The ringing sound from the telephone crashed into her sleep. “Damn!” the woman groaned as she reached over the cluttered nightstand[1] and felt around for the phone. It seemed only a few minutes since Foday, her husband, kissed her as he left to do his paper round. But, in fact, it had been two full hours, and it was now almost five-thirty a.m. Who could be calling at this ungodly hour, the woman wondered. She picked up the handset and pulled it toward her head.

“Hello, hello,” she croaked into the mouthpiece.

“Caller, please say your name,” a computerized-sounding voice instructed.

“It’s me Santigie, Ma.”

“Will you accept the charges?” the computerized voice continued.

“Yes,” the woman snapped, the source of the call jolting her into an irritating consciousness.

“Santigie, do you know what time it is?”

“Yes, it’s eleven o’clock, Ma.”

“To you, yes, but it’s five-thirty here. Didn’t you just call the day before yesterday? These collect calls are expensive, you know…. Well, what do you want now?”

“Can I talk to Mr. Foday, Ma?”

“Mr. Foday has gone to work.”

“Miss Claudine, the foreign exchange bureau says they have no money for us.”

“Santigie,” Claudine began with a chuckle, “It’s half past five in the morning. What do you want me to do? Your uncle sent three hundred dollars last week.

“But the man at the bureau said I should ask for the number, Ma.”

“Which number? I don’t know about any number. All I know is that your uncle sent money last week.”

“The man said that I should not go back if I don’t have a number.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe there’s a delay. You know, we post the money to Washington, D.C. and they send it from there to Freetown. Wait till Friday, ya[2], then go back and check. If by then the money has not arrived, call back, and we will see what we can do…. Santigie, did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, Ma, but Miss Claudine we don’t have anything to eat, not even bread, Ma.

“Why? Can’t you go outside and buy food.”

“No, Ma. We are in the middle of the fighting. The Alpha jets are bombing all over the city, especially near us, by the barracks. It’s all smoke and explosions. Then yesterday Sissy Baby and her four children came to live with us, so now even the little food we have is not enough.”

“Who is Sissy Baby?”

“She took care of Mr. Foday when he was a small boy.”

Claudine took a deep breath and blew it out slowly like she was following instructions from a doctor. Five more mouths to feed, she thought. Jesus, when is this going to end? And who is this Sissy that Foday has never mentioned before?

“Miss Claudine,” Santigie’s voice broke into her thoughts. “We don’t have food, electricity or water to drink, not even to wash with. The rebels are shooting and killing people. Yesterday, they went into Pa Coker’s house down the street and forced him to look as they …, as they … di… di...it to his wife. 

“Wetin[3]? They raped her?”

“Yes, Ma, then they forced her to cook for them. They call it Operation Pay Yourself, Miss Claudine. When they heard the Nigerian soldiers were coming for them, they went next door to Dr. Bangura and took his daughters to be their wives.”

“Oh my God, those poor little girls. What is happening in that country?”

“Miss Claudine, things are bad, baaad! The rebels don’t care. And since last week, we have not seen Mr. Sebora.”

“Santigie, I’m sorry all this is happening. I don’t know what I can do. We are praying for you all, ya,” Claudine consoled, suddenly wearied by  her nephew’s news of woes. “Check the bureau for the money in two days. I’ll tell Mr. Foday when he comes home.”

“Okay, thank you, Ma. Tell Mr. Foday we are always praying that Allah will keep him safe for all he is doing for us.”

“Okay, goodbye.”

“Say hello to the children, Ma.  Are they well? I hope you are all well.

“Okay, okay, Santigie, goodbye ya,” Claudine urged, dumping the phone on the handset.

“This is not happening,” she exclaimed, drained by the latest request on top of the obligations that had been bombarding them since the coup in her native land. What in heaven’s name does Santigie expect me to do about money that has not yet arrived? Twenty of my hard-earned dollars gone down the bloody drain, wasted on a useless phone call. Why can’t these people ever understand these collect calls cost money!

Claudine pulled the blanket up to her waist, leaned back on the headboard and pondered her next course of action. Now, of course, Foday is going to want to add more money on top of the three hundred dollars we send monthly. How many of these bloody aunts raised him anyway? Probably one of his father’s numerous wives. I have no obligation to her. Why should I have to be responsible for all his family?

“They are different, you know,” Claudine recalled her mother’s caution when she announced she was going to marry Foday.

“Oh, Mom, I can’t believe you’re talking like this. Foday is an educated man.”

“Look here, you can take the man out of the bush, but you can't take the bush out of the man. These people…”

“Stop it, stop it! I know what you want to say. Foday is not like that. He has lived in England and he studied in America. Are you afraid he is going to take a second wife or have his daughters circumcised?  Over my dead body! Besides, Foday does not believe in these things.”

“Hmm, when the time comes, he’ll not do what makes sense but do what they have always done. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Claudine briefly wondered at her mother’s ignorance before dismissing the conversation from her mind. Her Foday had been a good father and husband, for the most part. She just could not understand his fanatical belief that he was responsible for everyone in his family. Before the coup, they made monthly remittances to his family and arranged quarterly delivery of containers of food, clothing and other essentials. But ever since Major Kakatua’s coup destroyed all semblances of civilized life, the demands from Foday’s family had increased, and the disorder of life back home played itself out in her family’s everyday life, in disruptive early morning phone calls, lengthy midday e-mails at work, humbling evening news broadcasts from the TV set and endless worry and guilt.

Claudine remembered when she was studying in England and her family lived in Freetown. Living abroad then meant something: physical distance, breathing space between her and the family back home. But not anymore.  Communications technology had made family back home permanent hitch-hikers in their lives abroad. They could be reached and touched at anytime. Once when she was in the solitude of the bathroom, someone from back home had called for Foday on her cell phone. She had got up and flushed, holding the microphone over the noisy, rushing water of the basin. And these are the benefits of living abroad, in a global village? “Pssh,” she hissed!

Claudine resolved that something drastic had to be done. Foday’s countless sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles who supposedly took care of him when he was a little boy were just simply an unbearable burden.  His family had been a drain on their money, their time, and their energy. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be her or her kids. Foday had to face reality and understand that he cannot help everyone in his family. His first obligation was to her and their kids. This extended family was just the kind of crap that continued to hold Africans back. Twenty, thirty people taking a free ride on the backs of one or two people-- welfare African style, plain and simple.

It was almost six thirty when Claudine realized that she had to get her three daughters ready for school. She leaped out of her bed, hurried down the stairs and ran smack into an unsightly heap of unwashed dishes, open drawers and cupboards, yesterday’s newspaper, last week’s magazines, used candy wrappers, and Foday’s shirt and slippers laying around in majestic abandon. She clasped the sides of her head and shook it till she thought she could feel her brain wobble. She had neither the time nor the energy to bring order to the chaos threatening to take over their townhouse. She turned around and marched up the stairs to wake up her daughters, deciding she would buy breakfast for them at McDonald’s and save herself the trouble of preparing lunches by giving them money to buy food at school.

She dragged the children out of bed and into the bathroom amid a wail of protests.  Relaxed and with time, Claudine usually handled the morning madness well, simultaneously taking calls for assistance whilst scrubbing someone’s back and buttocks, or helping brush somebody’s teeth; finding buried underwear and matching odd socks; ironing a dress, combing and adorning the hair on a bobbing head; finding an item for show and tell; ensuring a project is in the right bag or a waiver or approval form is signed while getting herself dressed and writing out a list of things to do for Foday. But this morning was different, and her daughters, self absorbed and carefree, had never had cause to think that being a child left them very vulnerable.

“I got it first!”

“Na-ha, I got it first. Mom, Mom, she won’t let go of the toothpaste.”

“I got it first….”

“Mom. Mom, she is squeezing my….”

Thwack-thwack! Thwack-thwack! Claudine brought down the full force of her wet, soapy hand on the bare backsides of the two girls fighting for the toothpaste. She recalled the news about Dr. Bangura’s daughters and she resented even more the silliness of her daughters.  Thwack-thwack! Thwack-thwack! Her hand swooped down again searing their backs with two mopping-up blasts each.

The strikes had been lightning quick and savage. The youngest child who had not been hit and whom Claudine was actually giving a bath started to cry. The targets of Claudine’s attack, shocked by the hits they had sustained, began to cry several seconds later. The bathroom’s exhaust fan droned, the girls wailed in various degrees of bewilderment and pain, and the steam from the hot, running water fogged up the large vanity mirror so that the two targets could not see the reflection of their mom’s eyes to glean some understanding for their beating. All they could see was this vaporous shadow of a mother. Echoing screams, steam and fog, heat, pain and confusion, mayhem: the bathroom had become another theater of operations. 

“Shut up! Shut up!” Claudine shouted. “I don’t want to hear anymore crying, fin! If I so much as hear a peep from anyone, I’ll smack all of you to kingdom come. Do you hear me? Do you? Now, not a sound, fin,” she concluded, putting her pointer finger across her lips. The children swallowed their tears, suppressed their sniffles and understood for the first time the reality of their vulnerability. It was a sobering encounter.

The youngest had never before seen her mom hit one of them. So, she stole glances at her mommy’s hand as she desperately tried to reconcile how the gentle hand that oiled their backs, tickled their tummies, combed their hair and fed them, could also be the instrument of pain that had just sandblasted her sisters. The sudden realization that her body was also vulnerable to such treatment sent her cowering to her mom’s side for the rest of the morning. Young, weak and unable, she calculated that her best course of action lay in currying favor with this new woman, this new reality.

The eldest child had been slapped before, and harder, so the duality of mom as guardian and enforcer did not come as something new. But before, she always understood why she was being punished. She would have been told not to do something, and she would have done it, like the time when mom told her not to drink her cherry-red Cool Aid in the living room, but she had forgotten and had mistakenly spilled it. So, mom had smacked her and told her to follow directions. It had hurt a little, but not for long. Yet, this smacking was different. Mom just beat her for arguing with her sister. “Sisters fight and sisters will have differences,” mom always told them, “but you’re always sisters.” So what had they done that deserved this smacking? It was this incomprehension that worsened the sting that the eldest child felt. Everytime she tried to understand the cause of the beating, she felt the sting anew. She did not know what to do. But she knew that if her sisters bothered her like they always do, she will smack them, hard.

The middle child was not given to much reflection. For her, the situation was simple and clear cut. She had done nothing to deserve the smacking. She did not know exactly what to do, but she wasn’t going to run to mom and make friends like her younger sister, and neither was she going to just let it pass as if nothing had happened, as it seemed her older sister was going to do.  She knew only one thing for sure. When she sees her dad that evening, she would tell him that their mom smacked them for nothing. She hoped he would then shout at her and throw things like he had done one time which made her cry. She didn’t really like it when he made her mom cry, but she felt her mom deserved to cry, just like she had made them.

Though the rest of the preparation for school passed without incident and Claudine wished that all her mornings were like this, she felt badly that she had hit her girls and had decided that she would apologize to them when they sat down to breakfast at McDonald’s. However, she never got the chance to because when she tried to get money from the cash-dispensing machine in the restaurant, the machine responded by flashing “insufficient funds.”  She peered at the screen in disbelief.

“Damn Foday,” she mumbled to herself as she bundled her girls into the car.

“Mom, aren’t we going to get a McDonald’s,” inquired the youngest”?

“Shut up, do you hear me? Just shut up!”

********

Foday was surprised when he returned home around ten-thirty that night to find the house exactly as he had left it earlier in the day. He was angry with Claudine because during his much needed morning sleep after the paper round and before he went to his day job at the warehouse, his aunt, one of the witnesses at his marriage, had called, collect, to complain that Claudine had been rude to Santigie on the phone and that they had not got the money. 

“That your city woman did not give him a chance to talk. Do you now wear a lappa[4] in America? Must we be afraid to call on you whom we fed, you whose snot we sucked with our mouths and you whose shit we wiped because your wife has city ways? This is what happens when you don’t listen. Do you think Khadi will treat us like this?

“Sissy,” Foday began, “I am the man in this house, even in America. I will let Claudine know that you can call here anytime and that she should treat everyone in my family with respect.”

“That’s better!”

“Sissy, I did not send the money last week as I had promised. I only sent it yesterday because I wanted to add two hundred dollars more. So you should now pick up five hundred dollars not three hundred. Do you understand, five hundred?  I’ll call you this coming Saturday or Sunday to see if you have got the money.”

“Tenki ya[5]. Allah will bless you, borboh[6]. By the way, do you know that Cousin Baby and her children are now living with us? There are twelve of us here now. But we will manage, Incha Allah. We have no food. Granny is sick and I hear that Sebora has gone to join the government. You have….”

“Sissy,” Foday cut her off, “Sebora is a big man. What can I say to him from here that will make a difference? I am sorry to hear about granny. Let me look into this money business, okay?  These phone calls are very expensive, so let me go now, ya.”

“Okay, Foday, but please don’t let us down. We pray everyday for you to keep well, for you to be strong and for your children to stay well. You must be the man, do you hear me? And you must never forget family. I am sure your city woman does not forget her family, so…

“Yes, Sissy. I understand, but let me go now. I’ll call you over the weekend, ya.”

“But you must talk to Sebora. Joining these people will only bring trouble to our family. May Allah have mercy on us.”

“Sissy, maybe I will talk to him when I call this weekend. But I have to go now. These calls are expensive. Say hello to everybody for me, okay.”

“Okay, my child. BAHYAYE.”

Foday hated conversations with Sissy that called into question his standing in his house. But he hated even more Claudine’s behavior. Why did she have to shout at Santigie, he wondered. She always made him look bad in front of his family. He decided that he was going to have it out with her. But how and when? It was almost a quarter to eleven and she wasn’t even at home. She had not left a note and had not called to explain where she had taken his daughters. Khadi certainly would not have behaved like this. The thought that he had perhaps made the wrong choice in marrying Claudine gnawed away at him. And then to have to listen to Sissy suggesting that he was not the man of his house. Foday sat down and began to think how he was going to confront Claudine, but he did not dwell on the subject because he remembered that he was hungry.

He walked over to the fridge and scavenged for food. Leftovers everywhere, but ones he couldn’t eat: Spaghetti here, macaroni and cheese there, half eaten yogurt, celery sticks and carrots, and other white man’s food that he did not like. There was no rice and no soup of any kind, not even a plastic bowl containing a frozen, week-old cassava leaves that he could throw in the microwave. This was utterly absurd, and he would certainly bring it up tonight. He reached into the back of the fridge, grabbed a beer, opened it, flicked on the huge-screen T.V. and flopped on the sofa. Two sips later he was snoring.

He awoke to the noise of activity in the house. Claudine and the girls were already upstairs, and he could hear from her remarks that they were getting ready for bed. Though he desperately wanted to see his girls, he decided that he would wait till some other time. There were many things to straighten out with Claudine: taking the kids out till late and not letting him know where they were; insulting his relatives on the phone; not preparing food for him to eat. These were not topics that could be discussed amicably and the girls would be better off asleep. He was not sure which issue to start off with. But he was sure that for each, he was armed with an assorted array of examples from history, tradition and common sense that would lay to waste whatever counter arguments she would offer. So he sat up in the chair and waited for her to come into the living room.

 “Why did you take the money I had put aside to pay the mortgage and not tell me? What did you do with it? What sort of behavior is this?” The questions exploded in quick succession behind Foday’s head like concussion grenades. The questions were from Claudine and she had fired them off as she walked toward the kitchen before she appeared in Foday’s peripheral vision.

“What”? he asked in surprised confusion. She stopped her advance into the kitchen and, turret-like, wheeled herself around and trained her eyes on Foday who, beginning to recover from his surprise, jumped up as if ready to do battle. Bull’s eye!

“I went to get some money from the ATM[7] this morning and all the money I had put aside to pay the mortgage was gone. Why did you take it without telling me and what did you do with it? I know you took it and I want it back. Claudine was slow and deliberate and the no-nonsense tone of her voice pounded Foday.

This was not the course, with him on defense, he had imagined for the argument. He was supposed to be laying down the law. “I needed it,” he said, wearing a pained, guilty look.

Claudine saw the look and she felt sorry for him. She knew how hard he worked, doing the paper round and lifting those heavy pallets at the warehouse. “Overtime Foday from Africa,” they called him at work because he was ever ready to put in extra hours each week. And Claudine knew that he did not really spend the money on himself. A lot of it went back home to his family, to Sissy and those many aunts that she hated,  to pay school fees for nephews and nieces he did not know, and to pay for the damn collect calls. Claudine also knew that many days Foday went to work without a cent in his pocket; that sometimes he could not even buy his high blood pressure medicines because he had no money. She knew that sometimes he put off buying clothes and things (like the computerized chess set or Lazyboy) for himself because he wanted to make sure that his family back home was not starving. A man with a Bachelor’s Degree in African History, a former Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Education who once lived in government quarters and had garden boys to tend his yard, now reduced to a mere hand in a factory. They had given up all that because their own country was a wasteland. Now they were squabbling over two hundred dollars.

            She looked at him in his overalls, facing cap with the Nike logo and hobnailed boots, and she saw the struggling man she loved and knew the fight had gone out of her. His rugged look and the combined scent of cardboard boxes and work sweat strangely intoxicating her. She just wanted to have him right there.

“Foday, I know you took the money because you needed it, but what did you need it for and why didn’t you tell me?”

            There was just a hint of admonition in the tell and the me, but Claudine was hoping that he would tell her he had done something impulsive, like, maybe, put the two hundred dollars on layaway for the Lazyboy or for the ten-level computerized chess set with the IBM chip in it that beat Gary Kasparov.

Foday heard the softer tone in Claudine’s voice and sensed her body relax.  He interpreted the changes as fear of his imposing 6-foot manliness. It was the opening he had been looking for after been caught off guard by her discovery and questions.

            “I wanted to add some more money to the amount we were sending for my aunts. I have a responsibility to take care of them and that is something I’m not going to shirk. I have put back your precious money,” he fired.

            “What?” Claudine replied in surprised confusion, the combination of sympathy and sexual energy that had been titillating her suddenly flushed out by the icy coolness of indignation and contempt.

            Deliberately and in his no-nonsense voice Foday explained: “I said I wanted to send something extra for my folks. So I took some money from our account. Money that I go and sweat for every day. I have put it back. No one has been hurt by it?”

“That’s not the point,” Claudine snapped. “You took the money without telling me. You’re always jeopardizing us for your relatives. And you say no one has been hurt? Well, it so happened that when I wanted money to buy breakfast for the kids and to give them money for lunch at school, I couldn’t get any. While you are busy pretending to be Mr. Rich man in America to your one thousand and one relatives, your own family is going without food.”

“What do you mean by one thousand and one,” Foday barked resentfully at Claudine, the talk of large family a sore point with him.

“Family for me doesn’t just mean you and the kids. I grew up in a very large household where we learned to share what we had; we cared for each other; one man’s blessings were everybody’s blessings.”

“Well, it seems all your blessings are being captured by your relatives back home. We are only getting your curses.”

“Oho, so you want me to abandon my people because I’m in America. Are you blaming me because my family is large? I’m not responsible for that. I simply have to cope with it as best as I can."

“That’s the problem right there. Responsibility!  Marrying ten wives and having twenty, thirty children as if there’s no tomorrow. So now my kids should have to suffer because your father could not keep his belt buckle on?

“How dare you talk about my father like that? This is what Sissy is talking about. You talk about my people, my father, as if you are better than them. Sissy told me that you were rude to Santigie when he called this morning. You did not give him a chance to talk. Instead of asking them how they were managing, she said you just kept telling him that the phone call was expensive. Is money the only thing that matters to you? My god Claudine, they are in the middle of a war and all you care about is how much the call costs?

“Is that what Santigie said? Yes, I did say the call was expensive because this was the second collect call he had made in three days. I hear you tell them the same thing. Why shouldn’t I. Especially when I can’t do anything from here. Didn’t you send them money last week?”

Foday did not answer and Claudine did not care for one. “Santigie is a liar if he says I was rude to him. An ungrateful liar,” she added.

“There you go again. What reason would Santigie have for telling a lie? If you had not been rude to him why would he say so? You probably think he does not even have a right to complain anyway. That you have a right to talk to him anyway you feel. Why? Tell me why? Is it because they are poor? I am a poor village boy. You probably think you are better than us. Well, I guess you have a right to feel that way. You don’t have relatives who ask for money and call collect.

“Well, it’s true isn’t it? And if it was the other way around, I’m sure you would complain too.”

“But we know why your people don’t ask, don’t we? 

“Don’t bring my father into this. My father never…”

“Oh yeah, well tell me how a civil servant gets to build three houses, send two children to school in England and drive a Mercedes Benz  on the money he is  paid? You don’t have an answer, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. He did it by stealing from the country. And that means from the people. The poor people. Yes, the diamond money and foreign aid that should have been used to build the roads, schools and hospitals that may have helped us poor, rural folks. So if your kids do without a meal today, they are making up for the deprivation that your father and many of his kind have subjected us rural folks to.”

“Look, you can take your tired, re-treaded arguments and shove them. My father served the government and people for twenty long years, helping to put up schools and hospitals, the very ones that right now your so called victims are burning down.”

**********

Their neighbors, a middle-aged childless couple, heard the raised voices, the screaming children and the slamming doors. They saw the hurried walks and the furrowed faces coming and going. But for them it was just those noisy Africans being Africans. They could not tell a domestic spat from a party. Both involved lots of shouting, slamming of doors, banging and much coming and going.

But this was a domestic spat, and it was sending the home into slow disrepair. The broken toilet was overflowing because even though Claudine had warned the girls not to use it, the youngest had forgotten when she had to go in a hurry. She remembered just as she finished flushing and bolted out of the bathroom when she saw the water rise over the seat and run all over the floor. The thought of being smacked like her sisters made her determined that she would deny being the doer of this misdeed. She would even cry if she was accused. But she escaped interrogation because Claudine, avoiding anything that might break the undeclared truce with Foday, wiped the floor and taped the seat covers to the basin. The toilet remained unfixed, like the warped tiles on the roof, the doorknobs of the children’s bedroom doors and the choked garbage disposal.

The inside of the townhouse was untidy. For almost one week following their spat, Claudine refused to cook, so when Foday came home, he would bring with him packets of Kentucky fried chicken or boxes of Chinese fried rice. He would push aside the newspapers, magazines and the packets containing dried up chicken bones from the previous nights’ meals, nestle on the couch and flick on the TV to watch ESPN[8]. After a hearty cholesterol-laden feast, he would drink a beer and then go to bed. A couple of times he fell asleep on the couch until it was time to get up for his paper round. One such night, he was awakened by a piercing pain in his crotch. A string of ants, drunk on grease, salt and dried up chicken flesh that he left lying on his lap, had wandered up his legs. It was not a concerted effort at first. One or two of the ants had merely stung him in a probing sort of way. But these early stings sent the sleeping man’s hand down into his crotch to search out the problem.  Trapped and in danger from his searching hands, the ants lashed out at the surrounding flesh. Foday woke up, jumping and dancing like a jack-in-a box, his crotch alive like a crackling Harmattan fire. He immediately thought Claudine had poured something into his pants. He unbelted his trousers, pulled down his boxers and proceeded to pulverize each of the ants, one-by-one. It was a most satisfying kill as he squeezed the life out of the last bugger.

*****************************************

But a week of tension had left him weary, angry, frustrated, bitter, regretful, righteously indignant, and disappointed, at everyone: Claudine, Santigie, his dead mother and father, Sissy and his other aunts. But most of all, he blamed Major Kakatua who dared to author an epic when he could not even write a rhyming couplet. And especially since he was working overtime to fill up the hole left by his mounting responsibilities, Foday had no extra money to stop by the local bar for a draft with some guys from his shift or even to pick up a six pack of a decent beer like Heineken. And worse, he finished work much too late to stop by one of his friends, to drink some beer, curse Major Kakatua’s ancestors and progeny and plan to lead an Entebbe-style commando raid to rescue his beloved country from the yoke of this upstart and his band of cut throats.  He himself would finish off this thug with a single shot, right between the eyes; or maybe he would do something that had the ring of poetic justice:  disembowel him in public view under the Cotton Tree. Then he would show the onlookers the white, mutated cancerous tissue that had eaten up fifty percent of his gut and the crowd would nod their heads as if, now, they understood why this idiot had risked so much. Some of the onlookers would feel sorry for the major. They would say he, too, was a victim, of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. Still others would dismiss these views and urge that they  cut him up into one thousand small pieces and feed him to the vultures, for they feared the soldiers and rebels protected themselves with powerful medicines. But many were just mystified, confused. Was all the mayhem part of a divine plan for their country?

But Major Kakatua and imaginings about back home were Foday’s out-of the-house and at-work thoughts. Claudine was no hologram in his head whose demise he could conjure up and execute without consequence. Claudine was the reality of his life, evident in the arrangement of the furniture, reflected in the bold colors of the their home’s interior wall paint, and certainly prominently placed because her portrait with the watchful look hung midway on the staircase wall and seemed to follow Foday as he climbed up to their bedroom.

 Indeed, as he walked into the dark bedroom, the outline of her outstretched form asserted itself. Her white man’s hair, which he loved, fell in loose tresses down her back. Her buttocks protruded through the sheets with inviting defiance. Claudine, smelling the cardboard boxes and work sweat, moved and breathed ever so slightly. Just enough for Foday to know she was not asleep.

 Attraction. Repulsion. Invitation. Thought-words, sotto voce.

Cardboard boxes. Sweat.

Almond butter with a hint of Jasmine and Palmarosa.

Warm, sweet and dark.

Clarity of the senses. Action by instinct.  Tension into heat.

Give! Have!

Give, I take!

Take, I give!

Mine, yours, ours.

Engorgement. Exploding contractions.

“Mmmm, Mmmmmm, Major Kakatua.”

“Aahh, aahh, Kakatua.”

Operation Pay Yourself? BackHomeAbroad.

Onipede Hollist

© Copyright, July 1, 2003