The dawn is just uncurling from itself, leaning towards a hot dry season day. Egoabia watches as grains of sand jet out of her son’s eyes and ears: jagged, cavern clay. Ude’s body deflates, slowly, slowly as if his skin were a covering merely cradling all the things he embodies. A small wind blooms in their direction, startling the garden egg leaves and pepper plants lounging in a corner where a mossy wall straddles the house. The heap of sand, wooed by the wind too, begins to crawl, shifting in segments like an earthworm. It is Ude’s soul moving. Egoabia can hear his feathery laughter as the heap bloats in parts, pulsing forward and backward to a rhythm. The heap gathers into a tangible form and stretches tall into the air. The form shortens and thickens, shooting out two arms and two legs. Other body parts form next: neck with the folds intact, shoulders which people sometimes clap in admiration. The holes in his silvery eyes seal closed as the ochre hue drains out of his skin, unearthing a coffee brown. The world stills for Egoabia each time she witnesses this Rebirth. Her son returns, panting, sweat cresting his face. A new life for another moon.
Egoabia whips him a feast of soft new yams and fresh palm oil. His eyes well up at every swallow. Tubers are his favourite. Things born of sand. The itch to build new skin comes once every month. Egoabia imagines that he is realigning his body, refastening it into new patterns. She identifies the pangs now, how they draw him like strings, pulling and pulling until Ude starts convulsing. It began two years ago, in Ude’s third year. Egoabia had been working on the Singer sewing machine, running stitches over a hole in a dress. The presser foot against the throat plate of the machine produced sounds that resembled the glugging of water, or the dissolving of her child’s body into fine sand. A needle had nipped her index finger as she shimmied away from the machine and ran to the backyard where Ude had been playing. Her scream died in her throat when she saw the last of him crumble and then crystallize into a somewhat bigger body.
Ude seems content to string discarded scraps cut from clothes into playthings while Egoabia works. His human interaction is limited to Egoabia’s customers who flood the house on weekends to give Egoabia specifications on measurement and style. They always call him ‘fine boy’, rustle his full hair, and ask the name of his school and what grade he is in.
“He is not in school yet,” Egoabia says, racing to her son’s defense.
“Why?” a customer asks, in a concerned voice, eyes questioning.
“I am homeschooling him.”
She hopes that announcing her decision will fetch her some free time in the chaos of living. But the pile of fabric to sew into outfits never runs dry. A scoop neck here, a kick pleat there. Waistbands and breast cups to resew.
“Are you worried about the school fees?” one of her rich clients, a large-bodied woman with a voice too thin for her size, asks her once. “I can sponsor him,” the woman beams at her own kindness as she spread her legs for Egoabia’s tape to go round her inner thighs. Egoabia knows that she cannot let Ude into the world. Other children will shove him about until they burst him open. And what will happen next? All that sand everywhere? She knows that her boy does not need the compression of school. Regulations on walking and speaking. He only needs Egoabia to ferry him to the backyard when the jerks of renewing his body run him through. He needs the small brown pebbles adorning the sand, overlooking the weep hole blocked by debris. He needs to journey in between forms while his mother watches, and when he resurrects, they’ll return to the house together as if they merely went to check the cucumber plant for signs of wilt.
Egoabia’s sewing career was plucked from obscurity in her thirty-fifth year. Her customer list was suddenly filled with classy women and wives to high-brow politicians who didn’t kick off their shoes at her doormat. Spiced and erotic scents of these women filled the two-bedroom apartment where the living room doubled as her workspace. She found a name for the business: Fabulous Woman. She rented a workspace somewhere in town and employed another skilled seamstress, a girl in her early twenties named Charity, who had the shop to herself most days. Egoabia’s hands grew busy touching thighs to create trouser legs and brushing against armpits for perfect arm holes. She found herself in near-embraces, chest on chest as she bound the tapes around the bodies of women. When their footsteps petered out through the compound gate, or their cars roared down the dusty road that ran for about one hundred yards before touching the main road, Egoabia felt lonely. She paled with envy when her customers trooped into her workspace with their cackling children. Egoabia needed someone of hers. Not a man, for she couldn’t bear to be told what to do in that way that Nnewi men did. Not a woman either. She wanted someone who’d burden her in a subtle way, a little person who’d need her. The idea of carrying a real child in her womb frightened her. Even if she psyched herself up to go through with it, what man would agree to staying out of his child’s life? Her other choices were IVF treatments or adoption. But fertility treatments required inordinate emotional energy and legal adoption was a grueling path.
Egoabia visited the rented shop twice a week and she spent those work hours sewing and listening to Charity’s endless chattering.
“Aunty Ego, see ehn, there’s this trending story I heard o.”
“With the number of trending stories you hear, Charity, should we consider running a news blog?” The girl’s laughter and the slit sound of the silk fabric she was cutting filled the air of the shop. She did not look up from the fabric.
“Aunty Ego, there’s this company called Rebirth. I heard they’ve been secret for a while, but people are now beginning to know about them. Guess what they do, Aunty.”
“Charity, don’t stress me.”
“See ehn,” Charity bent a little towards Egoabia, “they give out babies.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know o. Na wetin I hear.”
It was Egoabia’s turn to laugh at Charity’s whimsical aura; this young employee of hers whose demands of the world she inhabited were still elemental: food and a sprinkle of wealth, maybe a perfunctory vanishing of the acne ravaging her face, which she didn’t stop examining in mirrors.
Some days later, Egoabia saw an advert blinking blue as she navigated Pinterest pages for new gown styles she could dazzle her customers with. She remembered her conversation with Charity. She never clicked on ads, but this ad said: Rebirth – free delivery within Nigeria. Egoabia tapped on it. The new site looked like facebook or twitter or a mix of both. A question box popped up and spread all over the page, asking why she wanted to access the site. There was a comment box underneath the question box. I want to know more about the children you give out, she typed in the response box and chuckled at her humour. A message saying Thank you for your interest in Rebirth bounced across the screen and gave her full access to the site.
The urge to always visit the page thrummed in her like an appointment her soul needed to keep. She interfaced pocket openings and collars and hems, marked start, fold line and end point of pleats into notches, all the while envisaging the new universe her phone had led her into. She visited more pages of the Rebirth site as if her hands had been sawn off and soldered to a different body. She found the names of people from different parts of the world who’d used the Rebirth powder. She found over 1000 posts under Testimonies:
>A two-year barrenness broken! I used Rebirth powder and it gave me my beautiful daughter.—Tomi_13
>I live in Scotland. I have a son now. Thanks to the Rebirth powder.—Stanley
Gradually, Egoabia narrowed the testimonies down to names that were identifiable to her. From Mary Alabi, a Nigerian woman living in Canada. From Nonso and Johnson, a Nigerian gay couple living in Florida. From Ibimina, Port Harcourt. From Chidi, Anambra State. Egoabia read endless scrolls of testimonies until she knew all the stories by heart.
There was a help box at the bottom of the page. Egoabia clicked on it and typed:
How to have a child.
The reply was instant. It felt like a personalized message for her. Place an order to get your own Rebirth powder. Blend the powder with clay and mould a child out of it with your hands. It is important that you do this with love.
Egoabia had learned to scissor fabric into squares and rectangles at the Arts Academy in Nri. She loved joining the cloth pieces with thread and modelling it after a human body. Her minor had been in pottery. She would sit for hours with fingers mired in clay, lost in a trance-like state.
“There’s something about the way you make things,” the academy director told her once. The director’s face was transfixed by Egoabia’s statuettes, the detail of their knee pits, the pointy tips of their elbows as if sculptures also needed the olecranon bone.
Whatever propelled Egoabia’s hands in pottery also possessed her when she pieced fabric together, the image of the owner in her head as she created shoulder seams. None of her customers ever returned for adjustments.
She input her card details, placed one sachet of the powder in the shopping cart and clicked on the blinking green button for purchase. She heard nothing else from them. What if it was all a fraud? The powder was inexpensive. But she was afraid that her hope would be crushed.
One week after placing her order, she found the packet on her porch. Birds were just chirping the day awake. The moon was still drifting across the sky. Egoabia wondered at what hour the delivery had happened.
She wanted to mix the clay in a corner of her backyard with the powder. But it was too dry and pocked like an abandoned ant hill. It needed water.
Pinned post
>Rainwater is the best water source for your clay.—JimmyD
>For those asking why, rainwater has not been impacted by human activity. Helped smoothen my child’s skin.—JimmyD
It was still November. The world was dusty. The heat hexed the city like a spell. The first rain would come only in March. She bought two silicon fake pregnant bellies. The small-sized belly would fit the first three months. She’d wear the medium-sized silicon at the tail end of her wait for rain.
Charity said nothing about the fake belly button that started brushing against Egoabia’s clothes. She continued inundating Egoabia with trending gossip and merely stole covert stares at Egoabia’s stomach.
Everyone else stretched out a kind hand towards Egoabia. Her clients gave her lessons on sitting, sleeping, and resting.
“Don’t be sleeping on your stomach o.”
“Make sure you spread your legs when you sit, to give the baby some space to breathe.”
When a needle slipped from her grip and she bent to retrieve it, their collective warnings caught her midair. Don’t bend like that! Do you want blood to fill the baby’s head! They showed her how to squat slowly, almost fetchingly, as if the object on the floor must be approached with caution. They recommended calcium-rich meals. They gushed at her body that was not ballooning in size and her nose that was not broadening from the pregnancy. Sometimes, one or two of them asked about the baby’s father.
“He doesn’t want the responsibility,” Egoabia answered simply.
Egobia didn’t unstrap the belly at night. It fed warmth into her skin just like it drew in people’s compassion. Hands reached for things she dropped. Buttocks vacated chairs when she lingered a little too long in a hall without enough seats. She’d always admired how pregnant women were treated like brittle creatures. She felt inexplicably lucky to finally belong to that ring.
Rain came in February. A little too early. It was also scanty like a held breath. Egoabia was not even done with wearing the first belly. She waited until March. Then April. Long enough to hammock the medium-sized belly to her stomach and jiggle it through the town. As the rainy days of April slithered on, she sent notices of her maternity leave to her customers. Her shop at Oba-Nnewi Road would still be run by Charity.
Her boredom peaked one evening after sewing had tired her out. The art director’s comments on her pottery all those years ago awakened her hands. She took the powder and went to the corner where the clay lay, newly softened and sticky from the rain. Egoabia lowered herself on a spot that was redder than the rest of the clay sand and scooped up a chunk.
Blend the powder with clay and mould a child out of it with your hands. It is important that you do this with love.
She mustered all the love she had in her heart when she made clothes and injected it into her words.
“Let’s make you some little legs for running about. Let’s make you thick thighs, but not too thick for your calves. Let’s make you a torso. I hope you like chocolates as much as I do. Let’s make you a neck with folds that will triple when you become chubby. Do you have hands yet? Oh no! I hope we haven’t run out of clay. You will have an oval face. There! Look at that jaw! How handsome! The ears are small. But they are perfect.”
Dusk fell. Her muscles pulled from endless smoothening of surfaces and gumming back detaching joints in the lifeless thing she made. A hesitant rain pattered on zinc roofs. She gingerly removed her handiwork from the rain and placed it in a corner of her small kitchen.
In the morning, a skirling sound woke her. Something clanged against the utensils in her kitchen. She pushed out of bed, drowsy from sleep. At first, she did not see the caked mud child tottering about in the kitchen. Egoabia’s arms goose fleshed as she watched it move. She dispelled her fear, picked it up and placed it in the crook of her left arm. She poured some milk powder into a cup with her free hand and mixed it with water. The child’s lips were sealed, and the milk dribbled on the flannel wrapped around it. The child kept dangling its arms and legs and belching a weak cry from deep in its guts.
My baby is here but it doesn’t look human. Mouth is sealed too. From a frustrated new mom.—Egoabia.
Laughter and sad emojis bounced across the page.
>How did you expect a non-human child to look? Clay babies will look like clay babies!—Goldie1989
>Wait, you wanted the child to sing Johnny Johnny yes papa on the first day? Lmao!—VickySolomon
>It’s normal. Just teach it what you want it to do.—SantaClausTwin
>Congrats, new mum. Your baby will become everything you want. Is your baby a boy or a girl?—Hannah
>I dunno yet. I didn’t make it as any.—Egoabia
>Okay. It will become what you want it to be. The lips will open.—DrPekings
>Just keep feeding it.—Jane001
>How else do you want an unnatural baby to look?—ChristTheKing
> Please change that frustrated mum to obsessed mum. Y’all that wanna make children with your hands must love what you get.—Isabel
>This mysterious sand-child technology reminds me of one legend of a Hindu god. Not sure of the name now.—Henri24.
>You mean Ganesha?—Onyi.
>That’s it! Ganesha! Thank you.—Henri24.
>Don’t mind the negative comments. Congratulations on your baby. They will come around.—Pi
She began to swaddle the baby with blankets to teach it how to keep still. She named him Ude, called him a boy. She twinkled her eyes to teach him eye movement. She touched different things on his lips until he began to ingest fresh vegetables which disappeared once they caressed his chapped lips. In the sixty days it took for Ude’s skin to gleam, like that of a child formed in the womb, she barred her gate to forestall uninvited visits. Ude’s face began to crease when he cried. His nail buds formed. Scant curly hair sprouted like weeds on his head. Then, she let Charity visit. She didn’t confirm or denounce the younger girl’s likely suspicions or ask if she could rely on her discretion. She bristled with pride when Charity dandled Ude and spoke with unrestrained wonder about his perfectly sculpted features. She sent a bulk text message to her phone contacts, apologizing for her silence and announcing that she’d welcomed a baby.
Egoabia is satisfied with Ude; his smile sitting on his face as a fixture, and the glitter of unsaid words in his eyes. Her house is no longer a place where she works or sleeps. It is the home where she and her son live. She visits the Rebirth site to read and answer questions from other users. New parents ask for tips on feeding. Some of the older parents lament how their child broke loose from their grip and attacked a grass field with their teeth. The Rebirth page has gained traction despite the social ostracism recorded against its children. Sometimes, Egoabia thinks that she sees a suspicious sparkle in her clients’ eyes as they watch Ude, perhaps looking for missing fragments in his physical composition.
When they go to the market or visit the rented shop, Egoabia worries that Ude’s near-mechanical steps might be too conspicuous, or that people will see how his eyes cling to things and refuse to unstick. She feels relieved when she sweeps him into the shop, where Charity’s sustained wordless denial of any knowledge about Ude’s origin anchors her.
It is Ude’s fifth year, and he suddenly starts climbing the rung of new milestones. His eyes glimmer now. Egoabia is pleased at first when this unfolding sets out. Ude often stares at the sky where airplanes are glints of light and waves at them. Only children wave at airplanes and Ude’s interaction with Egoabia’s clients’ children is limited. Egoabia is not sure how he picked up the act.
“No,” he says one morning as Egoabia reaches around his shoulders to pull his polo over his head. His voice is firm enough to stop her. She gapes as he shrugs free of the rest of his clothes and walks to the bathroom. He takes his towel and dips it in the water. Then, he dabs it on his body as Egoabia had done for him for five years.
She logs into the site.
>He wiped his body and brushed his teeth. He is 5. Should I let him? I fear he may use more water than he should. Also, how much water is too much?—Egoabia.
Nobody replies to her. All the comments are geared towards a distraught parent whose daughter crumbles and reforms in a playground, triggering a stampede that resulted in a deserted playground seconds later.
>Did people understand what was happening?—DrPekings
>Did people see the girl changing back?—Sarah
>Gosh! I hope you and your child are safe!—Noah’sArk
>Look at how God is shaming you people! May all your sand children continue to scatter!—JesusBaby
>@Rebirth team, is this body renewal process supposed to be a recurrent phenomenon all through the lifetime of a Rebirth child?—DrPekings
>My son almost changed while we were in a taxi. Thankfully, I detected the slight twitches of his body early. We quickly came down from the taxi and found a hidden spot.—Maria
>@DrPekings, the whole point of Rebirth is that the person’s body dissolves and revamps itself. Will growth take place if a Rebirth body does not fall apart in the first place?—KK1985
>Sorry to hear this, Rebirth mama. At least, she chose her renewal in a playground where she can connect with sand. I once heard about a Rebirth boy who dissolved on the tiled floors of a shopping mall and couldn’t piece himself back together.—Abraham
>@KK1985, I am not debasing the importance of the dissolving process. I am only outlining the danger it poses to the existence of Rebirth kids. How long has this thing been around? Ten years? Many people are yet to accept Rebirth children as normal children. It is unsafe to have these children growing new bodies anywhere. I like to compare this process to human teeth. Do our teeth fall forever?—DrPekings
>@DrPekings, your comparison is flawed. A more apt example would be our actual bodies. Our bodies grow until growth ends. It is simply impossible to condition the body’s growth to a specific time and place. Maybe Rebirth kids would continue to dissolve until their growth peaks.—KK1985
Someone replies to Egoabia’s question after a few days. But it is to tell her that the story about keeping Rebirth children away from water is a myth.
Ude’s independence increases daily. It is as if he is recollecting what he never even knew in the first place. After bathing, he oils his body to a coppery sheen. His lack of neediness triggers some resentment in Egoabia. She loves him because she holds his words and thoughts. Now that he needs none of her touch to propel himself; now that he changes his form without needing her to watch, her love for him starts thinning.
“Can I have some yam?” he asks now, instead of saying “yam.” When her clients come with their children, he no longer looks to Egoabia to gouge words out for him. He leaps about the yard with them as if he is not a wan thing that can be smacked down. The children swarm him and trill when he trills. They run their hands down his body, asking him why his ears are small and why his cornea is too white. Egoabia takes measurements of their mothers and seethes in rage.
“We agreed you would not play too much with other children,” Egoabia scolds him when the clients and their children leave. His response is a knife-cut grin no different from how he regards everything. He stops kneeling by Egoabia’s sewing machines. He slips outside once Egoabia settles down to work. She watches him through their paned window, checking the skies for rain so that she can take him inside.
A woman named Peggy, who’d lost a daughter she had from Rebirth, often responds to people’s questions. People accuse her sometimes of giving negative responses and discouraging prospective Rebirth parents. Peggy’s loss makes Egoabia alert to the blessing of still having Ude. Sometimes, she goes to Peggy with questions instead of posting them on the general page. Once, the woman messages Egoabia first, her questions matching Ude’s milestones.
Is he aware of himself now?
Does he behave as if he does not need you?
What does he call you?
Egoabia bristles at Peggy’s accuracy and the void inside her for which she is losing words rapidly.
Yes!
Yes!
Nothing!
The shine of having a son has started waning for Egoabia. She feels guilty for summoning him in the first place. Isn’t it her obligation to love his sand-made skin, and the sharp claws she made him for teeth? Shouldn’t she love him no matter what?
In a dream, two faces peer down at Egoabia. She is aware of their proximity but cannot pull herself out of their line of gaze. She struggles to roll away all through the night until sunlight pries at the windows. Outside, where everything is crackling in the sun, she sees Ude kneeling in the sand and braiding it. He looks perfect, just like the son she wanted. Maybe he’s not bad. Maybe when he’s six or seven, he’d lean on her once more.
“Ude,” she calls out, her resentment long melted under the day’s glare, under the boy’s skin throwing back the sunlight, his eyes, cotton white. “What are you doing?”
He turns with a thin smile. There is a pause. The question floats in the air. Then it drops.
“Making a brother.”
Egoabia’s heart stops. She descends the short steps leading out to the compound. What brother? Where had she been? What was she doing all morning lingering inside her dreams?
Ude is already assembling the fragments. The nose’s dorsum flattened like the edges of a paper boat. Two arms without an elbow. The clay is currant red and moist, not softened enough to bend into pliable shapes. The brother’s skin is rough like a sack, with tiny holes that pore into a different world. The left shoulder slants downwards. Egoabia can hear grating cries rumbling deep down the brother’s vocal cords as knobs of spine rattle and caked eyes become eyeballs, soft as a lizard’s eggs. She does not remember reading any rule where a Rebirth child should not fashion things out of the sand. Her fear lies in the way Ude had said ‘brother’ and in the wispy-black figure, tall as a complete boy, who comes to life differently than Ude did, whose looks are those of a four-year-old. He now paces in every direction while Ude guides him. The earth groans beneath Egoabia.
My son made a brother! What do I do?
Her question tops the viral post chart within minutes. Hundreds of posts ask where she was when it happened. Some ask if she can call herself an attentive parent. Some laugh and say she should consider herself a grandmother now. Maybe the son was lonely. Maybe you were not enough. Maybe a brother is not so bad. Maybe this is what you get for thwarting God’s word.
The brother has a faint buzzing that might have been a neigbour’s television if an occupied house stood close by. He runs in Ude’s shadow, copying Ude’s movements. Ude’s face radiates with joy, the kind Egoabia has never seen. At sundown, he wafts into the house with the brother, his nail buds thick with crescents of soil. He dresses the brother in some of his old clothes. The brother watches Ude clean himself in the bathroom. When Ude moves to sit at the dining table, the brother follows. He sits in the manner Ude sits. When Ude laughs, the brother emits a sound like a flock of birds pecking at glass. Egoabia dreamed of one, not two. She can feel the muscle of her want for a child withering. What if the brother snags unwanted attention to Ude?
“Your boy?” her customers who come the next day ask her.
“No. Ude’s cousin.”
“Ehen! Because they look so much alike.”
“I don’t think they look alike,” Egoabia says as anger cinches her throat.
“They have the same nose. So cute!” another customer says. Egoabia glances at Ude and the brother after her customers leave. The brother’s dorsum is no longer as flat as it was during its creation. It has distended, just like every feature on his face, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ude’s. None of her customers speaks to the brother or asks him the friendly questions they ask Ude. They are mocking her, Egoabia thinks, and her face heats up with shame. Maybe, like Charity, they all know but are performing ignorance for her sake. What if they all whisper to one another about it at her back?
On the fourth day of the brother’s existence, Ude jerks with the readiness to renew his body. The brother scoots to Ude’s side before Egoabia reaches the door. He shatters in the same way that Ude shatters. Two mud walls razed down. They appear unbelievably compact. There is no demarcation from where one child ends and where the other begins. They make a parade with their sands, slithering and knotting and stretching. A special show put up for Egoabia. When they build back their bodies, their exchange of glances is simultaneous, a separate language that excludes her.
She logs into the site.
Hey guys. Anyone ever had a child that created something out of the sand? Send me a direct message please. Thanks.
She refreshes the page for most of that day. At night, her inbox bubble taints red with an unread message. It is from Peggy.
Hi. I have been busy with work. Did you say your son moulded something? This was exactly what my daughter did.—Peggy
Did your daughter mould another child?—Egoabia
Once they mould a play mate, they are no longer yours. It’s like the companion starts controlling your child. It may be different for every child, but my daughter’s sister made her aggressive. Isn’t it suspicious that the Rebirth company has never mentioned that these kids can literally breathe life into anything made of sand?—Peggy.
Did your daughter’s playmate kill her? What happened to your daughter? Sorry that I’m asking you all these questions.—Egoabia.
Some Rebirth parents believe that I’m here to plant the seed of fear in their hearts. When I tell some of them about my experience, they say I’m bitter because I lost my child. But the process of Rebirth is still uncharted.—Peggy.
Just save yourself when you still can.—Peggy.
She spends most of the day’s hours tailing Ude and the brother, who is a tangle of limbs inside the clothing Ude put on him. They move through the house as if Egoabia has relinquished this small nook of the world for their existence. They go to the garden where the papery bulb of the garden egg and cocoyam leaves jitter in the wind. The brother makes ratty holes in the leaves with his chewing. They dig holes in the sand and close them up. Their lips do not move, but their constant buzzing gives the house an undertone, a strange rise and fall as if the earth god lives inside it. On her way to get sewing and food supplies, people ask her after Ude.
“He is at home. His cousin is visiting,” Egoabia says, grateful that she no longer has to pull Ude everywhere while cowering under people’s suspecting stares, yet sad that the boy has slid free from her.
Each day feels like a hike up a hill for Egoabia. She does not feel exhausted from sewing or sweeping out the heaps of sand they carry with them. It is her knowledge of their presence that drains her, and the fact that they both revel in this existence that is alien to her.
“Aunty Ego, things are happening o,” Charity launches a story of a couple raising a Rebirth child. Her customer in the market who sold plastic buttons told her the story. The child’s parents often got into fights. The child’s constant groans while they pummeled each other did not calm their rage. People claimed to know these parents. They’d seen the child’s face pressed against the glass as his mother’s car rolled past. He was often hoisted on his father’s neck though he looked four or five and could use his own feet. His parents fought again one morning, blind to the danger looming behind them: their own son advancing on them with a knife, his face rearranged into a grin like someone who’d lost his mind. The man died immediately after their son drove the knife into his back. The woman, according to the story, lived an hour or two longer after the boy stabbed her to tell of the tragic incident. People say the boy disappeared or melted back the way he came. Some say he is in a rehabilitation home.
Egoabia’s heart raps like impatient knocks in her chest. She imagines that this tragedy also lay repressed in her own history now that two Rebirth children tramp around in her home. Charity might be telling her a true story and warning her as well. There is no mention of the tragic incident on the Rebirth site.
The boys’ glitchy walk now feels like an invasion of her territory. Once, Ude raised his hands suddenly and she ducked, then wheeled around to find the brother repeating the same action. She wondered if she was witnessing a rehearsal of the future, her mutilated body curled up in the middle of her living room while the two boys stab her from both sides, setting free spurts of blood that would taint the walls and the unsewed fabric hanging on a rope in a corner of the room.
She starts sewing more at the shop.
She goes home in the evening when the sun is a large red bulb. She boards a white bus with a blue stripe bound for Onicha. She wishes she can drown in between the warm sweaty skins of the four passengers squeezed on a bus seat meant for three. She can go past her bus stop marked by scraps of polythene bags stuck hard in the soil and waving only their unburied parts. She can go past the street where stray dogs sit on their haunches as if on guard. She can go past the Idemmili River running underneath the bridge at Obosi. The passengers slug from side to side as they make way for her to alight at her bus stop.
Fear crisscrosses her heart each time her bungalow comes into view. Ude’s slightly red skin is more visible in the twilight. The brother is brown and nearly invisible. It is the brother who always looks up, eyeballing her. Egoabia’s heart skips like it wants to be set free.
“Ude,” she calls out in a jittery voice.
“Playing,” the boy says without sparing her a glance.
“I know. Time to go in.”
Ude rises and the brother rises after him. They seem to exchange words now because they glance at each other and suppress a laugh. She flicks on switches when they reach the door, scared of being alone with them in the dark. She plugs in the electric kettle while the two boys roll around on the floor.
“Ude, bathing time,” Egoabia says, afraid that he may one day reject this final ritual she’d taught him. But the boy tugs at his clothes each time Egoabia says it, just like he does now. The fabric of the son Egoabia moulded years ago seems intact. His silent obedience streaks her heart with sadness. He is still hers after all. Ude walks into the bathroom and reaches for his towel.
The brother bounds in after him as if he too is a body part that must not be left behind. A new fury breaks out in Egoabia, lashing like a gale. Peggy’s message to her on the Rebirth site dawdles across her mind like an on-screen display. Once they mould a play mate, they are no longer yours. If they are no longer yours, then why keep them? Peggy must have felt this burden, the kind that translates to numbness, now weighing down on Egoabia’s neck. She feels sore like a gaping wound. There are snapping sounds, which come from her or not. It might be her fury disentangling her muscles from their natural weaving.
She unplugs the kettle, not thinking of how she’ll explain the boys’ absence to people. The water is not quite boiled, but sizzles when it splashes to the dry parts of the kettle. Maybe if the boys’ shadows were not lumped together on the bathroom floor, maybe if they weren’t buzzing laughter as if the real world were a pun, maybe if the bathroom tiles weren’t littered with sand trickling from their playing and from everything they contain, maybe then, Egoabia wouldn’t have even considered tilting the kettle on them at all. But they stand so close like a single wall, gushing sand from every orifice on their bodies. Egoabia, who desperately wants to shrug off their torture, slopes the kettle on them. They melt like burning plastic. Globs of clay crusted beneath their skin come loose. They scream! Their sands merge. They squirm back and forth in a thousand segments, fighting to draw breath. The tiled floor has no pores like natural sand and cannot feed them air. Even if they happen upon pores in the grout, the scorching water narrows all chances. The lumps melt into grits and slide towards the drain.
A clew of worms lingers behind, writhing. The boys’ effort at humanness, maybe. The warped core of their existence. A future in them spreading its nets. Egoabia empties a bucket of water on the last vestiges of life and on all the tiny grains that might somehow resurge.
