Free Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé

house somewhere as a Goodwin should. They would carry on, he and his sister, as the good family their parents had forged, in their clear diction, culture and manners, and the high-yellow pallor of their skin.
    But all of this Maria had thrown away on Jack Thompson, a man from Nowhere, Louisiana. A man with no past and no future, who would lead his sister into the destitution that his sort of social protest guaranteed. It was not that Randy Goodwin was blind to the turmoil of events. Rather, it was that he was incapable of looking beyond the colored glass of his upbringing, where Goodwins were favored by the gods and by the status and connections that years of guarding their lightness and brightness had wrought. He couldn’t let his sister throw it all away in a temporary passion of the heart. He forbade her to marry in an explosive argument that would be the last time they saw or spoke to each other again. She had shouted back that she and Jack Thompson were marrying, that she was going back to New York with him. And if she were to strike out on her own, if she were to make a decision that was entirely hers, then what business of her brother’s was that? In any case, he was not her father, and she didn’t care how dark Jack Thompson was or what kind of family he came from, he was more of a man than her own brother would ever be.
    So no one knew that Uncle Randy felt all of this at the doorstep years later, when the caseworker came with Manden and Horus. He first noticed the darkness of his nephews, then looked into their faces and saw Jack Thompson living there still—him, the reason for his sister’s demise, the end of his parents’ muted hopes, the dilution of the family line that had taken generations to build, now changed forever. And in the two boys, Manden and Horus, he did not see his sister or the Goodwins at all and only saw the dark unknown of their father. And thinking of this in those seconds when he shook his nephews’ hands was much easier than thinking of his own empty life, which, save for his tax-accountant job, had been unremarkable, a failure in some ways, even, in its ordinariness. And that was when he had the thought that at last, he would have the chance to stomp out what was left of that black hooligan.
    But Manden, standing with his brother and the caseworker, shivering in the cold of their spectacular loss, could not have known about any of this on that first day in front of his uncle’s house. After the caseworker shook Uncle Randy’s hand, told him how the Lord would bless him, and left, Randy installed Manden and Horus in the basement, where there was no heat in the winter and no air-­conditioning in the summer. A thin metal stair rail, which wobbled in its concrete pegs if pushed or pulled too much, lined the narrow steps. Entering the basement had reminded Manden of when his father once took him and Horus to the caverns in Virginia, and from the top of the basement steps he almost expected to see an expanse of luminescent stalagmites and mirrored pools of water at the bottom.
    But it had not been so. His eyes, blinking in the dark as his uncle told him to take the first step down, had been unbelieving at first. Then, slowly, he began to understand. In the gloom, on the third step down, with Horus close behind him, Manden heard the creaking noise of the dry, rotting wood, which would be forever imprinted on his mind. The sound of the third step would stay with him always. It marked Uncle Randy’s daily approach to bark an order, to remind them not to be like their misguided father and their fragile mother, to say that he was making men of them. The creaking third step was perceptible from every other sound in the world. It was the signal of descent into a long and uncomfortable night. The sound, too, was the trumpet of their daytime escape from their uncle’s manhood-training tyranny, for its sound meant two steps to the unlocked door, to the outside,