Naana Eyikuma Hutchful
My mother builds an empty home.
We move out of our old life with the quickness that only a natural disaster rouses, with only the clothes on our back, my eldest brother lounging behind to grab his analog radio.
We fill the house with whatever we find. A small sofa we find down at the market square, an adorned mirror with a jagged end we learn to be careful with when it summons blood out of my brother’s ring finger, chemistry books that have been piled high behind a particularly studious window, a three-legged table with an unbreakable spirit.
We find mimosa plants and shame them into closing their leaves, whispering “kata so ho, mmɛma wo ha”—cover yourself, there are men here. There are life plants overshadowed by crown of thorns. There is a mango tree that peeks out over our neighbor’s fence. My brother climbs over the fence, anchors himself against a sturdy branch and rains down mangos with the benevolence of a small god. In the back of the house is an alive forest. My brothers snake around the forest after it rains, looking for snails. We boil them on small makeshift hearths. We suck out flesh and congratulate each other on our cleverness. They pierce another hole into my left ear and we bet how long it would take for my mother to notice. Though sometimes her eyes lock into my face, I was only positional, like a telescope, and she a scientist searching for something that was spiraling farther from her reach, she never does. My brothers bring me trinkets from their escapades into the town. They whisper ghost stories into my ear in the middle of the night. I cannot sleep until my brothers perform their special ritual, a slow saunter around the room, twirling around a whip, bumping their chest against each other, asking the ghosts to leave if they weren’t strong enough to face them. In return I do their chores. I have complete faith in them. My brothers carry me over their shoulders, throwing me up in the air, pretending to forget to catch me until I start screaming, my giggles of pleasure the only sound echoing across our little ghost town.
We settle into the mosaic desolation of our ghost house. Over time my brothers find new friends to climb trees with, amble around town like a mildly crucial side quest, and my company becomes a chore. I make no friends. I can only nestle with my mother. I lay in her lap at night looking at the stars, looking at the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, looking at an empty sky. She runs her fingers through my hair, sings hymns I do not recognize, tells me how all the alive people at the townhouse tread carefully around her, how there is something satisfying about being this shell of a person she has become.
I think about killing myself. I think about running away. I think about becoming my mother, vacant, breakable, gray. My mother is a corn husk with a wilted tassels and I think that I should get on with it, the running away or the suicide. I prepare myself for death. I think of my grandmother’s well-groomed body, how it was the first I had seen her without the forehead crease that often looked starched on, how she looked like she had reached her hand out for a bird to perch on, to whistle a tune back at it, to chirp until she was light on her feet, until she could take off into the sky.
I only know things in the way that they would change. I have time, a collapsed eternity of it and nothing else. I learn to yearn, to sit at windows, to look between the oblong-elliptic shade of the mango leaves and to only see the winding end of things.
My father visits every other night. He is a half-alive person. He can never spend the night in the ghost house. He and my mother sit in the front of the house, for the few hours she allows him to be here, the air tight around my mother’s mouth. She trails through the mental note of topics to break him out of the monotonous mmms with which he responds to her questions, the noncommittal nodding and shaking of the head, the obligatory nature of their present circumstances. Before he leaves, he shakes our hand like the conclusion of a business meeting. Sometimes he pats us uncertainly on the head in mock affection, mumbles something about being good—listen to your mother—makes a comment about how much bigger we have gotten. From behind the door my mother watches this through the corner of her eye.
When he leaves my mother takes off her ghost uniform. She lays spread eagle on her bed, which is not really a bed, just the idea of one, worn-out cushions we picked up from a neighbor, together mimicking a bed. She thinks about the man who is not really her man, just the idea of one, just pieces she picks up from the other alive women, mimicking all the things she needs him to be.
When our ghost house empties out, my brothers on another meaningless chaos trek through the forest, my mother picking up odd jobs at the townhouse, I make clay molds of my mother and father. I make them into alive people, happy, together. They touch each other tenderly, he places his hand on her thigh, they watch the sky together and he says her laughter is like music. He puts color into the sky, a staggering baby blue. He winds the edges of my mother back together until they smooth into flush skin. He writes her name on the moon, punctuates it with a beating heart. He makes her alive.
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Naana Eyikuma Hutchful (they/them) is a Ghanaian writer with work appearing in Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, Unbroken Journal, and forthcoming elsewhere. They like sunrises, baja blasts, and Wong Kar Wai films.