Two Stories by Mark Cassidy
Juju
After sex, Miss Josephine cleans herself with water from the rain barrel on her stoop. She fills a silver bowl, normally used for washing her hands when she eats garri, and kneels astride it to scoop the water into the folds of her genitals with a cupped hand, raising each knee in turn while she balances her weight with the other hand, knuckles pressed into the floor. Outside her room the afternoon rain brings thunder and early darkness over the tin roofs of the houses round the yard.
Tell me something, I say.
Tell you what?
Anything.
She sighs, bends forward so that her braids fall from her shoulders and over her face, and says, Ok. Listen:
Two young girls, students from Uniport, travel to a small town in a neighboring state for a weekend break. They stay in a hotel. Could be a bush hotel or could be a fine town place with air conditioners in the rooms, maybe even CNN on the television. Doesn’t matter. They toss their bags on the bed, wash, put on a little make-up and go out on the town to enjoy themselves.
First place they stop into, maybe someplace recommended to them by friends back home, they meet two men who say that they are from the capital, in town on business. Would the girls care to join them for some dinner and then some dancing? The two friends confer and agree that, as far as can be ascertained, these men are what they say they are and looking for nothing more than some fun away from their families, their wives in particular.
Of course, after the dancing, the girls go with the men to their rooms for sex and that’s okay too. It’s expected. Afterward they all dress and reconvene in one of the rooms to talk, to gossip, get to know one another a little better, continue drinking the Guinness and the Red Label whisky, the Five Alive juice, which the men have provided. During the conversation one of the men lifts an old-fashioned, battered suitcase onto the bed and opens it. It is full of money. Local currency but still, the girls are impressed. They glance at one another, eyes a little glittery with greed and drink, and ask what’s going on. The man hands a wad of bills to each girl and invites them to lunch the following day. After that, the men say, they must travel on to the next place to continue with their business.
Josephine ties her braids up in a plastic shopping bag, wraps a towel round under her arms and steps outside in flip-flops to the communal shower. When she returns she sheds the towel and stands in front of the long, narrow mirror which leans against the wall beside the door, to apply her lotions, the Topifram and Skin Success, the Black Orchid, upon which she relies to care for and lighten her skin. A serious undertaking this, perhaps the most important activity of her day after her prayers. She carefully taps measured dollops from each pot into both palms and stirs them together with a fingertip before applying dabs all the way up her legs from her ankles onto her stomach, her breasts and over her shoulders, twisting to reach round to her back and her buttocks and finishing at her neck and throat. Rubbing follows application, again starting at her ankles and the tops of her feet, but this time moving more slowly and thoroughly in strokes and looping circles up along and around her entire body.
The following morning only one of the men appears at the agreed time. He explains that his friend is not feeling well, or maybe has unexpected business to attend to. The girl then without a partner, and again after discussing the situation with her friend, withdraws and returns to wait at the motel. The remaining couple eat their lunch—maybe it’s okra soup, or egussi soup with garri—and then retire to the man’s room for a last bout of lovemaking before he takes his leave. Again, afterward, he lifts the suitcase onto the bed and opens it, but this time empties all the money onto the sheets.
‘What’s this?’ asks the girl.
‘For you,’ says the man.
At that point, a knock comes at the door and his partner enters carrying not one but two more suitcases. The girl becomes nervous. The second man sets one bag on the floor, opens the other and dumps the contents, more money, onto the pile already there. Now she is frightened and starts to collect her clothes. The men tell her to relax, that nothing bad is going to happen, that all they want from her is a small favor, something which they believe she can provide and her friend cannot. They tell her that they want to make love to her together, a threesome, and that, if she agrees to this, they will seal the deal with a drink of whisky, or whatever she would like, and then get to the business.
She does not want to do it but greed gets the better of sense and she says yes. She starts to dress in preparation for going downstairs to the bar in the lobby for the drink. She believes that it might be necessary to have several drinks inside her before she can go through with what they want. She thinks that these might be rough men after all, that they might even want to do unusual things with her, but she is seeing a lot of money, a lifetime of money and comfort for her mum and her younger ones back in the village.
‘Good,’ the man she was originally with says. ‘But let’s not go downstairs for a drink. Not that we don’t trust you but what if you change your mind and run away? We might not get another chance like this and, after the next town, we will be going back to our families and our opportunity will have passed.’
‘Plus,’ the other one says, winking and loosening his tie, ‘We’d like to sit with you, naked, and have the drink. That way we can get to the fun part without interruption, when we’re ready.’
Of course, after the first few sips of whisky the girl passes out. When she wakes the men and their luggage have gone. The money and her clothes remain. She remembers, as her head clears and she starts to pull on her things, that she has dreamed while she slept. She has dreamed that the men opened the third suitcase and removed a large snake, leaned over her where she lay on the bed, swaddled in cash, and opened her legs to introduce the head of the snake, its tongue flicking, eyes black as death, into her sex. She remembers that the serpent’s long slick body disappeared completely inside her and then re-emerged, head first, to slither back into the bag. When she has finished dressing she looks for something in which to stash the money and goes to find her friend, to tell her what has happened.
When she’s finished with the creams, having worked the last traces from her fingernails and the creases in her palms, Josephine leans and calls through the bars of the protector for one of the children in the yard to come, now that the rain has passed, so that she can give money to fetch mineral and soup.
The two friends return to the residence in the college and, the following day, the girl who went with the men starts to weep and finds that she cannot stop weeping. Fearful nightmares disrupt her sleep. The next day she falls sick and on the third day after her return to the city she dies.
I go chop. You want chop?
I stand up to dress. Sure. Suya. And beer. Not the happiest of endings.
In another version of the story the men with the snake attempt to trap both girls but one runs away and leaves her friend to suffer her tragic fate alone in the hotel room.
She reaches for the towel.
In a yet further rendition the girl who receives the serpent survives and goes on to establish herself in the town as a revered and wealthy Auntie, supplier of catering equipment and advice to the lonely, purveyor of juju charms upon request.
Man With Razor
Listen. He kneels at the foot of the bed between her slender brown thighs, razor in one hand, dollop of foam dribbling from the fingers of the other, and clears his throat. I want to tell you something. She watches him, watches the razor and shakes her head, braids fanning, the multi-coloured beads at their tips clicking. Tiny muscles, like frets of chill wind on water, feather across her belly. Behind him the television mumbles. He shifts, leaning this way and that on his haunches, to smear the foam. She pulls back sharply, crumpling and bunching the bed sheets beneath her buttocks.
Relax. It’s ok. I’ve done it a thousand times. So. Here’s how it goes: A man, a famous singer, walks onto a stage and sits, rather leans, onto a high stool, one foot still on the floor, the other on a rung, like a lounge singer, like he might be Tony Bennett. He’s wearing a black suit and white shirt open at the throat. Polished black shoes. He looks sharp. He looks glossy. His perfectly groomed hair catches the light from the overhead lamps. Beside him is a Spanish style guitar, such as a gypsy might use, resting upright on a chrome, rubber-tipped stand. In front of him is another stand supporting two microphones, one set at sound hole level, the other positioned higher up, to receive his voice. That voice. The audience, quieted now, is waiting but he says nothing, sings nothing, does not reach for the guitar, reaches instead, without taking his eyes from the crowd, into a pocket of the suit jacket and takes something out. We, his disciples down in the dank well of the theatre, our hearts thumping in anticipation, might be thinking, Aha! A piece of paper. Something new! Lines, freshly blackened pages, from a work in progress. A bulletin from the front, which he is going to offer to us, runs past us as it were, for our consideration. My friends, compadres, listen and tell me what you think. Or maybe it’s a Jew’s harp. Whatever it is, as he pulls his hand back into the open, into the light, it is something too small to see from even the first rows. He lifts his hand and draws it without hesitation, in a single, smooth stroke, down one side of his face, from the point of the cheekbone to the point of his chin, and then repeats the motion on the other side. He then rests his hand on his knee. Something in his fingers glitters. The audience, we beggars in the market, catches its collective breath. Only when he smiles, not a smile so much as a wide, forced grin, does the blood begin to flow. First, two lines which resemble fronts on a weather map appear, and then rivulets, following the creases in the skin, flow down over his neck and into his collar. Droplets fall onto his lapels, onto the front of his shirt, into his lap. He pushes the grin wider, ears lifting, eyes narrowing, and the flow of blood intensifies, soaking the front of his shirt, dripping down onto the boards at his feet. After a moment he returns the blade to the pocket, steps clear of the stool and walks past the guitar and off the stage.
He gets up from the floor and goes into the bathroom, returns with a glass of water which he dribbles slowly over the freshly denuded folds and clefts of her sex. He stoops to pat everything gently dry with a hand towel. I have talc.
Bring. Afterward she slots the little blue shaker into her purse.
You believe that? I heard that story when I was in school, way back, way out there on the flats of east central Alberta, and I believed it. It mattered. Then at least. The wind blowing all the time. Distance, anywhere I looked, slinking behind grain elevators, loping out beyond the last straggle of houses along the highway. Not true, obviously. There’d be scars. But, whatever I thought that was, I wanted it.
She tuts and raises her narrow hips from the bed. My friend, take. Such nonsense.
Mark Cassidy was born in Scotland, considers Canada home and presently lives in Houston. He has lived and worked in various locales around the world, including West Africa, out of which the two stories here emerged. He has had several short stories and flash pieces published both in the US and the UK.
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