Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé Read Free Book Online

be, seemed a thing from which there was no escape. It was a structure she had somehow helped to build in order to house pains she never knew she could have, to press against what was no longer solid ground beneath her feet. Sometimes she felt the weight itself to be a presence, a living barrier to the person she was before, to the person she could have been. Like when she filled the tub and sprinkled talcum powder and bubble bath into the water to hide her body from view, to make sure that the other self she had lost touch with would not rise from the water. Her body had become like a map spread and tacked to a wall. Stretch marks were stenciled in long, meandering lines across her belly, around her ass, along the rolls and folds of her abdomen. Veins swelled to the surface and collapsed back into her tissue. Cellulite and fluid retention made bumps and dunes and mounds around her rotund legs. Her body had become an off-road tract of land, a wilderness where weeds and thorns grew of their own accord, strangling and suffocating it.
    Her other self—the self of before—was down there still, beneath the valley of arum lilies, beneath the Outeniqua Mountains and all things still beautiful, a corpse that refused to decompose in spite of the bulwarking weight, her voluntary and involuntary efforts to make it disappear. How had she gotten so far away from herself? She wondered where the person she used to be was. The other Brenda had been eclipsed by her husband’s prison sentence, by the enormous block of frosted glass in which her boy was encased.
    Not that there hadn’t been other things that had draped Brenda’s life before. Marriage had been important in her parents’ house, for instance. Her mother and father migrated from South Carolina when they were barely out of their teens. For them, the cycle was simple. Marry, start a family, and get old. She was expected to do the same and was told so every Sunday sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in one way or another, sitting alongside her parents. She would watch the ritual of the women serving the men meals at the fish fry in the reception hall afterward and how the men stood up when one of the church “mothers” took her seat at the table, how they looked to their wives before joining in conversations. Like the other women, her mother asked her father how many pieces of whiting or catfish he wanted and whether he would rather have the greens or the potato salad. She’d watched her mother maintain her status of wife for years. Her father did the same as husband. He went to work every day. He was home for dinner. He read the newspaper every morning. He bought his daughter new shoes, his wife new silk stockings. They were married nearly forty years. Whether they were happy together remained a mystery to Brenda long after both of them were gone. What remained was how Brenda found out that she was not her father’s daughter.
    Her “real father,” as it was gleefully explained to Brenda when she was ten years old by her visiting cousin Pam (in Washington, D.C., for the summer from Saluda, South Carolina), was not the genteel man in the living room. The visit was the first time Brenda met any of her cousins. On their very first day of play, Pam (wearing one of the three raggedy dresses she’d brought with her on the bus) pulled the head from Brenda’s favorite doll. A fight ensued, ending with Brenda getting the upper hand. That was when she was told about the “railroad man” who was her “true daddy.” He had left shortly after her mother “got in trouble,” Pam said, sneering. Her father (stepfather), who had been itching to get away from the cotton fields and pine mills, the Klan, and the South, volunteered that he was the father. They married and moved to Washington, D.C. “So don’t go actin’ like you better than me, just ’cause you got a nice room and a closet full of pretty