When I first saw Aunty Valentine, it was at our local church. Her coffee coloured skin and pink gloss smudged lip curled into a song “Jehovah bu eze” during mass, her breasts pushing against the folds of her chiffon top and I had told my Brother Bobo, that Aunty Valentine reminded me of fancy things. Like candies, Barbie
dolls, and the shapely biscuits in green wrappings the northern women at Hospital Lane with infants strapped to their backs sold.

He had disputed with this notion, shaking his head and snapping his fingers before he said she reminded him of the
wicked step Mother in the literature text we were reading
in school, because her breasts were too big and because they looked as if they needed someone to squeeze them.

We had not known then, that three Sunday’s later Aunty
Valentine would move into our yard, her butterfly sewing
machine behind her. Into the block of single room apartments on 19B, Odinaka Street that looked like the pictures of houses from comic books , that she would become neighbours with us and that Mother would say, “Obia ru ofu She’s new in town” when we asked who she was.

We had not known that she would come to our house on weeknights to watch the new telenovela THE PAIN OF LOVE
with Mother because she did not own a satellite TV. And that
she would argue about who loved who, who didn’t and who deserved to die with Mother as if it was somehow required of her to start a conversation with Mother because she let her watch our TV.

It was because of her we started to watch the telenovela series, because we wanted to be able to start conversations with her, to talk about love and who deserved it as she did, to frame love into the beautiful portrait that it was imposed on one rather than chosen.

We memorised the names of the characters. We knew Juan Carlos was the affluent man from the city who wore his hair slim cornrows and Maria Isabel was the effortlessly attractive daughter of his indigent House help Madam Ana Maria who did not approve of his reckless ways. We knew too that Juan Carlos after confessing his love for Maria Isabel who
turned him down had slept with Yolanda, his Mother’s choice wife who birthed a son for him.

The episode had aired a few weeks to Christmas and it angered Aunty Valentine. She had whined about how slack men could be with their... www.emkaul..co.ke/2016/02/valentine-short-story-by-caleb_22.html?m=1