Free Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé Page B

out of some subconscious desire to cobble together some closeness between brothers, Manden once took Horus and Brenda out to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant as a gesture of goodwill after the sudden news of the engagement, as a gesture to celebrate something he had no plans of ever experiencing. Ethiopian was her favorite, Brenda had said, pulling pieces of injera bread apart and dipping it into heaps of spiced peas and tomatoes.
    Manden remembered how she talked incessantly at the awkward engagement dinner like a bird tweeting in the trees—about her new job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about all the wonderful things Horus had done for her since they met, about the rowhouse they were buying together and how it had exposed brick with the original molding, about all the money they would be saving for the honeymoon by going to the justice of the peace. It had been a long time since he and Horus had sat together with a woman who was smiling. Her skin glowed in the candlelit room. They were both speechless in its presence, gathered around her like a warm fire.
    And Manden had wanted Brenda then, although he would never have touched her. He wanted his brother’s woman. But it was not because of her pretty legs or the soft halo that framed her beautiful face. Or how well versed she seemed to be in literature and politics. It was her regal ways. Her sweet charm. It was a loveliness that reminded him of their mother, before her voyage. Before their father’s blood had seeped down under Manden’s fingernails. The redness that stayed long after he locked himself in the bathroom and washed his hands with bleach, long after he scrubbed them with steel wool, so that he could no longer tell whose blood was running down the sink.
    Horus was only seven when their father was murdered. Did he remember Mama the way she was before all of that? Before what came after it, the staring out the window and the house visitors and the white robes and the institution she died in? He wondered if Horus remembered the big, fluffy pancakes she made for them on Saturday mornings. The steel-drum sound of her voice that filled the house. The way she laughed at his tenth birthday party that January. How she sang when she was cooking dinner and set the dishes on the table as if each one was a crystal chalice.
    Manden remembered watching Brenda pick up the restaurant goblet at their little engagement dinner party and how he thought of venetian glass and sterling silver. In the presence of her svelte skin, all butterscotch and creamed caramel, he thought of neat plates of chocolates arranged on a coffee table. Of steaming coffee and gingerbread. Of the comfort and order that used to be. These feelings had always made Manden uncomfortable in Brenda’s presence. He couldn’t stand the sense that he was trying to hold on to something pure under dirty circumstances. And for years, it was this feeling that kept him distant from Brenda when she could have used his sympathy and understanding the most, even when she called him with a secret too heavy to carry alone.
    She called a few weeks after the verdict to say that she was pregnant. In the silence, they listened to each other breathe through the phone. “Remains,” she’d said at first. That was how she first described the unborn child. Like a fossil of some ­fantastic creature known only in mythical lore. Manden had wanted to contest ­Brenda’s choice of silence, but he could not think of any reason telling Horus about his child would be better than keeping it from him. And he was plagued by a new kind of guilt atop the burden of knowing his brother had taken revenge for their father’s death and he had not. It lodged itself in his heart like botfly larvae, growing ever larger through the nine months of Brenda’s pregnancy, ­bursting through him when she called to say that it was a boy.
    â€œHello, Manden,” Brenda said now, with a thin