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1.

Forget everything you know about childhood memories and how sweet they sound when retold; ten, twenty, and many years later. Forget playing ten-ten under the tree with tattered panties and bare nipples long before you knew how to wear bras and singlets. Forget visiting the park and blowing cold tufts of ice cream off your gums. Forget walking through the street and begging your siblings for half a cob of roasted corn. Forget new Christmas clothes and Thanksgiving turkey. Forget everything you know about childhood memories.

Picture the streets of Owo; somewhere in Ondo with falling mud houses in between corrugated aluminum-roofed buildings. Picture smooth-edged mountains, sitting on the far end of the streets, draped in green and crowned with fog. Picture Kesandu, her black and yellow teeth flashing when she snarls at children; stabbing her bouncy breasts into the faces of people; picking dead skin from the cracked soles of her feet; sitting at the tail end of the street, clapping her hands at invisible flies.

But that is not how this story begins.

2.

Her name was Kesandu; you already know this. But you do not know that she had a round face that housed a gap tooth people said was cute whenever she smiled or laughed at funny things. She laughed even when nothing was funny, revealing her tooth at every chance she got.

She was thirteen when her mother made her the pepper grinder. Her mother knew that her fingers, like wads of wool, were soft. She knew Kesandu could not sweep the floors or fan the charcoal stove without getting blisters. It was not because she thought Kesandu was going to grow up to be a disgrace to womanhood that she made sure only Kesandu ground the pepper. If not, she would have insisted Kesandu learned how to sweep, too, to draw vivid spirals on the floor with brooms. No. It was because of how soft Kesandu’s fingers were, soft enough to always find their way up and between her thighs. Her mother had hated herself for almost bashing Kesandu’s head in with the butt of a broom the day she caught her and her soft fingers. From that day Kesandu was the pepper grinder, as punishment.

Her mother made sure those soft fingers were always peppery, so she wouldn’t have to hit Kesandu with the broom again, so Kesandu wouldn’t fall down, wouldn’t roll her eyes into the back of her head and gasp for breath, or—god forbid—hit her head on the hard floor and shake her legs like a dying hen.

Her mother had told her that women should never have soft fingers, at least not like hers. Because it was not a good thing for a woman her age to touch herself beneath the sheets. It was never a good thing for any woman at any age. But her mother did not know that Kesandu’s fingers weren’t just soft, but smart, too. They learned to grind carefully and to scrape the pepper off the grinding stone with a spoon.

One day, while her mother was across the street, picking Ugwu leaves from Mama Dera’s compound, Kesandu was busy touching herself. She had hidden beneath her mother’s old blanket which smelled of old urine from when she used to bedwet, to touch herself again. The tingle that attacked her fingers almost immediately was not enough. She wanted more. She knew she could get more, like the women she had seen on her father’s phone; joyfully moaning naked women she thought were in paradise. She curled her fingers into a fist and shoved them up her thighs.

Pain rocked through her. Hot and liquid, it crashed into her like a wave, threatening to bury her under. She held it between the muscles of her lips. She forced it down. When she pushed the blanket off her body, the floor was painted in her blood. She told no one.

3.

Mama Dera was not a woman, even though she was a mother. She was not a woman in the way women are expected to be. Women have husbands. Women don’t build houses. Women don’t talk back at men in gatherings. But to Kesandu and her mother, Mama Dera was a woman, and though full of mysteries, she lived in a gated house next door, and in her compound were endless shrubs of scentleaf, a garden of green African spinach, green and red balls of habanero peppers.

The first time Kesandu’s mother sent her to Mama Dera to ask her for 100 naira, was the second time her blood painted the floor. That day, gloomy clouds had wrinkled the yellow disc of the sun. She was fourteen and her mother, five years after her last miscarriage, was pregnant again.

“As soon as you enter her compound, you must kneel,” her mother said. Then she started counting the leftover firewood outside the verandah with pouty lips, while Kesandu stared at her father’s rooster as it flapped its feathers and chased the hen that had once taught it how to pick grain and hide from hawks. Kesandu wondered in amusement, how the mother hen allowed her son to climb her; how everyone thought it was not, well, strange.

Her mind was not with her when her mother said, “You have to greet her like a proper woman, and you must not look into her eyes,” drawing on the dewlaps of her ears and stretching her swollen face. Her wrapper was tied around her waist and she wore an old orange blouse that hid her pregnancy.

Even though many people asked Mama Dera for money, and she gave them as much as she could, rumors of how unclean her wealth was still spread like wildfire. That her eyes were her charms. That she stole people’s glories just by staring into their eyes; glories she somehow managed to turn into wealth.

As soon as she got back and gave her mother the money, blood began to stream down Kesandu’s legs; painting the floor with red dots. Her mother was frightened and immediately drew her close to herself.

“Did you look into her eyes? Did you kneel when you greeted her? Were you not polite? Did I not teach you well?”

And before she could answer any of her mother’s questions, her mother’s hands went up her thighs, inspecting. She sighed and said, “It is your menses. I wonder why you had no cramps.”

4.

Kesandu had just turned fifteen, determined to celebrate the day, pinching off the pimples on her face. She daubed her face with powder, smeared her lips with her mother’s lipstick, and smacked them. As she wound her mother’s bra around her growing breasts, her mind wandered down the lanes of her memories. She thought about what grinding pepper had done to her fingers, and about the rags she used during the early days of her menstruation, her mother’s babies, her brothers dying before they could see the brightness of the sun or taste the sweetness of Breastmilk. Realizing what her childhood was, growing up alone, scrubbing the blood of her dead brothers off the floor every time her mother miscarried, and having to be there for her mother on those dark days, she burst into fits of laughter. She laughed till her head ached.

One hot afternoon, her mother had gone to the market and her father had strangely returned home to catch her laughing into the mirror. It was strange because her father was never around. He was always playing draught under the trees and sampling bars and restaurants. He returned home when he was hungry to demand the food he never left money for, and got angry when the plates were empty.

Nonetheless, her father knew that normal people did not laugh like that. They did not laugh into mirrors while aggressively pulling their hair, teeth, or nose. When her father saw her laughing, he wobbled towards her, close enough that his thighs pressed themselves against Kesandu’s back.

“Why are you laughing like that?”

Kesandu turned from the mirror and laughed into her father’s face. His expression twisted in disbelief.  But as she turned back to face the mirror, to continue her laughter, her hand absently brushed against his thighs. She felt him. Her father, devoid of shame, unbelted himself and climbed her. Kesandu wanted to push him away. She didn’t.

Her mother returned early enough to catch her husband violently thrusting into her daughter. She tried to find her voice, to shout. To find the strength to twirl her husband’s shirt around his neck till he was dead. She couldn’t. She just stood there, watching.

5.

One Friday evening and many months have passed, Kesandu, a new mother, recovering from the trauma of a Ceaserian Session, was standing five meters from where her mother knelt, fanning the charcoal stove. Kesandu’s 8-month-old baby strapped to her mother’s back. She wondered how the baby slept so peacefully, how the smoke did not pepper her eyes.  She watched her mother unwrap locust beans from dry banana leaves and put them into the pot of boiling water. At that moment, Kesandu wanted to untie her baby from her mother’s back, sit her on the floor, and turn the boiling water over her mother’s head.

Her mother was savoring the strong smell of locust beans stinging the air, almost strong enough to taste when Kesandu blurted.

“Wicked woman!”

Her mother turned to face her. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yes, I said you are wicked.”

“Me?” her mother said, hitting her chest.

“A mother catches her husband on top of her daughter. And what does she do? What did you do Mama?”

“Be quiet!” her mother snarled. “Do not invite ghosts from the past. Let it stay dead. Besides, you were the one flaunting yourself all over the house.”

And that was when it happened. She wanted to ask her mother where else she was supposed to flaunt herself. She wanted to shout at the top of her voice till people gathered around them, to make them ask her mother why she decided to stay with a man like her father. She was going to make them ask her why she let her sixteen-year-old daughter have a child for her husband. But thinking the better of it, she channeled the anger to her mother’s face, slapping and scratching her eyes with her soft fingers.

That day, she ran away and never returned.

6.

In the streets of Owo, there are screeching tires and crazy honking bus drivers. There are heads popped out of bus windows, screaming at Kesandu to leave the road. They are all twisting their faces. She can see them; she can see all of them. She sees the woman, unmoved by what is happening outside the bus, breastfeeding a child. She sees the bald man lost in thoughts. She sees two schoolchildren in dirty uniforms who keep staring at her. And a whole lot of other angry faces that keep yelling at her.

Kesandu is determined to die. But no one is going to hit a madwoman in broad daylight.