ASHAWO -

While washing your vagina, you discover some bruises. The pain they give is prickly, like the pain of a salted wound. The man you slept with the night before, at the mechanic workshop while you bit your lip to avoid crying, was unexpectedly huge and rammed you with a ceaseless intensity. Remembering him now, your eyes become warm, moist, but you will not give in to tears. You empty the bucket of water on your body. The water melts away the lather on your skin. Then you dry your body with a towel and walk out of the narrow bathroom whose walls are covered by slimy, green mosses. Some other girls are outside, their faces wracked with impatience.
‘Ashawo, how long does it take you to have a bathe?’ One teased.
You look at her briefly. There is a warm, almost-friendly glint in her eyes. She should not have called you ashawo, a prostitute.
You walk away with your empty bucket, past the unending line of women waiting to have a bath in the narrow bathroom whose floor holds so much stagnant water that one needs to climb on top a stone to have a bath.
When you step on the peeling carpeting of your room, you feel a breath of gratitude over the fact that Funke, your roommate, is not around. You select a pant to wear, the G string thong that is easy to slide away in case a customer demands a quickie. You feel a sting in your eyes, but you will not cry, not anymore!
You select the strapless bra, the one Funke gave you the day before. Then you wear a skimpy gown that will make it easy for a man to have you without stripping off your clothes. As you feel the gown surround your body, you are enveloped by that nibbling, atrophied feeling, the one that turns everything in sight a dead grey, the same feeling you had the day you saw a man on top your mother.

Before the age of ten, you had understood the reason your mother locked you out of your dingy room most afternoons. You knew what produced those ghostly moans from the closed door. This knowingness came naturally to you, like an instinct. Yet, you didn’t really have a mental picture of the action, of the thrashing and gasping until that day, when you were ten that you returned from school early and barged into the room.
Your mother had gasped and looked up. The heavy-set, naked man above her on the flattened mattress had raised his head lazily.
‘Ini…’ your name left your mother’s mouth almost in slow motion.
You should have quickly turned and walked away, but you couldn’t. Your legs and the floor melded. The sight of the man’s hulking frame above your mother’s slender one grabbed your eyes and held your eyelids apart.
Your mother made to push the man aside, but he grabbed her shoulders roughly. ‘Stop, you will make me lose my erection!’ Then he began moving his waist up and down. The only thing your mother groaned before his wide palm clasped her mouth and he yelled, ‘Shut up!’ was a subdued, ‘Please go…’