Free The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

said nothing. Aya left him to undress and wash. Then she went downstairs and stared at the mother until the woman bent low with her fingers welded into pincers to support her head. When the son came down alone, there was life in his eyes again. He trembled in his clothes and reached for his mother, who clawed him up into her arms.
    And Aya didn’t warn the son about the mother’s food.

4

henry s. foote
    Amy Eleni’s hands. At first I was scared to let her wash my hair because I thought it would be too difficult for her. But really my hair is simple – once it is washed and fed with coconut oil, it sighs and falls asleep. And nobody washes my hair like Amy Eleni used to. Aaron is too gentle; he gets scared the minute he touches my scalp. But Amy Eleni puts one soft hand on my forehead and, with her other hand, rakes slippery fingers through my hair, comes back down with more air on the ends of her fingertips like seaweed fronds to breathe through underwater. But when she started seeing Sara, Sara insisted that she and Amy Eleni wash each other’s hair exclusively.
    Sara was an Art History student and she looked like a storybook pixie. She had a pointed nose and quirky eyebrows and there was always the slightest hint of glitter near her mouth. She would take half a lace curtain and a ribbon and tie it around herself over jeans and say, ‘Yeah, it’s a top.’ Apparently that was charming. Either way, the glass bottle of foamy aloe in Amy Eleni’s cabinet disappeared and was replaced with some shampoo with fruit and silk extracts, stuff that would break my simple curls in half.
    The shampoo was the first thing to go when Sara broke up with Amy Eleni. But I couldn’t rejoice; the break-up was too bad for that. Sara had decided to do her postgraduate degree outside London
    (‘______________ Uni’, Sara carefully drew dashes instead of a place name, as if worried that Amy Eleni might stalk her down there)
    and it was over in a note. We found the note just as we were about to watch Vertigo again. The viewing was a celebration; Amy Eleni had only been living in her new flat for a week. She sighed and chewed her thumbnail when she read it. She looked as if she was at the counter in a café, trying to decide what to have.
    To me she said, ‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to cry all over you.’
    The Sara-shampoo went out in a black binbag; we watched Vertigo , ate baklava and sneered at Sara’s glitter-mole. Amy Eleni was fine.
    But later in the evening she couldn’t mark the essays she had to mark, because her right hand felt broken. Amy Eleni laid her hand on her notebook and we both looked at it very carefully. I straightened out her fingers and let them curl up again; they were limp but strangely tough, like peeled prawns. Amy Eleni didn’t say anything while I stretched her fingers, but her whole body said ‘Don’t’.
    I asked, ‘Where exactly does it hurt?’
    Amy Eleni looked at me with eyes so honest that I couldn’t look back and found a spot on her temple to look at instead. She laid her head against my arm and said, ‘It’s the whole hand. I smell the broken bone. Can’t you? The smell, like potted beef. Get a knife and cut out the broken bone, cut it right out – this you can do. I don’t mind as I have another hand.’
    That note. Sara shouldn’t have done it. If she knew Amy Eleni at all she would know that Amy Eleni’s hysteric punches walls inside. I told Amy Eleni I’d mark the essays. She just had to come back together enough to tell me what marks she wanted me to give. Amy Eleni sat up straight and frowned and said, with dangerous civility, ‘I told you, a knife please; a rotten egg spoils the world.’
    I got her aspirin, bandaged her hand, and put her to bed with the weak promise of a knife later. She didn’t believe me. She turned her back on me. She lay there as quiet as church. I stayed up for a long time, marking essays on Amy Eleni’s sofa, trying to work out what Amy Eleni