under our dining table. I have modified a simple nighttime ritual. Every night, I sit on a stool in the boys’ room. I tell my younger brothers stories before bed.
Today, Mother and Father are locked in their room yelling at each other again. So we sit in our dining room fort, talking and laughing. The dining room is right next to our parents’ bedroom, there is only a thin wall between us, we are close enough to know when the first punch lands, close enough to scream if it continues. Peter sits next to me, his elbows are on the floor, his round face is nestled in the curve of both palms. His hair smells like Blue Band margarine. Sometimes after eating, he wipes his hands on the living room curtains, other times he wipes them on his hair when he thinks no one is looking. His face is oily, shining like a lamp in a dark room.
“Can you tell us a story?” he asks me. “You do not have to make it up. It can be one of Father’s or Mother’s stories, but nothing with a tortoise or a monkey in it.”
“Should it have a song?” I ask.
“Yes,” my brothers answer at the same time.
“But only if you really want to,” Andrew adds quickly. He is the older brother, he does not want to appear too interested in childish stories.
“Way back before the rebellion, when animals and people could talk to and understand one another, a woman buys two hens on her way home from the market. They cost only half a penny each and so she buys them even though she really does not need any more hens. The woman soon gets tired of carrying her basket on her head and holding hens in both hands, so she throws one of them away, right into the forest, and thinks nothing of it. And a few months later when she is walking down the same road after a market day, she sees her hen walking along the path. Only this time, the hen has several chicks walking in a straight line behind her.”
“How did she know it was hers?” Peter asks.
“Because, back then when you bought poultry, you cut a tiny piece off the edge of your wrapper and tied it around the legs of your hen. The rope was still there,” I reply.
“People still do that today,” Andrew says.
“The woman is excited,” I say. “She chases after the hen, but the hen refuses to be caught. It scratches her a couple of times and then runs to the palace of the king.
“The hen gets to talk to the king, but decides to sing instead. She tells her story, the hen does, with singing. How the woman bought her for half a penny and threw her in the forest and how the lord of the forest fed her with corn husks and water from a well. The hen says she is now a mother of many children: her first son is called the Warrior Prevails, the second is called Finger of the Truth—”
“How many children did she have?” Andrew asks.
“What did the king decide?” Peter asks.
“The song says they were six or three,” I reply. “I don’t really know, meta and mefa sound the same, especially in a song.”
We are singing the story’s song, “Iya Elediye eyen ye kuye,” whispering the words now because Mother is crying in the bedroom. Loud crying and hiccupping. And Father is shouting at her to stop.
“The king said the woman could take the first chick with her, and the hen was free to go back to the forest with the rest of her children.”
“And that is how it ends?” says Andrew. “You should have just told us the one about the tortoise and the hyena.”
Peter laughs because Andrew said hyena, he is laughing and laughing, and then Andrew and I also start laughing. Peter’s giggle is laughter at its best, light and loud, floating around then resting on you, making you woozy and hopeful. Andrew already has a man’s laugh.
Something breaks in our parents’ room. We stop laughing to listen. Everything is quiet, Mother is no longer crying, and Father is saying nothing. Then Father comes out of the room. We watch his feet walk past the dining table, along the hallway, and down the stairs. We listen to the sounds he makes in the kitchen. A clank of metal, a swish, water splashing on a face. We watch him walk back to the room. There is a tumbler filled with cold water in his hand. When he opens the door to their room, we hear Mother whisper, “Thank you, dear.”
It is hot here in our fort. Peter is sitting close to me with his knees folded to his chin. He is sweating, his forehead covered in shiny droplets of sweat.
“Tell us about that time you saw them burn a robber in Fashoro,” Andrew says to me. “Or about that time armed robbers came to the beer parlor and shot a man’s ear off.”
“I was going to buy pepper in Fashoro when I saw a boy running with a small generator on his head. Suddenly, one woman started running after him shouting, Ole ole ole, another woman came out of her shop and joined the other woman shouting. Then I saw the tailor who made your Easter suits come out of his shop. He started running after the boy. It was now that the stupid boy decided to drop the generator and run as fast as he could. The tailor was almost losing him, so he bent down and picked a giant stone and threw it at the boy. It landed right in the middle of his back. The boy fell down flat. Plenty of people now surrounded him. Iya Togo even came and said, Is this not Gbenga, the one who stole my pot of beans while it was still on the fire?”
“Was it Brother Gbenga?” Peter asks.
“No jare, did we not still see Brother Gbenga yesterday?” Andrew replies.
I am listening for sounds from our parents’ room, but I hear nothing now.
“Then many other people came and started accusing the boy of stealing from them,” I say. “He was crying, saying he was not the one, but your tailor kept slapping him. Then somebody brought a tire and put it on the boy’s neck. He was screaming and begging. Someone else opened the tank of the generator and poured out the petrol. They poured it on his face and on the tire and then they set it on fire. He got up and started running but that just made the fire worse, then he fell on the floor and someone took a big brick and smashed it on his head.”
“Did he die for real?” Peter asks me. He is yawning, so at first I think he asks did he die for free.
“Of course he did. He died, and several vultures came to eat his eyes,” Andrew says.
“Don’t listen to him, Peter. Nothing like that happened,” I reply.
“What do you think happened to him?” Peter asks again.
“He went to heaven,” I tell him. Someone must tell him about these things. “He went to a special heaven where only dead children go. And God gave him a room full of jean jackets that never get dirty and candy that gets sweeter while in your mouth—”
“And video games?”
“Yes, Peter, and video games, and TVs as wide as the walls of this house.”
WHEN ANDREW AND Peter finally go to their room, I go to our room.
Ariyike is awake and listening to the sounds from our parents’ room. I sit next to her on her bed and tell her this same story even though she has heard it all before. I tell her everything from the beginning—how the first time I saw the boy, I smiled at him. I told him I liked his FUBU shirt. He winked at me and walked away. And the end—that I saw the thief’s mother run to where his dead body was still burning, take off her
