Way Down By Chinecherem Enujioke | A Short Story

I am at the bar, the one where everything happened. It is the chimes of the clock that answer when I ring. The dust on the bottlenecks is thick. Before I see the oil on the floor, I am already in a silent jamboree. It reminds me of everything that happened that evening.

At the end of the street, the doors of my favorite coffee shop swing along with the hooting of the owl. When the women were completing the dirge at Siolu’s burial, this was how they hummed. They had let out their tongues only when the pieces of beef were not complete. Ninety, they said, nothing short of that, not even eighty-seven. And ninety they had at the burial of my cousin who died at twenty-one after ‘a brief illness’. Brief. That was what the Imeuno agreed to. They would not let Siolu soil our reputation, not even in her death. Pathetic Siolu.

 There is no one behind the counter, so I help myself. I want to wake up, to jump out of bed, and to be grateful this is not happening. I have worked so hard to be stuck here again. It all started when I was seven. I wanted Mpa to see me, to think of all his sons, and to call my name. He nodded when I greeted him; he would not waste any words on half a man. Everyone called me a difficult child except him. He would not say a word.

Siolu was the best of us—white teeth, long legs, and permed hair that glistened with oil. Her eyes? Immaculate. That type that if you blinked this way or that way, you could get a pass at the wrong thing. All the men wanted her, and she refused them. All of them, and kindly while she did. Which was why no one understood what happened. Except for the owl, the masquerade at the mahogany and I.

Mpa stopped speaking to me the first time I started hearing the masquerade. No one heard the owl unless they would not confess to a heinous crime. The Imeuno burned my left ear, kneaded pepper into the cleft of my buttocks, and flogged me. One after the other, they took turns. It was the law. The Owl was an abomination, and to commune with it was to have partaken at its table. I was an abomination, so they held me under lock at Siolu’s burial. They refused to let me throw sand into her grave.

When the women started humming, the masquerade was dancing. It beckoned me to join. The drums got louder, and the humming sounded like the trees moved with it. I followed her. It was a woman. When she hit my chest, moved her hands in the wind, and hooted, I remember falling.

That was when she appeared with Siolu dancing above the oil on the floor. To remember, I must go way down. Behind the Owl tree, I will find half-men like me hanged. Everyone who could not confess that the Owl was a dance that men were not allowed to do. I belonged to a new world.