Free Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé Page A

to school, however demoralizing or boring it had sometimes been.
    There was a separate entrance in the basement, now bricked over. Two slender windows near the ceiling were frosted and fitted with iron bars. He and Horus spent the rest of their childhood there, sleeping on a worn mattress piled high with blankets or stripped to the bone. Every meal (whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner) was a sandwich: baloney and a thick slab of cheese with a glass of water, or tuna fish and a glass of milk. To pass the time when they were not in school, he and Horus would look through the tiny windows and watch the shadowed feet go by outside and the squirrels that stopped in front of the glass. At night, the door at the top of the steps was locked. In secret, they kept an empty milk bottle to relieve themselves if they couldn’t wait until morning. From below, they listened to Uncle Randy’s television upstairs, blaring a sports game or the news. Some nights, when they couldn’t sleep for the cold or the heat, he and Horus lay on the floor along the wall, listening to the rats living behind the crumbling plaster crawl in and out of the tunnels they had made. They could feel the air moving through the cracks of their tiny halls, hear the freedom they were living.
    Manden was fireside to a burning rage back then, when he wished their father would rise from the grave and choke Uncle Randy for his cruelty, when he tried to conjure their mother and have her take wing from Utica to rescue them. “Mama is coming back,” he would say over and over, like a chant. Like a prayer. “Soon,” he’d say. After a while. One day. Had Horus wished for her too? Had he cried himself to sleep? He did not know, and in his own basement torments in their uncle’s house, a world away on the other side of the mattress, he did not cross the icy divide between them to ask. In the slow drip of helplessness, Manden came to view the world as an old house with many rooms, with many happenings behind closed doors. There were events in the common areas for all to see. And there was just as much wonder and spectacle in the time-stilled attic as in the decaying basement. God and the devil dwelled under the same roof, feet apart. Each listening to the other pad the hallways and creep up the steps.
    Manden walked on. The Autism Center wasn’t very far now. At that hour, store managers were still rolling back awnings, hosing down sidewalks, and putting out signs announcing the lunch special of the day. Walking the last block, Manden could see Brenda clearly on his approach, the center behind her, a box of mystery filled with children like Sephiri, yet all of them different in infinite, unfathomable ways. Without being conscious of it, he slowed his gait as he crossed the street and neared the entrance.
    â€œHello, Brenda,” he said when he got to the curb.
    Brenda nodded without speaking, distracted, Manden assumed, by Sephiri spinning nearby. He looked at her in the awkward pause. She was even bigger and heavier than she was when he saw her six months ago. A shiny brown wig sat atop her head like a mop. When she offered a thin smile, he could see her full cheeks push against the deep circles under her eyes. He was newly amazed at how different she was from the vibrant young woman he remembered. She was once a shapely thing, with a glorious smile and an air of vitality. Manden sometimes thought that had he been a different man, he might have reached out to Brenda now. But he was unreachable even to himself, and he felt incapable of helping her in spite of bearing witness to her self-destruction.
    Not that any of it mattered now. They had let the past be what it was. He and Brenda did not speak much, although they lived in the same city. They knew very little about each other’s adult life, other than the surface of things. Maybe because they knew too much of what lay beneath. Out of a vague sense of familial obligation, perhaps