bedrooms.
'Who sent you here?' Aunt Ifeoma asked.
'We are from the special security unit in Port Harcourt.'
'Do you have any papers to show me? You cannot just walk into my house.'
'Look at this yeye woman oh! I said we are from the special security unit!' The tribal marks curved even more on the man's face as he frowned and pushed Aunty Ifeoma aside.
'How you go just come enter like dis? Wetin be dis?' Obiora said, rising, the fear in his eyes not quite shielded by the brazen manliness in his pidgin English.
'Obiora, nodu ani,' Aunt Ifeoma quietly said, and Obiora sat down quickly. He looked relieved that he had been asked to.
Aunty Ifeoma muttered to us all to remain seated, not to say a word, before she followed the men into the rooms. They did not look inside the drawers they flung open, they just threw the clothes and whatever else was inside on the floor. They overturned all the boxes and suitcases in Aunty Ifeoma's room, but they did not rummage through the contents. They scattered, but they did not search. As they left, the man with the tribal marks said to Aunty Ifeoma, waving a stubby finger with a curved nail in her face, 'Be careful, be very careful.'
We were silent until the sound of their car driving off faded. 'We have to go to the police station,' Obiora said.
Aunt Ifeoma smiled; the movement of her lips did not brighten her face. 'That is where they came from. They're all working together.'
'Why are they accusing you of encouraging the riot, Aunty?' Jaja asked.
'It's all rubbish. They want to scare me. Since when have students needed somebody to tell them when to riot?'
'I don't believe they just forced their way into our house and turned it upside down,' Amaka said. 'I don't believe it.'
'Thank God Chima is asleep,' Aunty Ifeoma said.
'We should leave,' Obiora said. 'Mom, we should leave. Have you talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?'
Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.
'What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own country? Why can't we fix it?' Amaka asked.
'Fix what?' Obiora had a deliberate sneer on his face.
'So we have to run away? That's the answer, running away?' Amaka asked, her voice shrill.
'It's not running away, it's being realistic. By the time we get into university, the good professors will be fed up with all this nonsense and they will go abroad.'
'Shut up, both of you, and come and clean up this place!' Aunty Ifeoma snapped. It was the first time she did not look on proudly and enjoy my cousins' arguments.
An earthworm was slithering in the bathtub, near the drain, when I went in to take a bath in the morning. The purplish-brown body contrasted with the whiteness of the tub. The pipes were old, Amaka had said, and every rainy season, earthworms made their way into the bathtub. Aunty Ifeoma had written the works department about the pipes, but, of course, it would take ages before anybody did anything about them. Obiora said he liked to study the worms; he'd discovered that they died only when you poured salt on them. If you cut them in two, each part simply grew back to form a whole earthworm. Before I climbed into the tub, I picked the rope like body out with a twig broken off a broom and threw it in the toilet. I could not flush because there was nothing to flush, it would be a waste of water. The boys would have to pee looking at a floating earthworm in the toilet bowl.
When I finished my bath, Aunty Ifeoma had poured me a glass of milk. She had sliced my okpa, too, and red chunks of pepper gaped from the yellow slices. 'How do you feel, nne?' she asked.
'I'm fine, Aunty.' I did not even remember that I had once hoped never to open my eyes again, that fire had once dwelt in my body. I picked up my glass, stared at the curiously beige and grainy milk.
'Homemade soybean milk,' Aunty Ifeoma said. 'Very nutritious. One of our lecturers in agriculture sells it.'
'It tastes like chalk water,' Amaka said.
'How do you know, have you ever drunk chalk water?' Aunty Ifeoma asked. She laughed, but I saw the lines, thin as spiders' limbs, around her mouth and the faraway look in her eyes. 'I just can't afford milk anymore,' she added tiredly. 'You should see how the prices of dried milk rise every day, as if somebody is chasing them.'
The doorbell rang. My stomach heaved around itself whenever I heard it, although I knew Father Amadi usually knocked quietly on the door. It was a student of Aunt Ifeoma's, in a tight pair of blue jeans. Her face was light-skinned, but her complexion was from bleaching creams-her hands were the dark brown color of Bournvita with no milk added. She held a huge gray chicken. It was a symbol of her formal announcement to Aunty Ifeoma that she was getting married, she said. When her fiance learned of yet another university closure, he had told her he could no longer wait until she graduated, since nobody knew when the university would reopen. The wedding would be next month. She did not call him by his name, she called him 'dim,' 'my husband,' with the proud tone of someone who had won a prize, tossing her braided, reddish gold-dyed hair.
'I'm not sure I will come back to school when we reopen. I want to have a baby first. I don't want dim to think that he married me to have an empty home,' she said, with a high, girlish laugh. Before she left, she copied Aunty Ifeoma's address down, so she could send an invitation card.
Aunty Ifeoma stood looking at the door. 'She was never particularly bright, so I shouldn't be sad,' she said thoughtfully, and Amaka laughed and said, 'Mom!'
The chicken squawked. It was lying on its side because its legs were tied together. 'Obiora, please kill this chicken and put it in the freezer before it loses weight, since there's nothing to feed it,' Aunty Ifeoma said.
'They have been taking the light too often the past week. I say we eat the whole chicken today,' Obiora said.
'How about we eat half and put the other half in the freezer and pray NEPA brings back the light so it doesn't spoil,' Amaka said.
'Okay,' Aunty Ifeoma said.
'I'll kill it,' Jaja said, and we all turned to stare at him.
'Nna m, you have never killed a chicken, have you?' Aunty Ifeoma asked.
'No. But I can kill it.'
'Okay,' Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare, startled at how easily she had said that. Was she absentminded because she was thinking about her student? Did she really think Jaja could kill a chicken?
I followed Jaja out to the backyard, watched him hold the wings down under his foot. He bent the chicken's head back. The knife glinted, meeting with the sun rays to give off sparks. The chicken had stopped squawking; perhaps it had decided to accept the inevitable. I did not look as Jaja slit its feathery neck, but I watched the chicken dance to the frenzied tunes of death. It flapped its gray wings in the red mud, twisting and flailing. Finally, it lay in a puff of sullied feathers.
Jaja picked it up and dunked it in the basin of hot water that Amaka brought. There was a precision in Jaja, a single mindedness that was cold, clinical. He started to pluck the feathers off quickly, and he did not speak until the chicken had been reduced to a slim form covered with white-yellow skin. I did not realize how long a chicken's neck is until it was plucked.
'If Aunty Ifeoma leaves, then I want to leave with them, too,' he said.
I said nothing. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I did not want to say.
Two vultures hovered overhead and then landed on the ground, close enough that I could have grabbed them if I had jumped fast. Their bald necks glistened in the early-morning sun. 'See how close the vultures come now?' Obiora asked. He and Amaka had come to stand by the back door. 'They are getting hungrier and hungrier. Nobody kills chickens these days, and so there are less entrails for them to eat.' He picked up a stone and threw it at the vultures. They flew up and perched on the branches of the mango tree only a little distance away.
'Papa-Nnukwu used to say that the vultures have lost their prestige,' Amaka said. 'In the old days, people liked them because when they came down to eat the entrails of animals used in sacrifice, it meant the gods were happy.'
