"Tomosóko (Yellow sun)"

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A Yoruba myth, t’omo s’oko—“lure the child to the forest”—heralds the spirit of the truant evening, the first sudden rapture of the dark that ensues after the receding sun.

They lay on a mat, staring at their fingers, at how they curled around one another above them like an incomprehensible portrait. A bird knocked its beak on the wet roof outside. Somewhere in the small cracks of the wall hung the half of a dead large spider; its legs had frayed apart like a freshly watered flower. Raindrops slid down the rafters, the air smelt of soaked wood, of will, and they were saying nothing.

That evening, Koyi was cutting the fins of an *eja aro, scrubbing a pot for soup before the sky turned watery and the liquid aroma of waterleaf seeds mixed with the damp floor. She had been joyful for quite a while, talking about how they had successfully fled town together for the **aba, retelling herself how it made her feel strong again, and, from her brightness, Bodun’s head ached. He had swooped Koyi on his back like an eager infant when their journey reached the middle of the forest and they were laughing loudly through the low tree branches until they saw the hill, and then the farmhouse, the gaunt shed posed like a sacred dot on the horizon. So when Koyi mentioned the word ‘together’ and she was not looking, he had smiled.

‘After my bridal night, I want to have a twin,’ Koyi said after a period of silence. She held Bodun’s hand and parted two fingers gently. ‘I cannot bear to watch our child grow into a lonely world.’

She had been wrapped in her own silence after the rain stopped and now, she uttered every word of hers with something that seemed to Bodun like her one reasoned desire in a long time since their lips first touched; the candidness of which made his moment with her on the ground seem much longer than the small hours, seem surrounded by light. Koyi’s food was sweet-smelling. He needed to say something.

‘I miss this, Koyi. I miss you,’ he said.

‘I’ve always known this place, always wanted to stay in it with you,’ there, in her reply, was a sweetness she could not hide or, all the more, cared less about hiding.

‘And after a twin, you stop?’

‘Is that what you would want?’ she was staring at his chin.

‘For our bed to know no stillness, that’s what I want,’ he nudged her waist teasingly and she laughed.

She felt a strange happiness, grateful for the warmth in the way Bodun had finally used ‘our’. The boy hardly even spoke. She felt that same strangeness when she brought him his gourds of wine and stared at his neck. There was always something to be unexplained about it, something that demanded a secret staring. A kerosene lamp, turned to its lowest, was right next to him. The blinking cast a shadow the shape of cocoyam over the mat, over the loose earth-coloured tufts of hair on his leg. She watched his sweaty back mirror the evening and noticed how compact yet agile he was, how immortal yet hungry. She enjoyed his stealth, the way he caught her often gazing and gazing, moulding her morsels more unhurriedly than she used to, the way he would smile after some time and not ask why he saw colours on her face.

From the moment that she saw him storm out of his father’s barn at Ijowon, furious and wielding an axe, calling out on deities to mind their paths; she had quietly convinced herself that Bodun was an agile spirit, masked, the stout breed among the buffering crowd about to take form. Most of this town would prefer to skulk, to question nothing—not the carried talks of rabid spirits, the husky voices of arrogant priests; not the diseased brook that was once a silvery rush of water or the brokenness that hung over the town like a warning. Most of this town would tell the stories of how she was born a bride to a yellow sun, a grievous apparition.

‘Does he visit you at night?’ young girls like her would ask, and then scamper in giggly voices. Others would say, ‘Mind the manner with which you greet that girl. Tomosoko is a bitter spirit. The eyes that watch his love may go blind.’

One afternoon, she heard men whispering to themselves as she walked, muttering something about breasts and the magic of healing. She felt their fear, most of this town. It was because she disliked the shunning thought of being unusual, insular or perhaps it was because she never wanted to believe that she was. And so when, from the dusty haze of her compound, she saw a young man outside, barely trounced, shouting in the sunny breeze; she felt a surge run through her, an uncanny surge, one that mutated into a watery yearning.

A sparse throng had gathered round Bodun. As he spoke, his eyes strayed and were darkened with wrath. ‘Someone had better tell him! Tell Orunmila that the works of my father and his son are no dice for a god’s gamble. Only pathetic gods gamble!’

‘Caution your tongue, you!’ came a voice from the swarm. It was Abuke, the town blacksmith. The ageless heat of iron had made the old man caustic-mouthed, his gait an evidence of tragedy.

‘Oh caution is but a bargain. I settle that only when our gods finally understand why the hoe drags,’ Bodun raised his hoe towards the sloped barn behind him. ‘My rafters have seen no tubers in months.’

‘But, you cannot blame spirits. Only lepers have the pleasure’

‘Look old man, stop putting fear in the minds of everyone here,’ he spat on the dust and drew close to a child. ‘You should be telling these ones the grounds of their future are full of war.’

‘No one destined for good speaks like you have done. You will rain down heat on your fire,’ Abuke continued to shout. Bodun was a blind child. Bodun did not bear the good of his mother and sisters at heart. Bodun was defiant like his dead father. If Bodun refused to pay the levy of appeasement, to present four goats to the priests—an atonement for his loose tongue—Bodun would be stricken dead, forgotten like ***ebo in the evil forest, and like his father, again. Let Bodun be wise.

There was a rotten smell in the air, of raw mashed yam and wet bamboo. When Abuke finished, Koyi, from a distance, watched. As the crowd melted, she ran inside and returned with an empty basket.

‘God-Trouble!’ she called out, running down the spot. ‘Imagine what it is to watch a man strip a god naked to the world and have him live just across.’

Bodun stopped to look and was silent for a while. ‘What did you say?’ there was a slight amazement in his voice. It sounded also like eagerness.

‘I have only come to help,’ she said with a half-smile and picked a broken tuber of yam from the ground into her basket. She drew closer to him and whispered, ‘You know, just my own share of the fight.’

Bodun smiled and said an indistinct good evening. Surprising himself, he felt suddenly significant. His neck burned from the hot air but it was a different air, an air of acceptance and friendship he had longed for since he last saw his father, an air that was not the gnashing callousness which stopped him a minute ago. Some young girls were hopping around playfully under the mango tree and something had caught their attention, something in Koyi’s direction. A woman stood by the eaves blowing melon seeds and was staring. For a moment, he watched Koyi pick the seeds and vines, gracefully bent and moving in circles. He imagined a fragile moonbeam in her place and then realised the anxious face of his mother from the shadowed yard of his barn.

‘These are quite famished,’ Koyi inspected her full basket, although she did not know how to soothe him. She began to rummage through the pile. From the close tree, someone stifled a mocking laughter.

‘Here, have this one washed and boiled this night. It will be enough for a good meal,’ she handed Bodun the bruised sliver and slowly walked away. On the brink of heaven, out of the dusky sky grew the bright patina of a receding sun; its yellow thimble inspired a rank scent, and it was awful and nose-filling. And yellow.

* Dark catfish

** Farmstead

** *Divine appeasement