the attempts the girl made to wipe her face before she pushed the half-ajar gate confirmed her suspicions.

What pleased Edna about living in the flat closest to the gate was also what she detested. It made her the person privy to everyone’s business and, in turn, made everyone privy to hers. Which husbands had not returned for days after loud and violent arguments with their wives. Which girls were sneaking in boyfriends in the heat of afternoons. Which children were corrupting others by asking them to go out when they were required to study. When and what Edna was cooking. Edna knew the goings-on of the whole building because of the kitchen window, a hatch too small to let air circulate from one end of the single living room to another, but facing the reddish-brown contraption they called a gate. It did not always lock, the gate, and once or twice, when it was the turn of a family with young boys to close it at 10 p.m., it proved further damageable due to the strength of youthfulness.

She was cooking in preparation for her women’s group, whose members would trickle in at any time. Clara, with the tooth gap, will arrive first. She would come early because she wanted to get the seat by the door and watch everyone trail in. Then Clara, without the tooth gap, would arrive next because she hated the other Clara, who always arrived earlier than anyone else. Then Comfort and Sa’adiya will come together. They lived near each other in Tudun Wada, relied on each other for the long hike to Malali, and had a perpetual exchange of woefulness. Edna never understood how a friendship could be built on complaining. But there were many things Edna never understood, so she kept her tongue. Iya Lawrence might even make it if she convinces any of her children to drop her off. Her leg was getting too bad to attempt public transportation. She hoped Oziohu would come. She missed her friend, but she knew grief did strange things to the body, and the woman was still resistant to socializing in the wake of her Musa’s demise.

Today, she hoped they would review their savings and discuss whether the money they contributed weekly was enough or if they could be more ambitious. Edna favored economic pugnacity. She would rather fight with her customers than remain silent in an effort to please. It made her unattractive to the mild-mannered who would let peace endure instead of aggressively chasing every kobo. But she only knew this way, Edna’s way. The way she raised her children, who were not twins, although the myth of their likeness had superseded her attempts at correction, leaving her with the moniker of Mama Twins. It was the way she had survived each year, each brutal hour of shameless man after shameless man, some she had really loved and some she regretted ever loving. It was the way she made it to fifty-two years and could proudly count, on only one hand, how many times she missed a rent payment or failed to make school fees for Ola and his sister. There had been years, especially in the early to mid-nineties, when it felt nearly impossible to continue. Fantasies of jumping in front of moving trucks had become so strong that they were almost a reality. Then, she met Oziohu. A friend who taught her that life did not have to be done alone. Despite how much her extended family in Abuja had found her lacking in her move to Kaduna and her unwillingness to maintain holy matrimony, and they had condemned her to death, she was as alive as ever.

The stew bubbled with readiness, and hot drops of oil splashed and landed on her forearm. Something about the girl irked her. She knew of the sister’s death, a tragedy that had left their compound reeling with visitors for days. Dr. Yesufu was well-liked. He treated his wife with the care she rarely saw men display, and his customers with patience, even when they could not pay. When he arrived one day with two boys in tow, everyone gossiped that they were children he had with women out of wedlock. Few dared to jest with Mrs. Yesufu, lest the doctor find out and refuse them service the next time they came asking for something on loan. Everybody gets sick, and no one wants to be stuck with an illness late at night because they made the pharmacist angry with the movements of their mouth. The loss of a child who would have no doubt surpassed him had left the man and his wife in shock, and although Edna had visited them with some fruits in condolence and had seen the family was well taken care of, she had wondered if that was all there was to it. Death left too many unanswered questions.

Edna exited the kitchen and moved toward her living room door. She swung it open and gestured to the girl just as she entered through the gate. It was a tsk tsk sound, unmistakable for its meaning. The child was surprised and turned hesitantly. Just come inside, the woman seemed to say, her hand gesturing toward the living room. Glory approached with measured steps, cleaning her face again in front of Mama Twins. She thought the woman needed to send her on an errand. It was not unusual for older women to rely on younger girls from other families for various household chores. The girls were supposed to do it without question, with smiles to further prove feminine virtuosity.

It was strange to think Mama Twins needed her for anything. In the decade-odd years since the woman moved into their compound, Glory rarely saw her rely on anyone else. In Glory’s eyes, Mama Twins was one of those people they called onobo, a woman stubborn in behavior, insistent on her ways. It would have surprised her to know that Mama Twins was just a few years younger than her father.

Edna invited the girl to sit in the stuffy living room. She noticed how Glory did so swiftly. Her crying must have drained her. Glory looked around at the little that occupied the room, but she was most drawn toward the makeshift kitchen where the aroma of boiled rice and fresh stew prevailed. Edna noticed the girl’s gaze but ignored its yearning. Instead, she reached for her new fridge in the far left corner of the room. A variety of soft drinks had been carefully arranged in stacks within the cool hollow of the machine. Edna did not say anything but gestured again. What do you want? The girl looked at her, really looked at her. Edna noticed the question behind her gaze. Is this free? Do I have to pay? Although the fridge was precious to Edna as another source of income, a flourishing but small business of cold drinks on warm days to children who had a little change to spare or anyone who wanted something to emphasize the deliciousness of their meal, she shared its contents this time for the mere act of kindness. Pick something, she said to the girl, pick something you like.

“Sprite,” Glory said, “I like Sprite.”

Edna placed a 35cl bottle on a tray she picked from the top of the fridge and put it on a stool in front of Glory. She removed its cap with a bottle opener, pushed it forward, and then she reclined on the lengthy sofa away from the door. Glory picked up the bottle and took a drink. It was colder than she had imagined. The saccharine hit of the drink awakened feelings she had tried to erase at the gate. Mercy was dead, and life was spilling out. If she could accept anything in that instant, it was that she would never be the Glory she thought she might be before Mercy died, the Glory who had days of deciding to be more like herself. She could also not be the Glory she felt she ought to be after Mercy died, the Glory who had to be more like Mercy. Her sister, now in the realm of the beyond, could not answer questions about who to be, nor was she ever the foreteller of that decision. But she would have to take on the dreams that her parents had put on Mercy, and she would have to do it because Mercy had been doing it and had known that things do not always go the way one desires, that life pushes against you as much as you push against it. Glory would have to grow up and become someone who could hold multiple things within themselves, a person who could live up to her parents’ expectations while attending to her aspirations as she uncovered them. Glory cried because she did not know how to do this, how to be many things at once. How to be many things and still be herself, to bear the brunt of expectations without collapsing, disappearing into just a child, a daughter.

Against the taste of the sparkling cold drink Mama Twins had given to her, she wanted to cry again, but swallowed her feelings. She felt the older woman watching her. It was not a pitying gaze. It was something firmer —a steadying gaze, a commitment to give Glory a chance to find her footing within the unraveling character of her sadness. Glory gulped the drink, each chug bigger and faster than the last until it was finished. Her speed made a few drops of the liquid fall to the ground. Tiny black ants gingerly marched to the small pool. Every creature was looking for sweetness.