My mother and I, trying to attract customers to the fresh fruit we are peddling, place ourselves between blazing cars in the middle of a traffic-jammed motorway on the outskirts of Accra. Sweat pours down our necks like molten lava. The stench of a rat-split in jagged halves makes me gag on the back of my hand. My mother’s eyes are storm clouds gathering. She pulls my hand in hers, the sudden action causing the basket to wobble atop my head.
“Are you pregnant?” she asks, her voice sharp as obsidian, and just as brittle.
I pull my hand out from her grip, rubbing off the faint force left lingering.
A packed pale yellow tro-tro attempting to outwit the horde of cars waiting not-so-patiently honks from somewhere behind us. The driver’s mate holds a hand out of the crack of a slanted window.
“Madam, wonfri kwan nu mu.”
We shuffle out of the way, holding on tight to our livelihood.
Once we are settled beneath the shade of a decrepit kiosk, my mother weighs my discomfort in her hands. Her body leans to the left as though to support the weight of violent red suspicions leaden with regret.
She asks again, softer, quaking, forfeit.
“No,” I say, twiddling my thumbs from a learned untruthing, my eyes trained on an earthworm slinking steadily towards my feet.
My mother’s first birth was fifteen hours of agony. Twins, who seeing life’s tendriled hands offer them its trademark ambiguity, declined with a slight whimper, barely a cry. She would turn eighteen in two months. The pregnancy meant that she had to drop out of sixth form, where she had been one of the brightest students in her form. She could have made it to university. She could have studied in London with one of those government scholarships, like the other smart students she had always topped in class. It meant disgrace. Her own mother’s face turned against her. A honey-lipped boy now baring his venomous fangs. She never cried. Not that day, not since.
The pain etched across my mother’s face brings the words to the tip of my tongue. Concoctions and mixtures whispered about and passed around in dark corners, furtive glances, teenage bodies tightened in guilt, carrying along shame that holds the mouth shut.
My mother says grief forces the eye open. I will learn one way or the other.
Written by Naana Eyikuma Hutchful
Naana Eyikuma Hutchful (they/them) is a Ghanaian writer with work appearing in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House and forthcoming elsewhere. They like sunrises, baja blasts, and films.