Should have been a dress

The day before yesterday, was the first day of mom's apprenticeship as a tailor.

At night, she gathered all five of us under the palm tree and told us a story. A story of how the tortoise lost his smooth shell.

The second day of her apprenticeship, dad sent me to buy fuel so mom could continue to practice pedalling her sewing machine. The whirring of the machine continued for hours even after the one litre of fuel had run out. But mom didn't mind. She was comfortable pedalling with only the glow from the lamp placed on the window sill as the source of light. I know it because I peeped and saw the look of contentment on her face.

Today, mom came back with her first project. A round necked papery dress, flared at the bottom. Something about the little dress unsettled me and instead of approaching it with the adoration every other member of the family did, I couldn't help my cavalier attitude.

When a metal hanger was inserted into the cloth and the head appeared from the cloth's neck, it reminded me of a character from the children show teletubbies, with a coiled antenna right at the top of their head.

We were a family of two boys and three girls and our two bedroom flat housed us all. One room for the girls and the other for my parents. We, the boys had the sitting room to ourselves at night. I stared at the dress.

Mom made it a point of duty to smile everytime she saw the dress and to trail a finger on it's papery texture everytime she walked past it. I stared again. Something stirred within me.

We sat in a circle, each of us taking yam from a bowl and ensuring that no hand was about to dip before dipping it in fish sauce made with palm oil. The kerosene lamp illuminating the room well enough, we could make out silhouettes of things around the sitting room and bright enough, we would see if there was a fly hovering atop our food. I saw the dress, a chill ran through me.

We had all retired for the night. Papa went hunting so we left the front door open for him for when he got back. I woke up to Obinna snoring loudly next to me. Obinna rarely snored and even when he did, it wasn't always enough to wake me. He was so loud, for a moment I considered pushing him roughly so he stopped.

My eyes darted to the little dress but the sickly thing was no longer there. I wondered who had removed it but waved the thought of the dress aside. Mom probably took it to her room seeing how impressed she was with herself all afternoon. I closed my eyes, in hopes of succumbing to sleep but then, I realized. Apart from Obinna's snores, there were no other sounds. No cricket sounds, no whooshing of trees swayed by breeze. The night was still.

I opened my eyes and stared straight at my line of sight.

Unmoving, the little dress lay there, on the sofa. It's hem, resting on the part where one's buttocks usually sits and the length of it's body rested on one of the chair's arms.
Facing me.

It looked like it was put there by the breeze but maybe it was just me being paranoid, there was something off about that dress.

I stared at the dress for a while, wondering how it perched so comfortably on the chair. Then, I closed my eyes, mumbling a silent prayer to God for sleep to come sooner and embrace me till morning.

I opened my eyes swiftly again and this time, the dress floated directly above me. The hanger holding out both arms, it's iron head particularly close to my eyes. As though the action was mechanical, I grabbed the paper which deflated immediately in my hands.

I hurled it to the ground and squeezed. I dealt it blows and twisted the Hanger's head in a circular motion.
Succeeding in detaching the hanger head from it's body, I knelt on all fours, the crumpled dress now beneath me.

'Ikenna, what have you done?' The sound of papa's voice, a whisper, brought me back. The gravity of what I had just done, sinking immediately.

I tried straightening out the rumpled imitation of a dress and as the first tear drop slid down my face, I knew mom was never going to look at me the same way again.

Oddly, in the midst of everything, I realized that the dress's situation and tortoise's situation from that first day story, were awfully similar.

Thanks for reading

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