Kyrie Eleison | Κύριε ἐλέησον
Edidiong Uzoma Essie
Edidiong Uzoma Essie
God talks often to my Baba and he makes him an angrier man than he should be, angrier than he would’ve been without divine lips at his ear, but I think my Baba’s anger sits well with God; I think it makes Him, it shapes Him, sketches an unseeable silhouette, infinite complexity. God tells Baba in their private conversations, Titus, you are deserving of nice suppers on crystal plates every single day — not just at Christmas or Easter — and cigars sent from the prime minister himself (may he live the longest), also you deserve owned land, acres of it, not leased, at the very least three sons to obscure the waste of top tier semen your singular child turned out to be, a wife who has no bees in her throat, no bees and no stingers messing you the fuck up (the very antithesis of my mother and her throat full of violent bees). God says to Baba, you have enemies, your greatest, most sinister being the one who bears your last name, the bee-throated wife; she has stung just enough to make you slow and stupid, unaccomplished obviously. Is this true God? Is it really? How can my mother swallow her own spit if bees live inside her neck? How come I never hear buzzing creeping out of her when she kisses the crown of my head, when she reads out loud to me at bedtime — stories about off-putting prophets sailing from coast to coast, of greedy kings eating their own kin, charismatic heroines? Why would a colony of insects such as bees find refuge in my mother? Will you enlighten me too, spirit friend of my father? Will you make this mysterious rationale known to me, a lowly human girl with legs that barely work?
God shows him visions of a different life, an alternate life, and my Baba, Titus the third, keeps looking for portals to fling him out of the life he has into the one God has told him he definitely deserves—the crystal dishware and stropping sons, the new wife to boost his morale. He looks for portals in passport-less hookers, inside their glum eyeballs, their mouths and nests of fine hair ruined by peroxide, their ribcages, their overworked pelvic floors. Baba smokes narrow cigarettes, while we are eating suppers that are unfit for a king, old rice with older beans usually, or sitting in familial dysfunction on our veranda, and he asks more of the cigarettes than is physically possible, but a cigarette, a million cartons of cigarettes, cannot transform the mundane life into something sharper, prettier. He informs us, lame daughter, bee-throated wife, while he smokes, about all the whores he is fucking, the whores he could be fucking, real classy ones like the prime minister’s (may he live long) but Baba isn’t a prime minister at all, although he knows he has the brains to run up to three sovereign nations. He is just a court clerk. Just. So, the calibre of cunt available to him is unspectacular, it is ordinary, befitting his ordinary life, his distressingly ordinary status. Should a gout-afflicted civil servant sleep with the same sort of women as a prime minister? In a just world, perhaps. This world, ours, is unjust, his situation is evidence of pervasive inequality. Under the thumb of so many lesser men (his boss, his boss’s boss, that person’s superior too) he can smell the injustice, he has injustice crammed all the way up his rectum. Do you know what that feels like, Baba’s god? Why can’t you pity him (mother and me too) and stop with the whispering? Please take your everlasting mouth away from his ear, have mercy. And look, I would kneel if I could, you know this, omniscient being that you are, omnipotent too, (I have pored over your sacred texts with my sluggish clay mind, the mind of a teenage ankle-biter, so I am aware, god of my Baba, just how much power you wield). I’d kneel and let the skin of my purposeless knees to split, spewing canals of my own blood, I would scrape my entire body on concrete, if only you’d let my Papa be. If only. I don’t think the portal he wants sits in this ordinary world you have put us into, it doesn’t live here.
God shows him visions of a different life, an alternate life, and my Baba, Titus the third, keeps looking for portals to fling him out of the life he has into the one God has told him he definitely deserves—the crystal dishware and stropping sons, the new wife to boost his morale. He looks for portals in passport-less hookers, inside their glum eyeballs, their mouths and nests of fine hair ruined by peroxide, their ribcages, their overworked pelvic floors. Baba smokes narrow cigarettes, while we are eating suppers that are unfit for a king, old rice with older beans usually, or sitting in familial dysfunction on our veranda, and he asks more of the cigarettes than is physically possible, but a cigarette, a million cartons of cigarettes, cannot transform the mundane life into something sharper, prettier. He informs us, lame daughter, bee-throated wife, while he smokes, about all the whores he is fucking, the whores he could be fucking, real classy ones like the prime minister’s (may he live long) but Baba isn’t a prime minister at all, although he knows he has the brains to run up to three sovereign nations. He is just a court clerk. Just. So, the calibre of cunt available to him is unspectacular, it is ordinary, befitting his ordinary life, his distressingly ordinary status. Should a gout-afflicted civil servant sleep with the same sort of women as a prime minister? In a just world, perhaps. This world, ours, is unjust, his situation is evidence of pervasive inequality. Under the thumb of so many lesser men (his boss, his boss’s boss, that person’s superior too) he can smell the injustice, he has injustice crammed all the way up his rectum. Do you know what that feels like, Baba’s god? Why can’t you pity him (mother and me too) and stop with the whispering? Please take your everlasting mouth away from his ear, have mercy. And look, I would kneel if I could, you know this, omniscient being that you are, omnipotent too, (I have pored over your sacred texts with my sluggish clay mind, the mind of a teenage ankle-biter, so I am aware, god of my Baba, just how much power you wield). I’d kneel and let the skin of my purposeless knees to split, spewing canals of my own blood, I would scrape my entire body on concrete, if only you’d let my Papa be. If only. I don’t think the portal he wants sits in this ordinary world you have put us into, it doesn’t live here.
Edidiong Uzoma Essien is a Nigerian writer based in the U.S. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Southern Humanities Review, Pacifica Literary Review, Epiphany Literary Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. Essien enjoys reading, playing video games, and submitting to the whims of her cat.