Ritual

You envy the chicken. He pecks ignorantly at the seed you tossed in the dirt, oblivious to his fate. It’s worse to know that you’re going to die in a few hours than for death to sneak up behind you, grasp you in his hands, and take you silently.

The chicken is blessed with stupidity.

In a matter of hours, when the golden-red sun scrapes over the horizon like a big balloon, you will grab the chicken by his legs and head west. Fifty kilometers, you’ll walk, the chicken adorning your head like a fila, riding as though he were king of the Nile, owner of the Sahara. You will trek across the continent together, trudging over a vast expanse of dryness, the ground cracking beneath your sandals.

But now, as the sun begins to descend, casting orange glows across the slack rooves of the village, you press the cool, red clay between your toes. The chores are done; there is nothing left to distract yourself with. You leave the chicken for his last peaceful night and step inside the ile.

You study your home for the last time, memorizing every detail, hoping to grasp it forever. The rooms are adorned with straw and clay beads, porcelain pots. You study the corner in the living room where you came into the world fifteen years earlier, pushed out of your mother, clutched to her sweaty breast. A blessing, they called you, a reincarnation of ìyá àgbà.

You whisper goodbye to your garden of apricots and palm oil that taught you the art of nurturing, what it means to be a woman. You press your palms to the countertops you pound the yams against, running your finger over the rim of the cooking pot. Mama is preparing to heat up the Gbegiri that she taught you to make for your future husband.

After you eat your mother’s cooking for the last time, you retreat to your room and pack away your only three dresses, setting the best one out for when you meet his family.

Soon, you will be away from home forever, stuck in a place you must rechristen as home, though by then, neither village will feel like it. You wave goodbye as your family sees you off, embracing you and letting go. Your older brother, who will watch over you in your marriage, who is promised your first-born child as payment for his duty, joins you and the chicken on your journey.

Those seven hours are the last time you ever feel like yourself.

Then the pretending begins.

When you approach the village, you pretend you aren’t disappointed by its small buildings, its flatness, its simplicity. You pretend it is not a downgrade from your old home.

You pretend you are grateful to the people of the village for letting you into their home. They seem alien and unwelcoming with their judgmental stares and crossed arms. You pretend you are excited; pretend you are not exhausted and overwhelmed.

As you marry this strange man, the foreign blacksmith, you pretend he lives up to your expectations. He is shorter than you imagined, his eyes farther apart, his ears stick out. When he tells you he is happy to meet you, you pretend it means anything. You accept the arrangement and pretend the men around you didn’t calculatedly set it up.

You are honest when you thank them for the gift of the chicken but start pretending again when they slash and slaughter and strangle it. The chicken lets out a harsh squeal and goes silent. His auburn feathers fall to the floor, drenched in thick blood. He’s then cooked and celebrated as a gift, sacrificed for the matrimony.

His torture is over. Yours is barely beginning.

Later that night, the festivities are over, and you pretend you don’t burn the Igbin on purpose so that he will hate you and let you go home. As stars emerge, he finds you in bed, and you pretend it doesn’t hurt so he doesn’t hit you. You pretend his yellow teeth and stench of smoke don’t bother you. You pretend you are not crying. You pretend you are sleeping while lying awake the entire night, sitting in a pool of your own sweat, swatting away flies.

As days pass, your heart will sink further into your gut. It will sit there, numb like a rock, draining of hope. You cook every day, clean the house. You pretend to be happy when your blood doesn’t come, and the world decides you are with child. You have the child and pretend to love it, even though it is half of him, and you hate him. As your stomach grows, your wrinkles deepen, and you imagine a world where you had been born a man, and someone else would have to give up her entire life to you. You imagine the power that it would give you. You realize you will never know what that feels like.

And you pretend you don’t still envy the chicken.