By Chinecherem Veronica Enujioke

Emena was foolish. He believed everything the pastors said even when he had to torture his daughter, Mmachi. The way it began was first as an ache. He worried too much that Mmachi was too beautiful and that she would be prey for older men. Then, it became a boil when he preyed on his daughter one night. The next day, he put his hand in hot sand and cried for forgiveness. This boil grew with pus and he confessed to their pastor. One day at the market, Nkwa was in a fracas with another woman when she felt the life drain from her fingernails. She woke up at the hospital, devastated and wailing. In a round of insult-hurling, the woman had called her mother of the temptress, spouting how Emena preferred her daughter's bed to hers. She mused over it while the boil worsened.

Nkwa was life in every petal. Her laughter sauntered over the house, loud as the speakers at Victory International Ministry where they worshipped until the pastor called Mmachi for deliverance. She would sing and dance to Kenny Rogers on Saturdays while frying akara for her daughter. Nkwa was a tailor but she did not have many customers, so she spent free days with Mmachi, her button of happiness. No one wanted to make clothes at the shop of the woman whose husband left her. It was bad luck to take such clothes to your bed. Your husband would leave for another woman’s bed. 

Nkwa did not care what the women at the market said about her. She had no talk for the people that gossiped about a child. Mmachi was ten when her father tied her to a guava tree and left her under the hot sun. Another pastor had prophesied that his daughter’s beauty was from the marine kingdom and would be her doom. The remedy was to leave her under the hot sun so the things that laid claim on her would flee. So, he left his daughter to roast and flogged her because it would fasten the process. Afterwards, he put his hands in the hot sand and cried. This time, it was just tears.

When Nkwa came upon the nightmare, she rushed to her daughter and untied her. She did not cry when she bathed her daughter nor did she cry when Mmachi wailed as the water met her flesh. She cried only when her husband was running about, screaming ‘O gbue m, O gbue m’. She had waited till midnight to meet his evil with hers. When the bucket where she poured the hot water was empty of her anguish, she went back to her sleeping daughter. In the morning, he was not in his room, and the same was true for the next three months. The boil was gone.

When Mmachi was eighteen, her mother died. There was much to learn but she had known love and warmth. She had also known different gazes, stares, curses and cold. She buried her mother alone near the river. While the water soothed her feet, she knew it would be a long life. All she had to do was listen to her mother in the wind. All she had to do to live was to let the ache not be hers.