“Don’t be sorry because your mouth run. Be sorry only if it stop.”
I take the new grain into the kitchen while he follow.
“You remind me of someone or something. Something I don’t know . . .”
I used to think that certain things have a way how they supposed to be done, or a way you supposed to do them. Even when I don’t know what way the custom, there should be a custom and somebody, an older woman perhaps, who should know. But what to say about a woman who born in a hut with boys, and only know of woman who try to use her? And what to say when the only older woman she can think to ask about what come to pass is the wife of the same man she is about to fuck? We wordless because I don’t have any and he choose none. I thought I would think these are the things that must happen but I not thinking at all. He move over to me like he is about to leave the room, but he brush close, even though great space there be between me and the doorway. I smell iron on him, chain mail marking the red tunic, and he sniff me like he hungry. My nose follow a trail around his neck, my hands bolder than his, under his tunic and pulling down more cloth and grabbing his cock and feeling all the way to the loose skin and squeezing and moving down until my fingers discover balls that I grab too hard and he moan and shiver. I push him to one side of the doorway and he push me to the other side and I listen for squealing children but only for a blink, for his hands circling between my legs, then gone inside me, then circling me again, and then my gown is off so quick I don’t remember when it was on. And then he sucking my right nipple so hard he pull out a cry and I yanking the red tunic off his body but it stuck at his neck, and through the cloth he hunt for my nipple again and I watch a gluttonous red shroud suck me. I want to discover him, since I yet to discover a man, I want to run my hand over the washing board between his chest and his cock but can’t leave his cock for it is growing in my hand. And growing. Bigger and bigger and bigger still, and if I was a thinking woman I would remark on how big it getting, and not quitting getting bigger. Big not in way of thinking what it going do to me if I let him, but big in a way that you want to whisper to another woman so both of you can squeal in the marketplace, and she can tell you nasty things like when he burst he going to knock out your womb, fly up your neck, and launch through your nose. A noise bring me back, something like a growl, like an animal but it gone, and I say get out of your head, no name woman, and he lift me up and I wrap my legs around him, and I smell dinner on his breath, dinner that for once I help cook, and this make me feel that I make him ready for this night, and he hold me with one hand and take the other to guide his arrow straight into me.
This is not a big house, but in it we always find space unbothered by anybody. Times come when I feel we in another house, or a room set off from the rest, for I shout when he fuck me now, and nothing go tumbling and nobody come running. He take it for sport, I start thinking, for he don’t work my body until I done work his mind first, so much that certain afternoon before it even go dark, my mind worried about what small thing I can make deep, what stupid thing I can make smart. It is enough for me to wonder in the days what he truly come to me for. All of this I forget when I squat down onto him or he swim into me. Two moons later when I tell him to squeeze me harder and fuck me stronger he don’t take it as invite to war, or to best me, just something for a gentler hand, and for drawing runes on me with his tongue, and hammering me with his hips. I hold his buttocks and play in between them and make him moan to me the way I moan. The moan make me look up, to a brass shield in the corner, so shiny that I often catch myself. But this time I am not the woman that I catch in it.
“Gods!”
I jump off him to grab the nearest thing that look like cloth, a zebra skin that stick to the floor. I try to hide behind it, supposing that in a blink I going to get a slap, or a scream, or a knife through the neck. Or see a dagger cut through to his neck, but he just lie back and put hands behind his neck, not looking at anything while cock still stand tall in the dark. His look say to me that he would like me to climb back on top of him, but if I didn’t that would be fine too. When I look again at the shield, the sight gone. Is another four moons of the two of we stealing fucks that she come up to me in the grain keep. We doing the things for so long now that I forget to think about her, so I am thinking she going to cuss about how much sorghum go to waste when I trick the children into thinking pounding grain is the greatest game.
“Soon and very soon you going to feel sick. Whatever enter your mouth going leave through your mouth more than your back hole, you understand?”
“No, I don’t understand.”
“A little sicky-sicky is usual business. But if your sickness get worse then we have to see the potion master, you understand?”
“I don’t know what y—”
“If you more sick than usual, he going be happy. That mean is a girl, girl.”
Yétúnde gone back in the house before I catch what she mean.
* * *
—
You would think that with all of this, you would cut such thoughts loose, say a voice in my head that sound like me. Look at how your hands get full with three children who are not yours but are now yours, and with duties around a house that always end right as another one start, and with something like a purpose, and with a man who send you past the brink four or five times a night before he leave your room, or his room, or the kitchen, or behind the big tree, and with a first wife who don’t raise fuss when you start to act like second wife or first concubine. Look at how your hands are full, but you empty out your mind every morning to make space for him. Him who you don’t want to meet in a dream for he will rule you there, but who take over your mind many times when awake, so that when you’re still burning the food, or wasting the water, it is because you make him take up space in your head. And you don’t let him leave until you think of another way to kill him.