My husband’s fingers are a mob of cacti. Lush-green, bloated, and lined with thorns. Just like the ones he transplanted years back in the compound, to forestall stubborn kids from plucking our mangoes and littering the yard. Although I have never come in contact with the cacti, I can imagine how the thorns would feel on the skin. This is because, in bed, when my husband touches me, I feel needles in my body. My internal organs are ablaze, hissing at the intrusion of external air, slowly dying. I do not react at first; I expect my husband to retract his claws, but he runs his fingers around my neck and exhales acerbic breath, only retreating when I prod him with my elbow. He sits up, rubs embarrassment from his eyes. “Omoye,” he says, his voice nasal. “It’s been seven months now, and you’re still like this. Why can’t we just. . .move on?”
*
Seven months since my husband cactified. Seven months since my baby died. He had my husband’s flared nose, my deep philtrum, his grandmother’s fleshy underlip. But he was dead. Dead on arrival, the doctor said. I heard him, loud and clear, his soot-black lips parting to reveal shock-white teeth, but I ignored it. My baby couldn’t have died. Not like that. Not when I spent nine hours pushing, my legs flung apart, fibres of ripe-red pain roaring through my body. Not when I lay there, dislodged, like some parts of my body had been taken out or relocated to places unsuitable for them. Dead? My throat burned with a barbed thirst. My eyelids stung. My husband was fanning me, singing a stupid song. Did I want jollof rice? Should he read something to me? He’d just bought a Nigerian thriller, could I believe that? A proper Nigerian thriller. He pulled out a book from his holdall. On its dark cover, in loud-green, went the title: My Sister, the Serial Killer.
I paid him no heed. I scooped up my baby. I smelled his skin. I caressed his hands. Loosely fisted, they looked like little microphones. I made a mental note to varnish the fingers when he turned three months old. Cherry red. Or pink. Maybe something bluish, like a sky uninterrupted by sunlight. He didn’t pant, like I knew infants did. Or gurgle. Or move those tiny hands around. God. Dead? I pressed my mouth against his and began to breathe, to fill his lungs with air, with artificial life.
“Omoye, the baby. . .” My husband paused, cracked his knuckles. “He didn’t. . . .make it.”
I stared at him. The baby, he’d said. Not our baby. What did he mean the baby? The ward, with its medical smells and clean silence, made me dizzy. I held my baby away from myself, studied his curled-up form, his sticky hair. It was impossible. I couldn’t have a dead baby. Never, ever.
“It’s not your fault,” my husband said later. He stood with his hands knotted in front, below his belt buckle. “The baby is gone, and you have nothing to do with that. I love you, remember that? The baby loved you too”—a chuckle—“no matter how ridiculous you’d think that sounds.” He proceeded towards me cautiously, one step at a time, a beast stalking a prey, prepared to pounce. He placed a hand on my shoulder. Then I saw it. Thorns were writhing out of the hand, bursting through the skin like splurging water from narrow pipes, yanking out bloodsmeared veins in their wake. I squealed. The IV tethered to my arm stung. Something like a belt clasped me in place. “What’s it?” my husband asked, his voice gaspy. A forlorn fatigue pooled through me. “I’ve brought jollof.” His voice rose like a roar. “Or will you take pap?” I tried to scream, like sad teenagers in American films do. But the last clutch of breath in my belly was too weak; every attempt felt like someone pulling the drawstrings of my lungs.
*
After I was discharged, I lodged my baby’s mattress in the middle of our bed. “I need space,” I said. My husband placed a tentacle on my lap. “We’re both in this, Omoye. I understand you want space, but, please don’t”—his eyes fell to the floor—“don’t punish me.” When I didn’t respond, he nodded, looked away, and I balanced my baby’s pillows on the mattress. Next night, because his ugly breath still seeped into my dreams, I added my baby’s blanket to the pile. Next, because he’d probably managed to sneak his hand around the mattress and his tentacles had touched me while I was asleep, I added a second, a third, and the final pillow, binding them to the mattress with a measuring tape.
*
My baby’s mattress lying between us brought us tranquil normalcy—something disguised, convincingly, as peace.
My husband on Sundays, staring idly at the mango tree, placing heart-shaped pancakes on my bed stool, taking long showers, talking to his mother and Aunty Nuella, saying we were fine, that they didn’t have to visit. My husband reminding me, with eager solemnity, that he, too, felt what I was feeling. My husband going to work in his tartan suit and laceups, the cedar reek of his perfume rousing strange allergies in me, his presence leaving a smudgy brown on the copper-coloured walls.
My husband bringing home a bottle of half-drunk wine he’d leave to perish on the dining table, the pink liquid slowly turning into frothy white.
And me. . .
Me stuck in a sofa, attempting Jane Eyre a second time. Perpetually boring. So I return to my usuals. Thrillers and mysteries. For the fourth time I read Murder on the Orient Express. And then The Silent Patient. After watching five episodes of How to Get Away with Murder, I descend into a dreamlessly boring sleep.
In the evening, we’d sit to dinner. Silence, foreboding as fuck. Except the clipped clatter of cutlery. The occasional flash of light from the muted TV. Then, an endless deluge from my husband: “This is tasty. I love it. Did you read today? Have you finished re-reading And Then There Were None? What about the London Noir collection? I particularly love Patrick McCabe’s contribution. Those stories beginning with dialogue? Touché! We should go out next Sunday. Have any place in mind?” He’d place his hand on the table, a mandibled finger boring a hole in the table-mat. “Omoye?”
“I’m reading The Dark Half. I can’t go anywhere on Sunday.”
“What about next?”
I stab a potato, hold my fork midair. “Can we just eat in silence?”
*
Tonight, he takes down the mattress, rolls to my side of the bed, and digs his claws into my shoulder blades. I say, “Jesus, stop, stop now, stop,” but he winds a strand of my hair around his finger and says, “I’m sorry, Omoye, I’m sorry. . .but tell me what I’ve done, tell me what I should do.” In the semi-darkness, only illuminated by my phone backlight, his eyes are tiny puddles, lying side by side, like the couple that we no longer are. He says again, “Tell me, Omoye, tell me, please.” There’s a lot I want to hurl at him—referring to my baby as the, not crying at our supposed loss, leading the way as my baby was being taken for interment—but as always, I swallow and pull the sheets to my chest. He gets off the bed. Gathers his bedding. Pillow, blanket, another pillow. “I’ll sleep in the living room,” he says. “Goodnight.”
*
I can’t sleep, so I plod to the living room, stopping, briefly, by the dining room, with its laser-red lights and odiferous coldness, to sniff my husband’s half-drunk wine. It smells like a melange of soursop and scented urine. A necklace of ants clings around the bottleneck, quickly dispersing when I switch on the light. My husband’s thin body is outstretched on the sofa. The TV is on; its lights make kaleidoscopes on his half-closed eyes. Outside, the mango tree is a threatening cloud against the security lights. In spite of the wind whistling in my ears, the jab of cold to my chest, I continue to walk. Barefoot. The soles of my feet gracing stubbly grass. Grass stinging flesh. The soresweet sensation of pain: tickling, pricking.
The baby.
I sit on the stool under the mango tree. It’s not fully in season yet, so there’s a faint pungence in the air instead of the suffocating smell of decay. The cacti are erect as ever, defiant, even in a night as black as death. Two days ago, I spotted a bud standing on a stem. Now it’s become a full petal, pink and proud. How things grow fast. How the buds of today become the flowers of tomorrow, so fast, while the humans who planted them remain where they are, like ancient carvings on prehistoric stones.
It’s not lost on me that I’m stuck in the puddles of my baby’s brief memories, but that’s the problem: being aware of it has made me more unyielding, because forgetting him will mean forgetting myself. Forgetting him will prove my husband right, that moving on is best for us, even though, really, there’s no us—just me.
My husband is a sensitive person, the type who sniffs at the end of Titanic, who prefers hugs to handshakes, who frequents the white offices of therapists and sits, blank-faced, while they try to fix his life. But he didn’t cry when my baby arrived dead. He was even eager to rid himself of him. That was why he pasted a detached, disavowing article in front of him: the. The baby. Same reason he conceded to burying him on the hospital grounds, without even consulting me. Later, when I asked why, he dug his thorns into my shoulder and said, “You were sleeping, you know?” Then, more frantically: “I thought it would be traumatic for you, burying him in our compound. I was mistaken, right? Oh, fuck, you’re giving me that look again. I’m so sorry, Omoye.”
Interesting. Who gave my husband the right to handpick and name my traumas?
I hobble down the path. By the crouchy cacti, not the ones standing stiff and tall, I squat, tease a finger across. My blood is a fat blob of ink. So beautiful. Our neighbours are playing music. Something as waily and recherché as Celine Dion. I’m drawn to the voice, to its scorn-sharp audacity to disturb a silent night. No, not Celine Dion. Adele. Definitely Adele. It gets clearer as I advance towards it. Adele threatens to set fire to the rain, to watch it burn. . .
My neighbours’ is a detached house enclosed in a galvanised fence. A family of four. A laid-back husband. A chirpy wife. A teenage son. And a two-week old babygirl. We’re not friends with them. I don’t know how to make friends. Neither does my husband. In fact, when their baby was born, we planned to visit as though for a trip abroad. In my arms, the baby hiccupped and started to cry. The father said, very casually, “To think she was quite bubbly before now is just. . .incredible.” I was stung. Some people believe babies possess a strong sixth sense. Had this child sensed that my body was a failure, unable to keep a child alive until he’s born, and had that frightened her so?
I’m standing before their house now, threading my fingers through the diagonal netting of the fence. One of their windows is open. Light pours into the night like a backlit stream. Isn’t the music disturbing their baby? If mine was alive, I wouldn’t play music so loud. I wouldn’t play music at all. I’d wear padded socks in the house so I wouldn’t make any sound. Maybe the mother is a deep sleeper. Some mornings, when we greet each other, I see bags around her eyes. Her baby could be crying now, but she’s deeply asleep, and the music is drowning the poor child’s voice. Hasn’t her body adjusted yet? Doesn’t the postnatal body know it’s no longer the same, that there’s now a baby to wake up to, at close intervals?
Or, perhaps, her body is having what I call postnatal denial syndrome? Like, having a baby but denying the fact? The opposite of what my body had—holding on to the illusion that it had delivered an actual baby? For the first three months, it happened to me, and I was terrified, because I thought the brain was supposed to know these things, supposed to regulate the body to suit circumstances. Or did I completely lose my body to my baby? Why did my body wake me up at intervals? Didn’t it know there was no baby to watch sleeping? Why didn’t my breasts understand there was no baby to feed? Why did my body leap the first time I held my baby, when it should have known he had no life? Why was my body expecting people to congratulate me the way it had watched people congratulate other women?
*
My baby’s umbilical cord was knotted three times around his neck, suffocating him. “It’s not your fault, Omoye; it was an accident.” That was the doctor’s consolation. We were sitting in his office, my husband and I, a day after my baby had been plucked off my arms and buried somewhere I’d never know. My husband was picking his teeth with the claw of his thumb. Placid, he was. His plaid shirt tucked in his khaki trousers, no single crease on it, just like his life: soft, solemn, sheltered from the showy sentimentalism of secular life; like his house, our beige flat, tucked away in the quietest part of town, with no family member except, rarely, his mother, allowed to visit. His mother is the only one who doesn’t blame him for being too soft, who doesn’t call him a woman-wrapper.
Back in the car, my husband started to play my Spanish collection. l like the songs for the freedom incomprehension offers me, the freedom to ascribe whatever meaning I want to the lyrics. There’s this drowsy rendition of La Bamba I especially love, sung in a loud, tremulous voice, accompanied by hollow-sounding drums, sombre flutes, and a light flick of the guitar. It makes my eyes water, the way the voice eats into the guitar, the way the drums fade out towards the refrain and resurge at the beginning of a new verse, but at that moment, it sounded like sand in my ears. I wound down the knob. Everything died away. “Oh,” my husband said, “I thought you’d like it,” and I quipped, “You think too much for someone who just lost the baby.”
*
In the morning, I can hear Gloria Estefan’s Mi Buen Amor from the sitting room. At first I thought I was still dreaming, because moments ago, in a vague party of squirming shadows, the song had come on, and I’d thrown my body to the wall, feet off the ground, gown ridden up my face. It seemed something solar-powered propelled me. Then I felt a wiggly appendage on my shoulder; its fingers, like claws, complimented my skin colour. I had no doubt it was my baby. The deep philtrum. The wide nose. His umbilical cord, now a noodle-coloured serpent, wound around his neck.
I gasped my way out of sleep, to an actual Mi Buen Amor. The thrum of beats. The soft fondle of the guitar. It’s my husband. Today being Saturday, he stays at home cleaning and cooking. I return to bed as he enters the bedroom. The door squeaks open. Sunrise, yellowish-orange. The spice of food. Of vapour. The ripe-rotten smell of my husband’s sweat. He lays the dish on the bedstool—the low clang of chinaware carefully placed on steel. I prepare myself against his advances. My hand is half-fisted, my forefinger and thumb almost kissing, a pinch waiting. But when he finally touches me, wading through layers of sheets, the response is of fight, the impulse so sharp that I react before the thorns touch my skin. He jerks back, ramming his knee against the stool. Unable to keep his balance, he falls; the food he’s made, onion-stew and parboiled rice, together with the table itself, upturns.
He gets up quickly. Instant freckles dot his face. There’s a whorl of stew on his bare chest. The cacti have suddenly disappeared. I scurry to and fro the kitchen. I wipe him clean. Pinch pepper seeds from his stubble. He winces, groans, growls. I mutter sorry, sorry, sorry while I peel a scud of rice stuck to his arm. The music rises, races to orgasm. Mi amor, mi buen amor, mi delirio. He starts to hum as I extricate matted rice from his fingernails. No pretendas que te olvide así, no más. He’d put the song on repeat, for we’re back to the first verse. The sonorous, almost desirous voice. Hay amores que se esfuman con los años. I could fall in love with a woman, I swear. A woman who sings in a language I can’t understand, a language I don’t want to understand because comprehension is adversary to psychospiritual depth. I could fall in love with Gloria Estefan.
But I’m here with my husband, and we’re strangers again. Our past, swollen with cinematic joys, contrasts darkly with this blanched present. I’m transported to the day I first spoke to him. Outside a therapist’s office at UI. Both of us, students of Classics—only because UI didn’t offer us Law, the course of our dreams. Before I spoke to him, he followed me around, his hands clutching the straps of his backpack, saying, “Hey, I hear you have a lot of Agatha Christie? Can I read your Agatha Christie?”
I stopped one day. “Can I read your Agatha Christie? How clever. Is that code for asking a girl out?”
“No,” he said simply.
“Okay?”
He chuckled, studying his feet. “I don’t know how to ask you out.”
Two weeks after we began dating, he said, “Sometimes I’m so sad. Like, suicidal sad. I don’t know why.” His father said it was because of his softness. If he tried being a real man, like his brothers, things would change.
It was then I realised why I fell in love with him. He mirrored me in so many ways. His forlorn fragility. His countenance. In his eyes was a sadness I found interesting, something I could peel back and probe, a sadness I could see myself in. I told him about my parents, how they’d died in a car accident when I was six, how Aunty Nuella wouldn’t allow me go to bed until she created welts on my back, how she often said, “You’re too stubborn, Omoye. Not stubborn-stubborn like normal children, but quietly stubborn. Green snake under the grass. Ah, you’re not like my brother at all.”
After I’ve cleaned him up, my husband plants a kiss on my cheek, careful not to cross the line. I step forward, offer myself to him. I don’t feel the claws inside me when he lifts me. Me arrimé a tu puerto a descansar. He carries me to the bathroom. Lays me in the bathtub. —me dio la felicidad. I let him squeeze my skin, soap lathered in his hands. Que tu amor fue luz de pleno día. Then there’s something like a reset—the baby—and my whole body is afire, willing me to slap him off, to jump out of the tub, to ask for help, to call somebody: the police, the vigilante group, the organisation against domestic violence. “I can’t,” I say, and reach for my towel.
He too steps out of the tub. En tu pecho, vida mía, me dio la felicidad. Swallows. En tu pecho, vida mía, me dio la felicidad. “You’re tired of me, of this, aren’t you?”
The only thing I can think of: the baby, the baby, the baby, thebabythebabythebabythebaby. . .
“You know, I’ve always been an abnormal boy.” He leaned against the wall. “Too bookish, too solitary, too sad, too quiet, too emotional, too everything. Everything changed when I met you, Omoye. I thought, oh, so I can have a normal life, a girlfriend, possibly a wife; I thought, oh, life is so beautiful. Please tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Tell me what to do.”
I’m still thinking, the baby. But I don’t say anything. The words are iron clogs on my chest. I can’t breathe properly, let alone say anything. He’s still standing there, his naked body expelling spangles of water, when I turn and run out of the bathroom.
*
It’s April. The mangoes are ripening. Orange-yellow skins, spotting a stipple of dots. I reach out for one. Then another. Soon, a bowl is full. I don’t think about going over to our neighbors’; I just find myself crossing the yard, cradling the bowl in my armpit. I’m not vigilant about the cacti. They zip through my arm as I duck past the fence, drawing a snake of blood. In the storeroom, I find a keg of herbicide. I beat off dust from the hose attached to it. Outside, I spray: every stem, every flower, the grass crawling through cracks in the tiled floor.
At my neighbours’, the husband is sitting on the veranda, his long legs studded with tight balls of hair. His son sees me. He nudges his father. The man looks up. There are smile breaks on his face, curved and beautiful. For a sweltering moment, I think I could fuck him, have a baby who wouldn’t be called the. “Neighbour, Neighbour,” he says, and asks his son to go get the bowl of mangoes—doesn’t he have respect?
The wife comes out quickly, as though she’d been expecting me. Her baby is at the crook of her arm, ominously placid. She lets me have her. The baby’s eyebrows, strangely, curve outwards, like concaves, dots of hair pale-brown against her flushed skin. I’m looking into her, smoothening the skin of her hands, but I’m away from here, away from the couch and the woman’s giggles. I’m a kite, clasping the baby in my beak, where I’d nurture her through infancy, through the day she’d say her first words, through the years she’d finish school and get married and have children and return home at Christmas, her eyes radiant with joy, her husband helping mine fix the fence in the yard, their children scuttling around, committing cute little crimes camouflaged as teenage mischiefs.
I don’t notice the child crying. There’s a grimace on her mother’s face when she reaches for her. I’m sure she’d ask me to leave, but when I visit the next day, bringing along one of the bears I’d bought for my baby, the woman is leaning on the balustrade, singing Neighbour, Neighbour, and almost simultaneously—I’m sure—asking her son to bring her friend a stool.
*
We have become real friends. Today, she allows me carry her baby and leaves the room to check on the fire. Alone, my thoughts are wild. What if I tiptoed out of the house with the baby? No one would see me. Her son is at school. Her husband is at work. Asides our house, there’s only a terrace of sunflowers and wild trees for a three-minute walk. I wouldn’t go home to my husband. He’d either alert the police or squish the baby to death with his ever-growing torns. I’d take the bus to another city, a faraway, improbable city, like Yenagoa or Damaturu, and I’d dissolve into the strange world I’d find there.
The baby is quiet, fixated on the TV. Her mother returns, twenty minutes later, carrying a tray of jollof rice, speckled with cucumber slices and carrot cubes. While we eat, she says, pointing at a Latina on TV, “I wanted to be like her.” She rambles about her dreams, her modelling career aborted in the pursuit of more pragmatic endeavors: marriage, childbirth, family. In her room are wallpapers of female celebrities. Rihanna in her beach body. Angelina Jolie and her long legs. Ariana Grande in her teenage smile. Helena Christensen with the frizzled hair. She reminisces on what she calls her glory years. Fresh from the polytechnic, where she’d studied Public Administration. Fresh out of a relationship with a boy she waves off with flippant ease, even though, she admits, she still misses him because he alone saw her. “What happened isn’t important,” she says before I could ask her. “I guess one has to be relieved of some things even though they’re good. Isn’t that what we call compromise?”
*
On my baby’s first remembrance, Maria’s daughter is five months old. We have become so much of friends we’ve exchanged names. She hates Maria. In her heart and head, she’s Desire. Even her surname, Okosodo, is Prime. Desire Prime—that’s the name of her imaginary clothing line. Desire Prime’s Thoughts: that’s what she scribbled on the front cover of her secret notebook, in which she details, in compact language reminiscent of Ezra Pound, all her dreams. She is a fan of literature, like me, and although she writes beautifully, she’d never be brave enough to call herself a writer. And yet she uses words like venust and beauteous and pulchritudinous when discussing fashion models or TikTok memes. And, today, she writes my baby a poem titled I Know Why The Free Sky Wails, modelled after Maya Angelou’s autobiography.
She’s sitting in our living room, holding the sheaf in one hand, her baby in the other. My husband is on the floor, working. Since the pandemic, he now works from home. All day, he sits there, his forehead wrinkled before the sepia light of his computer screen. At night, he climbs onto his side of the bed only after I’ve fallen asleep. He’s learnt to tuck his thorns between his legs. He’s paid someone to fell the mango tree. He’s seeing a therapist. A woman with a vague fashion sense, whom I stalk on Instagram and imagine my husband fucking. Some nights he doesn’t return home. Him on the phone, voice low and gruff: I’m staying at a friend’s; should be home first thing in the morning. I shrug, Whatever—while I see him inject his baby into the therapist’s womb. I don’t care—while the baby suckles her and he watches with heart-thumping awe. Other times he returns, squanders a full hour in the bathroom, squanders the next combing his hair, the next watching YouTube videos about Schopenhauer and the Pompeii ruins, the next writing frantic things along foolscap margins.
Maria rereads the poem on his request. The sky doesn’t weep forever. He bites his underlip. The same sky that sends the rain/sends sunshine/and rainbows/and auroras/and shooting stars/All at different times. He excuses himself, rather abruptly. I hear him plod down the corridor. There’s a continuous rain of water in the bathroom. These days he’s spending more and more time in the bathroom. Is he mourning the baby now, when it’s too late?
Later, Maria gets up to go. Her daughter is asleep. I let myself think she’d leave her with me, but Maria lifts her, offers me an apologetic wink. It says to me, No matter how many times you carry her, she’s not really yours. I watch her lips twist into a soft circle: “My husband will be back soon.” I’m thinking, But you said you didn’t want this life. Compromise sounds harmless on its surface, you once said, but it’s often used to describe women shedding their dreams on the lectern of marriage and motherhood. Remember you said so, Maria? You could leave your baby here. You trust I can take care of her, don’t you? We’re friends, aren’t we? But I’m only saying, “Okay, no problem. See you later.”
I stand by the window, watching her go. That’s when I notice my body swelling from the inside. On my left arm is a spreading patch of green. Thorns like stubbed bristles are jutting out of my knuckles. Cactiosis. That’s the term with which I describe my husband’s condition. The same affliction gradually crawling up on me now. I’m not scared, strangely. I half-expected this to happen. Hasn’t my husband, despite my warnings, been touching me? Isn’t his condition, like many others, communicable? To distract myself, at least for a while, I look outside. The sky flowers from a spiritless ash into brilliant orange. I’ve got cactiosis, I whisper into the evening. The mutations continue. Erect branches shooting out of my chest, shredding my argyle sweater, my skin, ringlets of semisolid blood hanging downwards, blooming into fruit-red flowers, their stigmas like needles. My headdress has fallen, allowing my hair to transform into a cacti bush. A pincer snakes out of my neck, curled like a tendril. I don’t feel any pain. No weird sensation, whatsoever. I’m only struck by wonder, almost divine.
Before the mob enshrouds all of my face, I tumble towards the bathroom. The shower is still on. A stream of water has meandered onto the hallway, not just soaking the door-mats but uprooting them, dragging them in its incredible current. Now a slab of cacti has blossomed out of my nostril. Gradually, it traces its way up my left eye. I can only see with my right, a definite circle of light wrapped tight by green gloom. The bathtub is full, expelling water in apocalyptic torrents. Inside it is my husband, his face warped into an expression I cannot deduce, his hands splayed, bubbles of water waltzing excitedly out of his mouth, his nostrils.
When I open my mouth to scream, only a sprinkle of stubbed stems come out. I manage to turn off the shower before my second eye is slammed shut. So much dark greenness. I grope around the bathtub. I lower myself beside my husband, pull my spiky knees up close, and shut what’s left of my eyes.
Ola W. Halim
Ola W. Halim is a 2022 fellow of the Literary Laddership for Emerging African Authors. His work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Lolwe, Iskanchi, adda, Isele Magazine, The Forge, and the Best Small Fictions 2024. In 2021, his short story, An Analysis of a Fragile Affair, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. A finalist for Gerald Kraak Prize 2022, his stories have received the Pushcart and Caine Prize nominations. Halim is currently working on his first novel.
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