Father was my father, not my uncle or my stepfather, this to me was unbelievable. He was the one who put a seed in my mother and after nine months of endured pains and a caesarian, he was the one who held me fully blooded at a point and fully clothed at another with his finger within.

My mother had told aunty Keyu one damp evening in our tiny pale kitchen where we prepared a cheap pot of bitter leaf soup that I was a result of a mistake, a grave one she emphasized. She bit her lower lips in between her speech as if to fight the water that welled up in her eyes.
She spoke in igbo to aunty Keyu who wasn't igbo but understood and spoke fluently too. I didn't speak igbo fluently and I also had a hard time understanding as it took me not less than seven minutes to filter through her speech and mentally give false meanings to words that failed my understanding.
"He is a wicked man" she said in Igbo and emphasized for the last time as aunty Keyu tasted the soup. That night was the last I saw of aunty Keyu, I had woken to loud sounds of chaos from the other end of the curtain aunty Keyu said words that sounded dreadful in her language, a glassware was shattered and the pound banging of our frail wooden door followed. Aunty Keyu was gone, at 3am, never to return. It was only later that I realized that truly my father was a wicked man 'onye aru ala.'

I was ten years old when reality slapped me hard on the cheek, a primary three student of a thatched school in the slums. My school looked nothing like a school and neither did our house. Our house was a tiny cluster. A cubicle. What the majority of lagosians called "one room," only in our case, our room was less than small. The walls almost caved in, it was never day in those four wall. The room housed everything we owned which was not much; a battered mattress, a rolled up mat, a stool, a kerosene lamp, and a wall clock that read 4 'O' clock regardless of time you checked it.
We had a small hallway which we called our kitchen, it housed our utensils by day and me by night. My father had put up a curtain to separate both spaces, we rolled up the curtain by day and fell it by night and only rolled it back up in the morning. My father had warned that under no circumstance was I allowed out of the passage by night, "Except your bladder is bursting and the house is on fire" he scolded, the night he put it up.

My father was a short faced man, he was terribly short but short faced too, a transporter, a drunk, and 'a disgrace to god and man' as my mother once said to aunty Keyu before she disappeared.
Indeed my father was a drunk, a chronic one, who drank himself to stupor on most days and unconsciousness on others. So when he had walk into the passage leering at me that night, one may have easily accused the empty bottles he indulged earlier had he not returned again.

The morning after father had walked into the passage, I was broken. A shadow of myself, memories of a sudden past hunted my mind; the struggles, the loud screams, the heavy thud as mother landed to the found, then nothingness as I shut my eyes to my reality. "It's much easier when you give in" he said as he unraveled me in the ugliest way.
I wouldn't go to school that morning, not that father had cared. He tightened his belt at dawn and left with his behind, he left me behind in my own shame as I clawed and pounded my chest, as my prayed that my breath will fail me as I hoped to disappear like aunty Keyu never to return. My mother had looked away all day, crying with the passing seconds, she did not roast her corn that night, she never roasted corns again.

The abominable soon became normal, a drunken or not so drunken man yanking my dignity with each passing night. Mother endowed with the shame her inability to save me gifted her. I was a ghost now, an 11-year-old ghost.
The day I threw up, my father beat my afterlife to death, he jumped on my stomach as he echoed "Amosu" "you are a witch."
The next day, my remains were dragged before a scruffy pale looking man who at my fathers instruction inserted a slim rusty metal rod into me and "pulled out the useless thing" as he was instructed. Later that night mother was disfigured, she was the witch who wanted father's downfall.

The house grew it's silence. I was out of school, father threw a pack of contraceptive at me. He will come for many more nights, he will slap my resistance to obedience, he will cause me to itch for a week, then he will come no longer.

We were robbed. A gang of four men opened our door at night, mother and father were asked to lie flat on their faces, father was shot and the men disappeared. The only thing stolen from us was him.

Aunty Keyu stopped by with a basket of condolence, and over a pot of bitter leaf soup she will say "onye aru ala" and mother will nod in agreement, almost too quickly, almost reluctantly.


PS: please leave your thoughts, I will be working on a collection of stories bordering around social justice this year, this is one of them.

Compelling. I like the way you write.

RaggedyAnn:
Compelling. I like the way you write.

Thank you! Means a lot!