An hour had not yet passed, since Tanaka slept with his neighbor’s wife, when ants squirted out of his manhood. Each time he felt the urge to piss, one by one little black ants crawled out from his shaft instead of a spray of urine. They did not come quietly, these ants. They bit into his flesh, tickled his veins with their antennae, and danced their way out of him with each of their six little legs.
Tanaka had made it a habit to sleep with other men’s wives. He liked the power that came with releasing himself in someone who belonged to someone else. How was Tanaka to know that this woman in particular, Kurai’s wife, was fixed?
He begged the elders for an answer.
The elders who smoked long pipes, sniffed tobacco, basked in the sun, and spoke of things unknown to the younger generation called it kugadzira mukadzi—to fix your wife. They said the words in hushed tones and laughed at Tanaka in between coughs and blowing smoke rings. They too had once cast spells on their wives. It was what you did when you married a beautiful woman. If any man but you tasted your wife’s sweetness, that intruder would receive a nasty surprise on his way out.
The elders told another story of a man in a faraway town who took another man’s wife from behind. He never came out. They went everywhere stuck together like that, the woman crawling on all fours with the man above her. Not even the country’s top surgeon, who had successfully separated conjoined twins earlier that year, could separate the man and the woman.
The Wright Brothers were not the first to find flight. There are other histories, other sciences not recorded, but in this world when something is not written down, it does not exist. Varoyi have known how to soar since before men learned to walk upright. Varoyi, those naked women in the forest with access to knowledge from the other side, lift off into the night from inside winnowing baskets. What men cannot do or understand is evil. So these naked women have been blamed for sickness and death, and their craft dismissed as witchery, not science.
Gusheshe, a comedian from a small town in Zimbabwe, rose to national fame with her skits. As more and more people subscribed to her YouTube channel, her jokes became more daring. High on the euphoria of a million views, she imagined she could be like her South African hero Trevor Noah. Envisioning herself hosting a Late Night or a Daily Show in America, she mocked the government. The videos were liked and shared and liked and shared. This small-town girl’s name travelled from lips to lips until it found itself in a Kill Folder.
The gunmen were swift breaking into her house, blindfolding her, and shoving her into the back of an Isuzu. Neighbors saw the whole thing, but who can call the police when the gunmen are the police? After hours of driving, they dropped Gusheshe blindfolded into sewage water.
“So you think you’re funny?” one of the gunmen screamed at her. He kicked her in the stomach. They stuck her head under the water.
“Since you think you’re funny,” another gunman said, “make us laugh.”
She heard six voices in total. Someone kicked her again with a boot. She knew that police wore red boots and soldiers wore black boots. She couldn’t tell the color of the boots from the way they crushed against her skull.
“I said make us laugh,” a gunman said.
They forced her mouth open and stuck her head under the water again. She tasted shit in her mouth. Her eyes watered. She retched and was shoved under again.
“A big-mouthed bitch like you can’t swallow?” another said. “Gurgle the water in your mouth like you are brushing your teeth for a Colgate advert.”
They laughed at their own jokes. Torture demands a certain kind of inventiveness; cruelty can turn a jailer into a comedian.
“Do you know why you are here?” a gunman said.
“Imagination is my only crime,” Gusheshe replied after swallowing a mouthful of the water. This made the men angry. They kicked and punched her harder. Seeing that their punches did not break her down, they thought of something else. The only way to break a woman.
“Take off your dress,” one said.
Her heart beat fast. She knew she would die and begged her god for a quick end. She shivered, not because she was cold but because she now knew what it meant to fly too close to the sun. She thought back to her primary school days, learning Greek myths about some boy named Icarus. She never found the story believable, and now she could finally pinpoint why she couldn’t suspend her disbelief. Her last thought before she blacked out from another kick to the head was that only women are punished for flight.
When Gusheshe regained consciousness, she was alone. She removed her blindfold, barely seeing out of her swollen eye. She was at a sewage pump on the outskirts of town. She willed her battered body to crawl through grass and dirt to the main road. She cried out for help, but her throat was sore. Finally she heard the voices of passersby and thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan. She was saved. She reached out to them for help.
They screamed.
Maybe she would have been saved if the female body were not a terrifying thing. When the passersby saw a naked woman crawling through the grass, they were ashamed first and afraid second. They did not see her bruises. They saw a muroyi. Everyone knew that witches who flew for too long fell out of their winnowing baskets when day broke. The sunlight starved them of their power.
“Muroyi adohna!” a little boy screamed, pointing at her nakedness. “A witch has fallen from her basket!”
And that was her death sentence before the first rock from the growing mob hit her.
Which came first, the orange or the egg? In eSwatini, the egg comes first. A young woman lies on her back with her legs spread. The examiner, an old lady with dirty fingernails and a hard look about her, shoves an egg between the girl’s legs. If the egg goes in, she is not pure and her family will be fined a cow by the chief for not keeping a better eye on their daughter. The young woman closes her eyes and says a prayer. Her boyfriend is big but not that big. Perhaps the egg will crack.
The examiner gives no thought to the girl’s comfort. After all, the old woman has a line of other girls and families waiting for the test. The examiner shoves with all her might, the girl winces and yelps and is ignored. The egg of purest white ruptures into egg-yolk yellow.
The girl has passed the test.
She is rewarded with an orange. When she leaves, she parades the fruit around the village for everyone to see. Bear witness to the fruits of my virtue, her wide smile says. Everyone must see the honor she has brought to her family.
If your brother kills another man, you must pay for the crime. That’s what sisters are for, right? Currency to bargain with. Your drunkard brother breaks a bottle on a man’s head during a fight at a bar. For a week, the man from the bar fights on in a poorly staffed hospital. One night during a power cut the hospital generator, devoid of fuel, fails to kick in, and the machines he is hooked onto pause their one job. He dies while the doctors are occupied operating on another patient by candlelight.
His family has agreed not to press charges. His family is reasonable; they do things the old way.
You, sister of the murderer, are to be married off to the dead man from the bar.
Yes, you are.
Crying won’t help. The elders have decided.
The dead man from the bar died without taking a wife. A man who is slaughtered before he knows the comforts of marriage becomes ngozi.
An avenging spirit, do they not teach you anything at school anymore? To appease the ngozi, you must be his wife.
He will be your spiritual husband.
On the day of the funeral, your mother packs your things. A pink shirt with Hannah Montana’s face on it and some jeans. You are to live with the dead man’s family now.
Don’t sulk.
You are helping your brother. Otherwise he and the children he will beget will be haunted by the ngozi for eternity.
Do you want the family line to be cursed?
No. So be a big girl. You are married now.
You have to be a wife until you die, of course.
Forget school. From now on you will clean the dead man’s family home, cook sadza for his mother, hand-wash his brothers’ clothes, dust the furniture, and rotate between members of his extended family’s homes, for someone always needs an extra pair of hands. Wear black, for you are a widow now. Burn the pink Hannah Montana shirt.
And then when you die, another girl from your family has to take your place.
You are thirteen.
A good wife works. Not in an office, for that is unthinkable, but with her hands down a sink, gripping a gardening hoe, scrubbing floors, bearing children.
Boyfriend and girlfriend hold hands and walk down a Bulawayo city street. They must be careful, for public display of affection is still a crime. An officer could walk up to them and arrest girlfriend for prostitution. Boyfriend tenderly strokes her palm. Girlfriend smiles up at him. Soon he will be going to university to study actuarial science. She is lucky to have him, everyone reminds her. He frowns at her hands.
“What’s wrong?” girlfriend asks.
“Your hands are still soft,” boyfriend says. “And your knees are brown-skinned, almost yellow.”
Girlfriend keeps her eyes on the ground.
“Your hands should be hard and your knees dark,” he says. “This just tells me you don’t do work. Girls that scrub floors and peka isitshwala have dark knees and hard hands.”
Girlfriend laughs awkwardly. “When you’re an actuarial scientist and we are married, you will buy me a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, and a dishwasher so that I don’t have to have rough hands.”
Boyfriend’s frown deepens.
“To buy a washing machine is to spoil a woman,” he says. “She will forget her place.” He lets go of her hand. They walk in silence the rest of the way.
It’s not only men who can fix their partners. Women can, too. A woman barred from working by her husband (for working women are wayward) finds much time during the day to sit and stew. Her husband, whose children have broken and bloated her body until her beauty has faded, tells her she has let herself go. She turns over the phrase this way and that like a dirty doormat. Let herself go. As if she has anywhere to go, she snorts. Her life is one of chains lived behind the bars of a respectable household.
I will fix him, she swears on her portrait of a bloody Jesus Christ bearing a crown of thorns. She hung the portrait in the living room the day they moved in as newlyweds. Jesus, take the wheel and protect my marriage, she prays to the picture every morning.
While she implores Jesus to take the wheel, her husband comes home later and later until he barely shows up at all. He takes up with a slay queen. Her own daughter shows her the social media photographs of the slay queen on a shopping trip in Dubai. All paid for by the wife’s husband, of course.
I will fix her, she says. I will fix her good.
Jesus is too slow in intervening, so the wife turns to other vengeful gods. African gods who dispense wrath quicker than vending machines. The wife visits a muroyi, and the muroyi does what varoyis are said to do.
The vengeful gods are swift. As soon as the husband pulls out of the slay queen, her womanhood moves from its spot in between her legs to her forehead like a third eye. The man screams and runs away, scared of the thing he licked only moments ago.
After a month of penitence he can’t help himself and takes up with another slay queen. Slay Queen Number Two’s skin has a transcendent shine to it. The wife begrudges her that skin, that light skin that makes men weak in the legs. Slay Queen Number Two, the wife is sure of it, will convince the husband to divorce her. So the wife prays to bloody Jesus in the morning, but at night under the cover of darkness she seeks out the vengeful gods.
Slay Queen Number Two is found dead the next day. Her once beautiful skin is flayed pink like plucked chicken. They bury her in a closed casket.
The first flow of blood never announces itself; it arrives an unwanted guest that promises to drop in every month. The first visitation is catastrophe, a gong sounding the doom of womanhood. At exactly noon a gong sounded for a girl in Harare. It is too shameful to tell her mother that the time to dance to the music has come, so she walks all the way to her aunt’s house. Look what I have done, she says, taking off her bloodstained underwear, holding it, head hung, towards her aunt.
Her aunt escorts her back to her mother’s house. It is the aunt who explains to the mother that her daughter can finally hear the chords and has joined the dance. The mother leads the girl to the bathroom and teaches her how to wash off the blood. As the girl dries off, her mother tells her to lean back against the tub with her legs open. The mother rubs chili peppers in between the girl’s legs.
“Now that you are a woman,” she says, “this is what happens if you open your legs.”
The peppers sting. The girl cries out—an overplayed melody.
She always sits with her legs closed tightly now. It could be worse, her mother told her. Across the ocean in Nepal, girls with blood are forbidden from sleeping inside the house, so a shed, akin to a dog’s kennel, is built for them outside. Sometimes in the winter the girls are dragged away by Himalayan wolves.
It is nothing new for us women to try something daring to keep the interest of our men. If we lie down like a log, we tell ourselves, they will get bored and look for other women who can please them. We scan blogs, buy books, listen around campfires for tips and tricks. Even when most of our partners cannot be bothered to bring us to climax, we search the web and unpack old wives’ tales for how to deepen their pleasure. One such tale that women whisper to each other after church and at tea parties finds our ears one day.
Men prefer it dry.
Our wetness is like sandpaper to them. We must start drinking a potion that makes it dry.
We quickly hunt down where to find this magic potion that makes it dry. In the public toilets near Bulawayo City Hall, a woman sells the potion we need. We know those toilets. No running water has flowed through those taps. Kombi and bus drivers shit on the floors because the toilet bowls are already piled up. The floors overflow with piss.
But if the potion will make our man quicken to pleasure, we will walk through a public toilet for him.
We walk past the women’s clinic in the direction of City Hall, ignoring the posters tacked to the clinic’s walls warning of the growing number of women diagnosed with cervical cancer in the region. Sure enough, we find the woman in the public toilet. The potion we buy from her is even smellier than the toilet. Later that night after a bath, we rub it onto our womanhood and pray it makes us dry.
I was watching SpongeBob SquarePants the day my gogo knocked on our front door and entered without waiting for a response. She carried with her a small suitcase, a hand on her hip, and eyes that darted from ceiling to carpet scanning for a single speck of dust. Nothing missed those eyes. I almost cut short the last years she had left in her when I engulfed her in a tight hug. I withdrew instantly from her, holding my breath. There was something unusual about the way she smelled that I couldn’t put my finger on. She usually had the smoky aroma of food cooked over a fire—she refused to let my parents install magetsi on the farm because electricity makes women idle. Today there was something else mingled with the smoke. I tried to pinpoint what that smell was as she drew me back into her embrace.
“I have come to do what must be done,” she said.
For me, turning twelve wasn’t a bridge that I skipped happily across to the other side but a tightrope onto which I was thrust. The next morning when I was in the bathroom, Gogo barged in with her suitcase. The sound of the zip opening cut through the air. Inside her suitcase were all manner of herbs, strange liquids, and lotions in repurposed Vaseline bottles. The horrid smell that I’d picked up when she hugged me was coming from the suitcase.
“It must be done before your first period,” Gogo said. “For you to become a real woman.”
What I remember is this:
Gogo telling me to lie down in the tub. That I must do this before every wash when she is gone.
Gogo rubbing the ointment around her hands, grabbing hold of my legs and pulling them apart.
Gogo smearing the ointment in between my exposed legs and then tugging at my labia, gently at first, like a slight pinch, until each tug became a vigorous pull. I screamed, but her hold on me tightened.
“Kudhonza hurts more if you resist,” she said. “We have to pull until it is the size of an index finger.”
A pain I’d never known before took me into its arms and refused to let go. I wilted, losing the will to scream. It was not the pulling that was the most excruciating, it was the inability to stop the invasion of my body, the gripping of my loins like they were elastic, the stretching like the milking of a cow’s udder.
The only explanation she gave me was “This is for your future husband.”
Which came first, the orange or the egg? Sometimes oranges turn into holes.
After the big white wedding, the groom’s mother lays down a bleached white sheet on the marriage bed. Girls these days aren’t like my generation, the mother-in-law thinks, they are crafty little things that can cheat even the sure science of an egg test.
The newlyweds are to spend the wedding night under the groom’s parents’ roof. In the morning, the groom’s mother inspects the sheet. It is still white. No blood. If the bride isn’t a virgin, she might as well be a hole, a cesspit that’s open for all to shit in. The mother-in-law will not stand for a cesspit of a daughter-in-law. She snatches the sheet from the bed and cuts a circle, a gaping hole, into the sheet. She parades the sheet of shame to the guests inside the house, outside to the neighbors, to the street vendors selling overripe fruit, to anyone with ears to listen. She marches with the sheet to the bride’s parents’ house, an excited mob growing and trailing behind her.
When she reaches their gates, she holds up the sheet like a trophy.
“No blood on the sheet,” she shouts to the bride’s parents. “Mwana wenyu akaboorwa.” Your daughter is a hole.
And now the parents must give the mob their daughter’s head.
Marulas and wild plums grow abundantly in Plumtree, a small town whose only elegant feature is the main road that runs through it, connecting the border town to Botswana. A young woman from the big city marries a boy from this small town. The newlyweds pay the parents a visit, as is customary after a white wedding. The couple enjoy dinner and conversation with the groom’s parents. They are good, humble people, these parents. The bride already feels welcomed into the family. When the derere and sadza have settled into their bellies, the mother-in-law exclaims that they do not have dessert prepared. The father-in-law tells his son to drive to the nearest store, along the main road, to get them something sweet.
When the son leaves, the mother with a kind smile asks her new daughter-in-law to go grab a shawl from a closet in her bedroom. “I get the shivers at night,” the mother-in-law says.
The bride, a good daughter-in-law, dutifully goes to her in-laws’ bedroom to retrieve the shawl. As soon as she steps into the bedroom, the door shuts behind her. Her father-in-law is behind her.
“This is our tradition,” the father says. “I must test you out before my son can have you.”
“I don’t understand,” is the last thing she says before the test.
The son returns. What he carries away from his parents’ home is not what walked in just a few hours before.
“I didn’t know of it,” he says in the car. He had been educated in the city and received a scholarship to study abroad. He was never around Plumtree long enough to know of these things. Never spoke of wedding customs with his married sisters, his married best girlfriends, his exes, his mother, his cousins, his aunties, the lady selling mangos at the street corner, that woman on the bus with a doek on her head and her eyes on the ground, the cashier at TM Supermarket, the bank teller at Standard Bank, the news anchor on ZBC News, the girl he sat next to in the lecture hall, the girl he tried to sleep with in the dorms but she refused because it would mean her head and he got angry and called her a prude, the girl he whistled at with his guffawing group of friends as she walked alone and frightened to the shops, the girl he chided for having soft hands and light knees, the girl he told “I will be gentle” and never texted back who ended up dead on the news.
The following year, when the couple’s first child is born, he holds the baby still slimy with birth blood in his hands.
He thinks, I don’t know if this child is my son or my little brother.
There is an old lady in a forest who sells lightning by the bottle. Drop five dollars and you can strike whoever you choose. If the men in Parliament had any sense, they would abandon their futile plans of trying to make the country a nuclear power by 2030. America will never allow it. If the men in Parliament had any sense, they would send a delegation to the forest, where they would remove their shoes at the door, cross a threshold of salt, and come out with lightning for the army.
A pregnant woman cries all night looking at an image of an ultrasound. Those patches of black and white pronounce a life sentence.
“Where is a son?”
“Where is a son?” she screams at the doctors.
She cries not because she wants a son but because she doesn’t want a daughter. Soon a daughter will be born and someone will tell her that her hands are soft and rub chili peppers on her as if dressing a wound and she will learn that eggs are not only for breakfast and she will go to Plumtree like her mother before her and come back a dead thing.
The pregnant woman burns the ultrasound and remembers the way to a naked old lady in a forest.
“I need protection for my daughter,” the pregnant woman says to the muroyi.
“From what?” the old lady in the forest asks.
“Everything.”
The muroyi smiles a knowing smile. Out of her bag she takes out a clear jar that must have housed sun jam in the past. Inside the jar the sparks dance in a zigzag. The pregnant woman holds a storm in her hands.
“It is bottomless,” the old lady says.
When the daughter’s breasts bud, an uncle does what uncles do and reaches to pluck a flower before the bloom. It is dark, the government has cut the lights for twelve hours again, but white light surrounds the uncle and flames erupt from his chest. Three times someone tries to beat the flames with a blanket. Three times the flame reignites. An autopsy is conducted.
Cause of death: Electrocution. Deceased probably put his finger in a light socket.
There is an old lady in the forest who sells lightning by the bottle.