“Are you all right? Why didn’t you send someone?” “Mama! Gini mere?!” Chika cried when he saw her, running up the veranda stairs. She had fine wrinkles around her eyes, hair plaited into tight cornrows, and her left foot was bandaged and propped up on a stool. Ahunna’s wrapper was tied around her waist, leaving her breasts bare, and her skin was redder than Chika’s, deeper and older, like a pot that had been bled over in its firing. The next photograph in the stack would be of Chika’s mother, Ahunna, sitting on her veranda when her son arrived, a bowl of udara beside her. He had looks that should have lived forever, features he passed down to Vivek-the teeth, the almond eyes, the smooth skin-features that died with Vivek. The women on the bus looked openly at him, his white shirt billowing out from the back of his neck in a cloud, and they smiled and whispered among themselves because he was beautiful. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.Ĭhika was twenty and as tall as his mother, six feet of red skin and suntouched-clay hair, teeth like polished bones. If this story was a stack of photographs-the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country-it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.
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