“You play too much for someone who’s becoming an adult.”

“Not really.” We said breathlessly, with our flat chest heaving as we came to a stop before running smack! into our dad. Though that’s what happens when there’s more than one of us. Everything we do is at 2x speed or intensity and too much.

“So wetin come dey worry you?” He said in Pidgin English, meaning so what’s worrying you?

“The fact that people are borning children than they can cater for.” We said in our thick feminine voice.

“Borning is not a verb. Its use is incorrect in that sentence.” Dad said. He was wearing only shorts without a shirt; he had a dad bod and could be called a tubby hubby, his jiggly middle and all.

We all turned to Mum. We is for my body and soul. We all is for my body and soul and those of others.

“Just like when I mark scripts and I see a student describe having a child as ‘put to bed’. ‘Put to bed’ means to make someone sleep. ‘Bring to birth’ is the correct verbal phrase. Some of my colleagues didn’t know. I’m sure your mum doesn’t know too.” Dad said smiling.

We all were now focused on mum who was coiled up like a cobra on her favourite couch. Mum is a mixed bag of skin. You can’t put your hand in and come up with the same thing twice. Her grandpa was from Brazil before he found himself in France where he married her grandma.They had a son who also had our mum. Then mum’s family moved to Canada. When she was nineteen, she got interested in Africa and chose Nigeria for university. She learnt here that one of the biggest ethnic group languages in Nigeria, Yoruba, is also spoken in some parts of Brazil. Then she met dad and stayed. She has since been learning everything about her heritage and the worlds she’s involved with from the couch. And X.

We went to the kitchen. Aromas of chicken, tomatoes and spices rose from the boiling soup and filled our nose. We opened the pot, admiring the chunks and tasting the sweet-smelling steam as we reached for the metal ladle without looking. Just as our fingers held the ladle to bring it to stir the pot, it slipped and went plonk! Inside the pot. We giggled, then sobered when we realised that hot soup could have flown into our face, scalding it. We would have screamed painfully with one mouth and two voices as our skin sizzled. We suddenly felt hot in our clothes. The weather was becoming hot. We reduced the heat under the pot and went out through the kitchen door. A soft, loud, hissing sound was coming from far off. We watched the drizzle in the distance while this place remained dry. Then the wind blew some of the rain and it approached us gingerly with the legs of a shy girl, in scattered, watery lines. It landed on our property in full-force torrents and we got drenched unexpectedly. We ran into the house through the kitchen door. The rain ceased immediately with the finality of a music conductor’s hand. We stopped to turn off the cooker.

Dad caught sight of us as we slid to the bathroom, dripping. He called and we walked a few steps backward to stand at the living room door. Mum was chewing chilly chinchin chihuahua-like. Hungrily. Should we tell her the soup was done? But her eyes were on the wall clock that had stopped again.

“What happened?” Dad asked, pulling our attention to our wet state.

“Rain.” We replied.

He looked into the eyes of our soul and asked: “How did it rain outside and not inside?” Thank you very much, Mr Moderator, for that question. Because if you ask us, who would we ask? God? We held our tongue and sucked in our puffy, angry cheeks to make them flat. We did not want to be seen as cheeky. In dad’s language, ‘cheeky’ is translated as ‘one whose cheeks are filled with insults’. Outside, rays of sun tried to part the heavy clouds. The light came out looking brightly-ill and fake. It was the last July rains before the hotness of Summer in August. Summer was a long holiday and always came with lots of parties, especially graduations and weddings. Mum usually came home with beautifully embossed wedding invites with a faint perfume smell on them. Couples liked to coin their first names to make a single name or an hashtag; Fareedah weds Kareem = #Fadaka2024. Fadaka meant silver. There were simple couples who didn’t have time for plus and minus of the letters in their names, like Tina + Bode = TB Union2024. Couples who do not choose elaborate, open bracket combinations for colours of the day. The likes of tomato red and emerald green; ginger gold, onion purple and sky blue; candy brown and bubblegum pink…

As we vacated the doorway, we heard mum tell dad: “What happened? sounded accusatory, Sola.”

“But how should I have asked?” He fired back. 

Intense sounds of running water, slamming doors and quick footsteps woke me up the next morning. I left my room to find mum complaining of water trapped in her ear. The cottonbud in her hand didn’t reach the water and when she shook her ear, it made a crinkling skrrh skrrh sound like when someone walks on a thinly iced pond, she said. Sometimes she looked white, other times brown, now she was pink.

“Just tilt the affected ear upwards and put in more water drops. Then, tilt inwards and down and watch all of the water slide out.” Dad told her as he danced from foot to foot before rushing out to warm up the car while he waited for her to join him. He needed to beat Lagos traffic if he didn’t want to get to work late. On a ‘normal’ day, a journey of an hour could take six fume-inhaling, painful hours with the added entertainment of careless driving, collisions and drivers’ dramatic fights, blaring horns and flying curses, and an unimaginable array of hawked goods such as cushion pillows for when people’s bottoms start to itch from sitting stiffly for long. Hawkers ran competitively with their fellows after vehicles, balancing their wares on their heads, shoulders or hands, shouting prices for passengers to buy from them, sometimes shoving stuff through open windows. Inside this same traffic, some people scouted for schools for their toddlers, took a virtual trip around the school facility, called the front desk, got the school bill, spoke to the new class teacher before making payment and scheduling a time to come and pick up necessary new intake items such as uniforms and books. It wasn’t uncommon to see such people reverse their cars out of the tightly-packed lines of bumper-to-bumper cars and make their way back home. A classical pointer of ‘I cannot come and kill myself’ or maybe this is more of ‘All man for himself’.

Evenings were more chaotic. Mum had called out and haggled prices like she was in a real market and bought tubers of yam, a crate of eggs, vegetable oil, bell peppers and onions from the comfort of the front seat. If she wished, she could have also bought a knife and pot to peel and slice up the yam and peppers, ready to be placed on heat as soon as she got home. 

This summer, we didn’t have much to do. We just sat or laid around the house, awaiting the results of the Post-Jamb examinations we sat for last month. The results would say if the university we want wanted us too. We sat on the verandah to discuss things and plan. My soul noticed my body mostly took decisions without involving her. Our body argued that our soul liked to have the upperhand and always told us what to do. Like the day we came to a junction on our way to evening fellowship, “Let’s go right.” Our body said. “It’s quicker.”

“We don’t want to get there too early. Let’s take left.” Our soul said. We stood at the crossroad, undecided, going back and forth for almost three minutes. Another time, we wanted to go to the cinema. Our body said we should put the perfume oil in our bag, to touch up once in a while and smell good all day. We walked towards the wardrobe where the perfume was kept. Then our soul said the oil was in a small bottle and could be easily misplaced. We turned away from the wardrobe and bent to pick our bag but our hand refused. We stood for few unsure seconds, thinking, before our body agreed and gave the go-ahead. Our right hand grudgingly picked up the bag and our legs put us on the way. We told ourselves there can’t be two masters in one place and there will be peace. We have to work together and always agree. Dad already thought we were too playful. We don’t want to replace ‘playful’ with ‘troubled’.

“Nora!” Mrs Eze called from two houses away. We walked to her front steps and greeted her.

“How are you, dear? Is Sola at home?” She asked as she looked at us from the top of her eyeglasses. Sola was rightly pronounced as ‘shawl’ + letter sound ‘a’. Shawl-a. The ‘a’ was flat.

“No, ma’am.” We answered courteously. Dad had lived on this street since he was a boy. His family only moved from one house to another over the years.

“Alright.” Mrs Eze said. “Do you know the meaning of this word – superimpose?” She lifted the typed letter in her hand and pointed at the word she had underlined. Were we a dictionary? Our soul told our body that Mrs Eze was one of the few people who was likely to contribute when we want to leave for the university. So we decided to give the word a try.

“We know that impose means to force something such as an idea or rule on others. Super means a higher power or level. So superimpose will mean a higher power that overrides the lower, old one.” We said. Mrs Eze looked down at the letter and read the sentence with new meaning.

“That makes sense.” She muttered. She looked at us. “Thank you, Leonora.”

“You’re welcome, Mrs Eze.” We said and left. We thought of the good job we did. Even mum with her eclectic knowledge, sometimes, could not adequately explain the meanings of some big words, though she knew how to use them in her spoken and written sentences.

“Nora! Wait!” That voice again. We turned. Mrs Eze went into her house and came out with a very yellow looking fruit which she handed over to us. 

“It’s Golden Melon. It is from Jos. Tastes very sweet.” We thanked her and moved in the direction of our house. We turned the fruit in our hands around, observing it with interest. It looked like a big yellow papaya. We got home and went straight to the kitchen for a knife. We washed the fruit and placed the knife on the center. A downward push broke the fruit into two equal halves. The inside was white. We scraped out the mushy hollow and sliced them into smaller pieces. Our hand picked up a piece and placed it in our mouth. It was crunchy like a cucumber and tasted like a blend of watermelon and pineapple flavours all at the same time. Tropical. The smell, like ice-cream. Too sweet. Yum! Nourishment for our body and soul. We put the pieces on a plate and went to eat them all in the living room. Mum and dad weren’t back from work yet. We looked at the time. The wall clock wasn’t working. We changed into a blue blouse and a pair of yellow knickers before stepping out to get batteries and some essentials like factory treated satchet water. We all don’t drink from the tap. We all can’t drink seemingly-clear unclean water.

The shop we stopped at had iron bars that prevented customers from entering. The only option was to stand outside the shop, on the road, without shelter and call out to whoever was inside the shop. The woman who came out had a ready-to-be-pissed look on her face. It was mild but it was there.

“What do you want?” She threw at us. We staggered and nearly stuttered. Wasn’t she expecting people to buy her wares? What happened to a warm greeting and what can I get you? Or, what are you buying from my shop? We told her the items we needed and she went in and stayed there forever.

The sun laid possessively on our skin and bit into our pores in smarting discomfort. Our armpits became pools of wetness and sweat rolled down our back, from our thick, dense hair.

“This sun is too hot.” Our body said to our soul. We didn’t know we said it aloud or that the shop owner was back outside until she said:

“You people complained of everyday rain. Now there’s sun, you are complaining it’s too hot.” We sucked in the harsh words brewing in the pockets of our big cheeks and swallowed them down our stomach. We didn’t want to be cheeky.

“Our skin is burning.” Our body said. This was better. It sounded personal and did not call others to our plight. Afterall, our skin was ours. The sun belonged to everybody. We looked at the busy street and saw a bright yellowness everywhere. It was from the Golden Melon, in front of fruits and vegetables shops, in farmers’ barrows rolling down the street, in trucks conveying farm produce, in people’s hands. Birds flew across the clear sky in a wavy line. The air smelled clean and expectant. This was the best time of the year.

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Maria Oluwabukola Oni is a copywriter from Nigeria and a literary artist of multimedia, hybrid, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Her stories have appeared in 19 magazines, most recently in Vagabond City, Black Feminist Collective, Blotter Mag, April Centaur, Nalubaale Review, Arkana Mag, Behemoth Biennial, and forthcoming in others. Her debut story collection, I Did Not Come For Peace; Problems, Always!, is to be published by Sulis International Press. Her multimedia narrative “Achalugo, I Will Marry You” was shortlisted for the Opening Up category of The New Media Writing Prize 2025.  She tweets @OhMariaCopy.