Amidst the crowd gathered in the marketplace, Uzodimma craned her neck, her heels reaching ambitiously higher while the sides of her face rubbed against the sweaty faces of strangers. And she saw it. In the middle, the space that the market people had made for the ‘performance’, a madwoman lay naked on the bare, probably sun-scorched, sand, silent and still, as if oblivious to the men wagging their penises in her face while they took their turns with her. Uzodimma shrieked. It was not shock she felt; it was some sort of withdrawal, like a woman in battle raising her hands in defeat. But Uzodimma did not raise her hands. She moved silently, slowly, from the crowd of sweaty faces, and lugged her heavy BagCo with her to the man-child she’d left at home.



Dinner that night was egusi, and the akpu that Raluchi had pounded to maddening softness -Raluchi because her father, Igwebuike, had muttered a few words about women lacking the ability to do anything and Raluchi had wanted to prove to her father that she would not grow up to be like other women. Uzodimma had, of course, hissed at this but when she stared at the rapidity at which Igwebuike molded and swallowed the balls of fufu, she felt the rage -that rage that had been building itself up since she caught him last year with yet another woman- fight and push its way up to the tip of her tongue and the soles of her feet, and the ribs of her chest, she knew that she’d had enough of Igwebuike; of men. She’d had enough of her 10-year old role as his servant instead of his wife; with her hatred for the lousy officer at NYSC camp whose story had been believed over hers; with the man at Ogbete who’d laughed at the idea of a woman being ‘truly’ in charge because, to him, women only deserved the illusion of being in charge and nothing more; with the yahoo boys at the market whom everyone had watched and let get away with raping a woman because some other man of the gods had said so. The more Igwebuike swallowed, the more rage Uzodimma felt, until she could taste the bitterness of it all over her tongue. 



“Nna m, do you want more food?” she asked, and like the fool he was, Igwebuike nodded yes. Luckily, she didn’t kill him that night. She killed him many months later. 



It was in his sleep, or so she’d let him think. She’d still wondered, after, if he’d really deserved a peaceful death. But she consoled herself with the knowledge that letting Igwebuike know that death had been coming for him would have meant letting the world know that she’d killed him. And so she’d begun small -tiny doses of air bubbles along with his flu medications in his veins. Air bubbles in the bloodstream, in the right amounts, were unsuspicious. She knew because she’d spent seven years in medical school, two of those aborting foetuses because Igwebuike had decided his penis too big to fit in condoms, and she’d experimented with air bubbles the fourth time, the time she’d also decided she would die as well. But she hadn’t died and Igwebuike should have begun counting his luck from that day. 



Over the next few months, before his death, Igwebuike had continued to catch the flu -or so Uzodimma had let him think. And in those months, she gave him the dosages the doctor had, given her medical background, entrusted her to -plus tiny bits of air bubbles. Igwebuike had a seizure in his sleep, and that was the end of him. No known cause was detected. Of course people had their suspicions, as they did of every woman in the world who was newly widowed. And although, this time, their suspicions were correct, they could not be proven. Only one thing was sure, maybe not to the rest of the world but to Raluchi and her younger brother: that the day Igwebuike was put to the ground, they saw Uzodimma’s face break into a smile for the first time -the first in a really long time.