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It is Hard to Kill Your Brother - JAY Lit
It is hard to kill your brother To hold a knife to his throat and watch his blood pour out onto your palms To look at his face and watch the life seeping out of his eyes If you’re a first timer, It is not easy to take a life When that life is your
jaylit.com
It is hard to kill your brother
To hold a knife to his throat and watch his blood pour out onto your palms
To look at his face and watch the life seeping out of his eyes
If you’re a first timer,
It is not easy to take a life
When that life is your brother’s
It is nearly impossible to make him die
~
When you woke up today, you were immediately aware of two things. One; that your name was Michael. And two; that you were a murderer. You had not merely killed someone; you were a murderer.
The concept of guilt is a very complicated one. Especially for you. On some days, you are strong. You are able to go out of your room and talk to the boys in the room beside yours; Jide and Malik. Maybe even play a game of football with the other guys. The evening ones are easier on your body. By then the sun is so far behind the darkening clouds that you are able to play 4 or 5 sets without quickly falling tired, your chest heaving up and down like a mad yoyo.
But some other days, you cannot get up from your bed. On such days, all you do is lie still, with your hands on your chest, staring at the ceiling. When you stare at the white ceiling with its peeling paint long enough, you begin to see his face, or rather, what his face must’ve looked like, because you did not see his face that night. You did not see anything, because you were scared.
But what was it you were scared of?
When you look at his face long enough, your left hand begins to wander down your body, down to your boxers, to your penis. Some things are too hard to face. It is better {easier} to run from them, from truth.
Your eyes always shed tears while you are masturbating. It is easy to blame them for the tears because it would be too difficult for you to agree that you are the one doing the crying. You are selectively aware of what is happening to you. You pick what parts of your life you want to be aware of, the moments you want to experience, and those that you don’t.
Like when you masturbate.
Most times, you are not even sure why you touch yourself the way you do. You know that it is not “konji” that is worrying you when you touch yourself these days. Lust’s allure has fled from your mind’s eye in the last two weeks. So are you masturbating because you are sad? Or is it for lack of what to do? Is it your guilt that pushes you to touch yourself like this?
But you cry when you touch yourself, and you’ve been touching yourself very often lately. When you go off, there is no pleasure in it for you. It is simply a means of escaping the worrisome images that are in your head.
But in keeping with the rhythm of moving your hand up and down very quickly, you start to feel something. What you begin to feel could be called release; the thing you would feel if a wrench was being slowly removed from your head. But just as you begin to feel free, an image flashes before your eyes, no, it envelopes you. His head is bobbing forward and back, his mouth wide ajar in surprise, red, warm, bubbling blood pouring out of it onto your palms. The release leaves you again.
There was one evening where you passed by the mirror close to your door and mistakenly looked in the mirror. Your eyes were red, like those of a rat caught in a trap. It shocked you how, in just one week, your face had changed entirely. Your beard was rough. And you were almost certain that if you continued to leave it like this, in a short while, it would begin to look like that of those homeless mad men you used to see as a child back home in Ibadan. You actually looked mad, like someone who was mentally insane and needed to either be placed in Aro Mental, but Aro Mental is in Abeokuta, and you’ve lived all of your life in Ibadan, so maybe you’d just be left to rot on the roadside. Perhaps that was why you blocked Nifemi on Whatsapp when she asked for a video call. Since then, you had ignored all her calls, and just yesterday evening, you’d blacklisted her number.
But it was not just because you looked like an animal that you didn’t want her to see you. It was because you felt like an animal, something so sinister and vile that you were less than human.
You weren’t sure yet what you would do about her. Nifemi had always been in your corner, for nearly 7 years now. She’d been your “guy” through everything; your secondary school days of lusting after everything in a skirt, to your 100 level days of trying to be a better man while battling ADHD and more lust. She had always been here, even after she found out that your gambling addiction had cost you and your mother nearly a hundred thousand Naira.
But now you had killed another person, you had taken a life. She would not be able to forgive you once she knew what you’d done. Your heart could not bear the pain. So you blocked her. You pushed her far, far away. She would be beyond bitter when she realised that you’d blocked her everywhere. She would feel that was reason enough to never speak to you again. Nifemi was a proud woman, just like you were a proud boy. But she also loved you, just like you loved her. She had become your sister, and your heart was doing something more painful than breaking every day that passed without you speaking to her.
It is hard to lose your sister. But it becomes possible to live with that pain when you have killed your brother.
~
He was not the type of person you would’ve liked. It might’ve been possible to tolerate him, but you wouldn’t have liked him. If you two hadn’t been brothers, you would have written him off as fake, a two-faced lying hypocrite. But because you had been brothers from the days of pushing around old tires with sticks and happily wearing undersized underwear all over the small neighbourhood, it was possible for you to understand him. It was easy to do so, because you loved him.
David was not a liar. There was no way for you to prove it when the other boys said so, but then again, they knew not to say so when you were around. So you could really choose to believe that they never said so, even if that was impossible to do. But you could not ignore what people thought of your friend. And you could not ignore it because you were the reason why they thought he was a hypocrite. You were a “razz boy”, the type of boy that David should be preaching to and inviting for the incessant midweek services that these mushroom fellowships were always holding. You needed saving, the kind of saving that people like David claimed their Jesus offered.
So it was perplexing to most people that you two were friends, or at least, were seen in public together. There’d been a few occasions when he’d told you of spats with his fellow fellowship members over his “continued alliance with a son of darkness”. He was a child of the light, and light should not mix with darkness. There was nothing they didn’t say to him about you. Heck! He’d even played you a voice note where his cell leader had berated him with a Yoruba proverb that said “Aguntan to ba ba aja rin, a je igbe”.
But like you, your brother was stubborn. It was something your parents were always flogging you for in the old days; knowing that such and such was what was required of you to do, but still going ahead to do what was in your heart to do initially. It was a headiness, a need for freedom and the absence of boundaries. A need to not be boxed in.
Maybe the problem that everyone had with David was that he wouldn’t pick a side. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to dress corporate and follow Jesus on Sunday, or if he wanted to wear too much cologne and baggy sweatpants feeling on women’s bodies by 1am in the dark corners of AngloMoz on Tuesday morning.
He was that undecided. It irked you sometimes too, but you knew to allow it, because you were undecided too. You would read something in your Bible and call him to talk about it for half an hour, but then forget to practise it by the time you woke up the next morning. So you could understand his indecisiveness, but only wished he’d own his identity a bit more often. But you were thankful that he always owned you, any slight chance he got. It was so good that one day you asked him about it in cussing Pidgin, and whether it was because he liked you that much, or if it did something for his stubborn streak. He did not give you a direct answer, but
rather smacked you across the back of your head.
Your love was like that, boys’ love is always like that; afraid to say “I love you” to one another, but ready to jump in front of a moving car on their behalf at the slightest need.
~
There is a memory of him that always chokes you like water filling your nose.
Both of you are labouredly pushing around a ball that is bigger than your heads combined. It is morning, too late for breakfast, but too early for lunch because the warmth of the sun is still too timid to be called afternoon. The two of you have been playing since morning, immediately after breakfast, but your mother isn’t saying anything. It is the midterm break, and neither of you is six yet.
Your family’s compound is fairly large, especially now that your father’s car has been driven to work, leaving a little more space for you to “dribble” David. You have both begun to grow aware of your bodies, and the fact that girls shouldn’t be allowed to see your penises, so you’ve graduated from wearing just pants, to covering them with short knickers that your mother is always begging you not to get too dirty. You are both barefoot, the tickle of the brown sand against the insides of your toes sends spurts of pleasure up your leg to your brain, keeping you alert for when he will try to kick some of the sand at you so you have to look away from the too-big-ball.
The game is going well; you are pushing David, he is pushing you back, when he “dribbles” past you and kicks the ball a little too far for him to reach in time, you pretend to be too tired to run after him, so he has enough time to reach his prize, he returns your kindness like a tennis serve. It is back and forth, this flow, this love, this cord that binds both of you in the innocent, unspoken oath called brotherhood.
Then it happens, he leans in to push you, but you slightly shift to the left. He has leaned in too much, he was pushing to fall you down, to hurt you. He broke the silent rules of your game, of your love. A stone wraps its hands against his leg in punishment, and with a cold finality, drags him to the sandy ground.
You are sure that he can see the shock in your eyes, just like you see the surprise in his.
It becomes quick, he is on the sandy floor, a moment, then a loud scream, spilling, spurting, bursting, out of his mouth {lips}, your mother is tumbling out of the house. It is all too quick for you, and you just stand, watching.
She is beside him, lifting him, petting him, rubbing him all over and saying “pele, pele”. She is hitting you, pushing you, asking you, “kilode, shey o fe pa ni?”. She does not call him “omolomo”, because somewhere between the endless nights slept over at your house and your incessant breakfasts at his father’s red bungalow, he has become as much your mother’s son as you are, you have become as much his father’s child as he is. You two have become brothers, there is no dividing line anymore, visible or invisible.
You are standing, ashamed, until you see the side of your friend’s face that your mother’s body has been blocking all this while.
Bleeding.
You become overstimulated, and begin crying. Your mother is incensed at you, your friend feels betrayed by you, even though he was the one to first betray you, but you begin crying. You didn’t know why then, you did not know why even fifteen years after, when you turned nineteen.
But now that you have killed him and you have seen what it means to spill your own blood, you know why you were crying that day, you know why he stepped between you and your mother with his gashed forehead, begging her to not hit you any more, telling her in tearful stammers that it was he who pushed you first and that it was all his fault.
~
