Sister, Sister
You do not carry the dead through the front door of a house. Or else, more bodies will follow. So the bricklayers are here, sitting on the raised flower beds my mother painstakingly tends every morning. A hibiscus stem, crushed by one of them, hangs wilted. Nobody pays attention to the buzzing of the dragonflies. My sister likes to catch them. She would press their tiny heads between her thumb and forefinger, then hold a magnifying glass over their still bodies, a pencil or brush in her other hand, sketching something that looked nothing like what was in front of her. I watch these men from behind the sliding windows in the sitting room. They contort their faces to perform grief, even though this is just another day, and this is just another job. Their hammers will create a hole in the front wall, so my sister can pass through.
I walk around the house to the beat of hammers breaking brick, avoiding where I know my sister’s body to be, where she decided it would be. The neighbor is the last person who is not a stranger who will see her as she leaves forever. He will symbolically place a note in each man’s hand after they take her away so that Death knows this is just a job and not an invitation to follow. The elderly in a family are forbidden from seeing the body of one whose time is cut short, as Death might realize He made a mistake. I’m older than my sister by three minutes. I want to remind anyone who cares to listen of the stories that we have been told, that she is Omokehinde—the second to arrive—but when we were in the womb, I sent her into the world to know if it was time for us to be born. I am older, but only because she led the way.
Our mother is in our room, lying on the lower bunk bed, my sister’s bed, peeling tangerines and holding their fruity segments under her nose. Seeds scatter on the pillow. Her cries are guttural as if she is trapped in her throat. She has surrounded herself with my sister’s things as a shield. The pink training bra she refused to wear, the crocheted blanket my mother made for our thirteenth birthday, the blue towel dotted with sailboats my sister used only to dry her locs, her sketchbooks filled with bold strokes that looked like nothing. Last night she came to me in the bathroom, her forefinger dripping with honey, telling me this was the last of it, telling me to taste. What if she didn’t wash it all off? Is a line of brown under her fingernail? Why didn’t I take it?
When we were little, my father brought home an iridescent globe. It was set on a plate of brass. When the afternoon light touched it, it filled our living room with every color. It was the most beautiful thing my eight-year-old self had ever seen. But my sister ignored it. So when she broke it in yet another painting experiment, I was angry too. Our father found the pieces and unbuckled his belt. I told him I was the one who broke it. That night, my sister massaged my inflamed calves, tearfully asking why I covered for her. I said nothing as she arranged broken glass on our window.
My father was the one who found my sister. My mother and I were at the stall where our family sold plantains, dried herbs, beans, rice, dried cassava, and yam flour. When our neighbor parked his van out front, we knew. It was her. It was always her. Our neighbor told us my father sent him. That Omokehinde had gone home. He stood by the display table, wringing his cap in his hands and chewing his lower lip. The metal tin my mother had been using to measure flour for a shopper clattered to the ground, and white dust rose in the air and settled on my hair, my mother’s wrapper, and the shopper’s bag. My mother sank to her knees, and her forehead scraped the ground. The muezzin started the early evening ṣalāt, and his voice calling the faithful to prayer was a sickening melody that filled the silence in the van as our neighbor drove us home. I sat in the middle seat, thinking of the light on that globe and how the colors danced on my sister’s opalescent face as she slept.
We entered the house through the kitchen storeroom. My mother banged on the bathroom door where she knew my father would be. He did not answer. I stayed back in the store, counting and rearranging the bottles of palm oil. Then, I opened each bottle and poured the thick, glossy red liquid on the tiled floor, in the deep sink, and on the granite countertop, imagining that this was what her blood looked like when my father stepped in it. I watch my stained fingers write her name in red.
When the hammering stopped, an impregnable dread settled in my lower belly. I decide on what to do. I hear our neighbor’s voice gently instruct the men.
Use this to wrap it. Don’t let it fall. Be quiet! Her people are inside. May this kind of thing never happen again. Who would have thought? We cannot question His will. Bismi Allahi alrrahmani alrraheemi. God is the greatest.
As my sister leaves our home, I take her place. I float over our home one last time. My father’s broken heart has melted his intestines. I know he will be in the bathroom till dawn. My mother’s breasts are hurting, and the front of her boubou is wet with milk and tears.
Suddenly, I’m carried through a hole in our front wall, bound head to toe in white cloth. I can’t breathe. Our neighbor prepares a bed of raffia in the back of his van, and I am laid to gently rest.
As the men lower the body, I see my sister at the window. She is crying, waving, with her smile on my face.
Ayotola Tehingbola (’93, Lagos, Yorùbá) is a lawyer, photographer, writer, & translator. She is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at Boise State University, Idaho. Her writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Witness, Passages North, Quarterly West, Hawai`i Pacific Review, etc., and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and the Best of the Net Anthology. Her work has been supported by various organizations such as the Lagos International Poetry Festival, Hudson Valley Writers Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, Alexa Rose Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts.