Male Sea Horses

Tolu ogunlesi
 

She flips her diary open. The room is
hot, but she doesn’t make any effort to
switch the fan on. Somewhere in the neigh-
bourhood, she can hear a fight - the stammering
of an angry wife, the generously measured
cursing of a mother-in-law, the screaming
silence of a husband-son...

She fills in the date on a fresh page.

Feb 21, 200...9.

It is getting hotter.The air is very stiff. She drowns herself in it.

*

Hi.
As you jolly well know, today is a big-deal day in my life. My daughter and I share a birthday, and today is one of such days. I am nineteen. And Nife is five. We have both changed a lot. Nife is a smart, beautiful little woman, who laughs like it is going out of fashion. She is much slimmer now - not like how she looks in her baby pictures. She always clutched an edible in those pictures, not too odd for a child who learned to pronounce biscuit before mommy. Big Aunty saw her last week and said she was going to win a beauty contest before she became twenty. Why not. If not. Will I encourage her? Of course. I would have been a model myself, and maybe a beauty queen. But not anymore. Not no more. You’ve passed up your chance, become a premature woman- I feel I’ve been around forever. People don’t see all that. They walk up to you and tell you you look like a candidate for a beauty pageant. When you know you’re just a well-preserved mummy. I’ve been wondering how things would have been like if they had happened differently. A nineteen year old should be in her second year of University. And on her second or third boyfriend. But if things had happened differently, they would have happened differently. Nife would never have been. Y’know, when people are not born when they are born, they can’t come as themselves anymore. If Nife hadn’t been born then, she wouldn’t have ever come again as Nife. The unborn Nife would have been unassembled and used to make another person, if you get what I mean...My God! I have become a philosopher. I Think, therefore I am.
No! I Sinned, therefore I am!...

*

There’s a radio documentary on. Some babbling about Marine Life. Something about sea horses. The narrator’s voice picks up a needle-and-thread, and proceeds to gently, unhurriedly weave itself into her thoughts. She waits for it to go far, then clamps down with her finger. On the switch.

*

...My own male sea horse is a ClubBoy. Lost in college, partying all night long and sleeping all day long. At least he must have learned his lesson. He most likely now uses imported condoms. Made in Nigeria ones seem to be made of cloth, not rubber...

*

The heat is lifting. A gust of wind lifts the curtain. She feels exposed, as if a cage has been lifted up from around her. She grasps for the heat again, but it is gone.

The wind lifts the page of the diary. Blows it over to the previous day.

The date on that page is in green ink, so it naturally stands out.

Feb 20, 2004.
*

2004. She sighs, turns the page to today and draws huge lines across all she’s just written. Urgent matters have to be sorted out, if she wants the canceling she has just done to be more than merely wishful. How she wishes the quick strokes of a pen could sort everything out, erase Nife, erase everything. She thinks of going back to tear the crossed-out pages from the diary.

That may be a good omen.

It may help her in starting on a fresh page.

It may help to prevent one version of her future from coming to pass.  

*  *  *

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