THE INTROSPECTION CHRONICLES 6 | THE BLACK BOOK

The sun is vanishing again. I muttered as I look at the sky fade to darkness. Mother used to say that. She used to say many things. She used to sit on the front porch and point at different things – birds nesting, lizards mating, dogs scratching and men. She used to say many things about men and none of them where ever good things. They took her away after she stabbed Mr. Okoro with a pen. Mr. Okoro had bled all over his bed. The pen didn’t write again after the stab and it was her favorite pen. She used to use it to write stories. She never read them to me. She said she would release evil on the earth if she set the stories free. Mother said many things.

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_{Unsplash: Aaron Burden}

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Mother had a big book that was always close to her. The book back was black and it was filled with her neat scribbles and drawings. She used blue ink for some parts and some parts she used black ink. She also drew different diagrams of nothing I had ever seen. I spied it one time. She had drunk her afternoon tea and feeling drowsy as she was wont to be after drinking whatever it was, she had slumped like a limp rag doll on her favorite chair and had soon snored away. I had walked up to pick the leg of my doll when I saw her lips slack with sleep. I sat beside the stool and brought the book down. I opened it and I saw the diagram of a man. He had a whip in his hands, the whip had several heads, and each tip of the whip had a face, a screaming face. His face was blank – no nose, no eyes, no mouth. She had drawn him with red ink. I saw all of this in the span of a feather touching the earth. I pushed the book away, upsetting the stool, breaking her teapot and cup, waking her from sleep. She had been raving mad that day. The words she said…

Sometimes when she was not writing or drawing or telling me fanciful tales, or pointing at men, or drinking that strange tea, she would sew me dresses. She sewed beautiful dresses. She would say I was a princess and deserved a princess’ dress. Mother could have been a wealthy tailor if she set her heart to it but she only sewed for me. She bought her own dresses but for me, she marched that sewing machine into the night. My dresses were always light and soft like fairy dust, like sea foam, like all the fanciful things a younger me could think of to name. Whenever I asked her to make clothes for sale, she would scoff and push her glasses back to the bridge of her nose and tell me in her raspy voice that no one deserved her sewing.

Mother was strange. She never left the house after 6 pm and she never allowed a man to cross the porch, no matter who he was. The landlord was afraid of her but his wife was a tartar. She would come on Sunday mornings because she knew mother didn’t go to church. She would be dressed in one of those store bought gowns, a feathered hat perched on an ungodly angle on her head and her heels as tall as her own legs. She would bark and bark at mother from her height. Mother would rock in her rocking chair and peer at her through her thick glasses with that absentminded smile of hers. Mother used to tell me that the landlord’s wife was frustrated. She needed to get laid more, she used to say then she would cackle and pat me on the head.

Mother used to smell funny. I could never name the smell. It was sickly sweet and in the evenings - some evenings, not all evenings, her room was always filled with the scent floating from a big pot like thing. At those times, she would be unable to speak and I knew not to disturb her – those where the good nights. The bad nights where when she could not get that smoking thing in her room, she would not sleep but would open her windows and rave into the night. She would rain curses on any and every thing and I was no exception. She would spew evil from her lips, her eyes wild, her face scrunched in a grimace of pain, her lovely hair scattered all over her head like a bush attacked by an unruly wind. I would cry those nights but in the morning, she would be there on my bed, her body shielding me from the floor and the first flare of the morning sun. I loved her.

When I told her that Mr. Okoro had touched me down there, something left her. The light left her eyes, I saw it, I swear. I have never seen it before then but I would see it in my eyes through the mirror some years later and I would know it for what it was - deep abiding pain. Her eyes had darkened and she wilted before my eyes. She wept before me for a long time. I have never seen her cry. She kept on saying she had failed and she kept on telling me that she was sorry. That day she made me fresh fish pepper soup and yam with a flat plate stained with palm oil mixed with salt to dip the pepper soup soaked yam into. This was my favorite dish. She didn’t eat but drank her tea until her eyes became too heavy for her to open. Her words slurred and her hands became limp. I thought she had fallen asleep as she sometimes did when she had too much of the brew. I did the dishes, closed the windows and locked up then I covered her with a blanket. She never slept without a blanket no matter how stifling hot it may be. If had known what she intended, I would have stayed awake and tried to stop her but I cannot know that I would have been able to stop her anyway so I can’t split hairs over all of that.

I woke up to the moon still high in the sky and the screams of a woman. I rushed out to see a crowd before Mr. Okoro’s flat. I could not find mother. I crept to the scene and no one stopped a little girl from walking into that sordid scene. Mother stood beside the bed like a moth trapped by a spider web. Two men held her hands even though she looked like a tiny insect between them. Mr. Okoro was on the bed and he was red with blood. They said later that she had stabbed him twenty five times. I wondered at who had bothered to count with all that blood. When mother saw me, she didn’t say a word. She looked me from top to toe and winked slow then she smiled. Ha… mother was beautiful when she smiled – her dimples, her gap-toothed white teeth, her flashing eyes were a miracle to see.

They took her away in the morning. I never saw her again. I was given to my aunt whom I had never met before. She tried her best with me but I am my mother’s daughter. One day, I found the black book among my old things that had been carried with me to my new home. I was eighteen and had started lusting after boys, one especially - I have forgotten his name now. I opened it and began to read. After the first five pages, I realized that my mother was insane and high most of the times that we had been together. The stories she wrote could only come from the nightmare of a deranged mind. I will not soil these pages with my mother's literary efforts. I forced myself to finish the book and my nights have never been the same since. I found a slip of torn paper at the back of the book. It was a poem by a different hand – I do not know who wrote it but its subtle nuance of danger hidden in soft words never left me. Let me read the poem to you;

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But I gave you my all.
My tears, I fed your eyelids and
My pain I filled your flesh.
You think this was easy?
You think to offer those things
That hide in the recesses
Of my soul was an easy choice to make?

Now you spurn me and call me cursed.
You push these hard-earned gifts
Aside and call me soiled.
You, whom I cradled in the crook
Of my shaking arms,
Against the broken places that I still tread,
You whom I fed with the ghosts of memories,
Of people and things that
Ihave joined and parted from –
You push me to the side as if I was trash?

I could have forgiven you anything.
After all, you had tasted of my pain and tears.
You had become a part of my story,
A treasured scar on the face of my skin
A memory that I could never detach
But now I do not know what to do.
Can I forgive being casted back into the darkness?
Can I forgive your rejection and the words
With which you dressed me up
And gave me away?

I am hunched over you as you sleep,
A scissors in my hand, a single tear on my cheek.
I could take you away from this world you love –
A single snip and you will become a speck of dust
Floating in the wind, unable to direct your course
But I touch your lips with mine, leaving the shape
Of my lips on yours like a stamp to a letter
That says we are done – goodbye.

You have broken me apart like a coconut
But I could never bring myself to pull
Your beard or the lashes framing your cheek,
Or the tender hollow of your neck where
You throb with blood and life.
I could never tear you apart as you have done
To me with those beautiful words
You seem to know to use so well.

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The poem was incomplete and I could not make head or tail of it. It deviated thoroughly from the rest of the book.

I began to investigate my family but no one wanted to talk. They told me of mother as a girl up to when she got pregnant and eloped with a man whose name no one seemed to know or remember or they chose to hide it from me. After that point, there is nothing. It is as if she disappeared from the face of the earth for eleven years. No one seemed to kno anything but I suspect that the answers lie within that sick black book. It has terrorized my sleep and denied me sweet dreams but I have to go back there. The clues to who my mother was and what she had become lives within those mad pages. I just need strength to seek it again. I hope I do get the strength and find something fast because I feel like it is becoming difficult to see clearly. Last night I heard a shadow call my name and laughter in the wind.

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©warpedpoetic, 2019