Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé Read Free Book Online Page B

empty chair. And on the day her mother had the stroke that killed her, Brenda felt a sharp and brief regret that she had never asked her mother about the validity of the railroad man.
    So it had been the eternal contradiction of things in Brenda’s world that allowed the drift to begin. There were boyfriends, men in her life before Horus, who seemed to enjoy watching her conform to their wants and expectations as they would a chameleon. Never their needs. Those were addressed, Brenda assumed, by someone else, someplace else. With the meatpacking-industry lobbyist, she was the perfect secretary with sleeping privileges. The sanitation department supervisor wanted her to be his mother, whom he had never met since she died in his infancy but of whom he had an image and looked to Brenda to shape-shift into the ideal woman he imagined her to be, pleasant and available. There was the freelance architect who was out of work most of the time. He wanted a wonder woman capable of everything imaginable, including sex at two o’clock in the morning on a work night. Marriage, Brenda discovered, was not on any of their minds. All of that had been when she was a size seven.
    Then there was Horus. She saw him going into the Martin Luther King Library at the same time every day when she drove by on her way to work. She could set her clock by him entering the building. She often saw him at a local deli during the lunch hour in his security guard uniform. There was a constancy, a kind of steadiness, about him. He was handsome, and his face held a contemplative look that was neither smile nor scowl. He had a quiet about him, a solitude that reminded Brenda of the father she knew, when he was still in his chair reading or thinking late into Sunday afternoon. One day, Brenda sat down on the stool next to Horus at the long diner counter. He asked her if the roast beef sandwiches were any good. That was their casual start.
    They spent a lot of time together: free concerts on the Mall, jazz sessions at Blues Alley, performances at the Kennedy Center, food festivals and museums, trips to the ocean. She told him about her unremarkable upbringing (omitting the part about the railroad man), her stint at UDC, her job at the Department of Agriculture. Horus briefly told her about his family, his face holding an expression she had never seen before, an expression she would learn to recognize later. But he had been warm enough and seemed to bask in her company. He did not balk when she spoke of marriage and family. “Beautiful mysteries,” he’d said.
    In Horus, Brenda saw pliability, a malleable shape from which she could fashion the life they would live together. Or, rather, she took his quiet, his amicability, as an invitation to define and shape him into Horus her husband. Horus the father of her children. Not necessarily Horus the man. In spite of all of Brenda’s renovation efforts with him, Horus still seemed to need . . . something. It seemed that the rowhouse they had refurbished, the patio garden, the home-cooked meals, the weekend trips, and all the rest of it only filled the corner of something larger that was missing. She spent the years of their marriage trying to uncover what it was, to repair whatever it was, as she had the family portrait of the past in her mind. All to fashion what she wanted her own family to be.
    Years later, from the gray felt panels of her USDA cubicle, Brenda would come to understand that everything she did had been in an effort to repair a kind of cosmic cycle started somewhere in the hot, thick woods of Saluda, South Carolina. After Horus was incarcerated, she developed a gradation system, a sort of clock to delineate periods of her life. Sizes eight and nine were the shell-shocked years, when she was operating on autopilot. The job. Day care. Coffee special of the day. Book club selection of the month. Food to quiet the growing silence of the house, to snuff the fog of uncertain days