On Thursday of last week, my father pumped bullets into my body and watched me slump to the floor. My baseball cap, cream-white and curvy, fell off my head and lay in the pool of my own blood. And the last thing I saw was the righteous satisfaction spreading over his face.
I never got to say my last prayers. To whom, I was not sure. But I could have at least said, “Hallelujah”, the word Christians say when the battle is over. I never got to say, “Forgive me, dad”, either. Not that he was going to forgive me, but I could have tried anyway.
Seven months before my murder, May, when he opened the door to my room on a sultry afternoon and found me and my boyfriend in bed, he staggered back—a stunned pause—and didn’t forgive me. I was so speechless. I hadn’t expected him to come home. He had been away for so long, leaving me and my brother alone in the apartment, that I let my mind blur all the sharp lines that came with his presence. A return home should have been heralded, I thought rather preciously. A premonition, my toe hitting a rock, me spilling my mango juice at the cafeteria, a slight shift in the air, anything. When he dropped live coals on my back and asked me to untie my sweatpants and leave my penis in the burning refuse at the back, angry yellow flames gnawing into my flesh, I let myself accept that he would never forgive me, for catching me.
I shouldn’t have thought of forgiveness as I died. I should have forgotten everything about the tender acceptance of what I was. But there is this wildness that seizes us during those seconds just before we die. A fleeting prayer. A wild desperation to cling onto some love—some validation—from people we’ve always loved, and then depart with it where we can hold it as a souvenir on our journey into oblivion, as having lived a life of worth, and gaze at it from time to time, still held in our hand, so we can smile in peace and wipe our tears. How much could I have asked of my own father?
He worked at the United Airlines. I had never really quite got the grip on what exact office he held. I barely had any grip on him anyway. My brother and I. We had always lacked him. His fatherliness. His love. The same way we lacked a birth mother in our lives. She had abandoned us at a very blurry age and gone her own way. We didn’t remember what she looked like, smelled like, felt like.
We lived at the Seven Hills apartment, where we begged for food from neighbours, my brother and I. Sometimes, they had what to give. Then, they said they didn’t have anything. Entitlement was another sense we adopted quickly, a wretched cloak we hastily wrapped around our flesh, a second skin. Our father rarely stayed home. And when he did come, it was to drag me by the ear to his study and beat me senseless while my older brother watched in mute helplessness. My offence was always vague—I plaited my hair, I opened the door too late, I got a new phone, how, where?
He once took me through a labyrinth of questions—what was in other boys’ bodies that I was seeking? What was in their bodies that wasn’t in mine? Why must I find attraction in a fellow boy? What kind of a lust was that? Was I deranged? At a point, I ran out of plausible answers and started to believe that I was deranged indeed. To think I could have changed his mind with my answers, with anybody’s answers at all, I must have been on a special codeine diet. How could I have ever made him realize that love was not greed, was not an experiment, was not an Easter Egg Search, was not something you “searched for” in others, that—instead—it was simply something you gave, something you helplessly, saylessly drowned into? How could I have made him understand that attraction was attraction and not “what you found in other boys”? There was no way he was going to swallow that. Or even think of swallowing it. So I sat through all the mental gruelling, lips fastened, and wished his questions would dry up fast.
They never did.
He would preach about abomination, his favourite word. He also liked to refer to what he called “mental anthropology”, other races that had been reckoned to be intellectually and spiritually underdeveloped, and how these different peoples “would not even sink as low as behaving like possessed animals”. He always used Nigeria as his glittering example. How the people there valued their culture and tradition so much that I wouldn’t find “this kind of thing” there. I almost laughed at that. His display of ignorance was like a farce, blatant, risible. I wanted to tell him that Nigerians were adjudged to be among the first three peoples who consumed gay porn the most in the world. I wanted to tell him about the brilliant brashness of Bobrisky, even if I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with what I was. I wanted to tell him about the many humans that had been beaten to pulp and burnt into blackened logs in Nigeria, for expressing same-sex affections. I wanted to tell my father about those who were being harassed, set up and celled on daily basis, on and off social media. But then, I thought of millions of people who were aces at drawing, singing, acting, curing, building, repairing, organizing, leading, entrepreneuring, despite the looming certainty that they would be stripped of all those qualities the moment their sexual orientation became known. And I was chilled into a heavier silence. There were so many other stories to tell; why did I think he needed to hear only the horrible ones?
My former foster mum—before she left the house to stay away—witnessed these sessions with my father. When he walked in on me and my boyfriend in May and pulled out a gun at me, she was there. When he boomed at me and kicked my boyfriend all the way downstairs and out, she was there. When he flounced back upstairs and ordered me to strip and took some coals from the fireplace and dropped them over my back and I screamed until my vision faded and I couldn’t hear my voice again, she was there, weeping and saying, No. No. Sometimes I hated her, a swelling burn in my chest, a constricting of my nostrils. Other times, I wanted to find her, clap my hands on her, and scream, “Run for your life!”
She was not there, my former foster mother, when my father asked me—months later—to loose my pants and poke my penis into the flames flaring at the back of the house. It was where he burned his old sports bet papers. He read out loudly to me Bible passages that condemned “man laying with man” as he watched me burn. She was not there to see this because she had packed out the previous week, dropping her number with my elder brother and hugging me so tightly I thought she would squeeze out all the air inside my body.
My father’s Bible proclamations melted into the flames faster than the skin of my body. Hours later, as I writhed on my bed, the fire still searing through my body, and my brother cried with me and patted my sore back with a wet salt-heavy napkin, I peered down at the still-warm, raw, blackened slab between my legs, and imagined that I cut it off. Why did my blood hurt this much to flow? Why was agony a visible, breathing, unforgiving thing?
The next morning, I woke up—more like, got up, since I had hardly slept through the night, my brother and I—to use the bathroom. I caught my father’s shadow in the kitchen. I was surprised because I had thought he had gone to work. He saw me and said good morning. I stammered out my good morning and tried to walk past him, but he held my shoulder. A million wicked needles shot through my body. He gave me an earnest stare and asked me what I learnt from the episode the evening before. I was at a loss over what to say, until he slapped me, a swift smack on one side of my face, and my bladder went loose all over me and the hot knives held in the muscles of my penis made me cry out:
“Thou shalt not lay with a fellow man!”
***
I sometimes stared in the mirror to see if I looked like my father’s favourite word, perhaps in the tilt of my narrow nose or in the pointed ends of my canines. My brother regarded my abomination with an impassive calm, for which I was grateful. He always listened to me talk about the boys in my school, the tall smart one I was crushing on really fierce; the not-so-tall, not-so-smart junior I once made out with in the library; the geeky, lispy “A” transfer student who allowed me to touch his glasses and kiss his lips. Rather than say something definite, my brother would only laugh and aww and shake his head at the right places and give me a warm, “you are safe here with me, bro” squeeze on the shoulder. I held onto those moments like fingers of grace. They made me feel a sense of worth. Of home. They made me feel human. They thrived best when my father plunged into his long absences from home. Sometimes, my brother pulled on a shirt and went about eking out a meal for us, sometimes for me alone, and I would be the only soul left in the house. In these moments of aloneness, I told my woes to the walls. I sat knees drawn up beneath my elbows and wept my heart out about how different I was.
—God, just tell me when I chose this. Tell them, too.
My body was a canvas of scars. My back throbbed. My penis flexed a raw continuous bleeding pain. I woke up one night and it was oozing pus. My legs wobbled.
But I always managed to face this silence, this solitude, with a brilliant will of recreation. There and then, these walls became my friends. I could lean on them. Tell them anything. Show them anything.
***
In school—Coronado High School in the parochial suburb of Las Vegas—my smile did not wane. The same smile I wore when I took Rachel, spice-allergic Rachel, to the cafeteria and bought a thymeless chicken burger so I could share it with her and make her stop brooding about hunger for a while. Each time my brother saw me in school, in the midst of my fellow teenagers, laughing and throwing jibes and discussing sports, he would tell me, back at home, how he did not see “the son that daddy burned with fire” but only his cute sweet little brother who loved flashy things and made people laugh and who, from it, drew his own laugh. And a tear would sprout from my eye.
I often wondered if my friends secretly judged me. They’d forever tease me about my pointed nose and pink lips and caramel skin. And my obscene love for tracksuits. I’d appear in school in them, a new one each day, a statement that said I chose comfort over elegance. But never had I caught in their breezy words a ring of condemnation or hypocrisy. They sounded sincere, genuine. As if they saw of me no abomination. No harm. No harm at all. Only laughter. Laughter and love.
***
On Thursday of last week, as November 2 dawned, my father appeared at the door. He looked startled to find me home with my brother. Why was I not in school? I said, Nothing. I was just tired, a little under the weather. So I stayed home. He said nothing, brushed past me and hung his coat.
Moments later, he called me into his study. His voice had the ominous quality it took on each time he wanted to lapse into his long sermon on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and how David and Jonathan were merely bosom friends and nothing more and people should stop reading bromance-bisexual tones into their relationship. As I walked into his study, I pulled at my cap and thought about my boyfriend, wondered if any pictures of us had leaked and if my father had seen them somewhere. I suddenly missed him, my boyfriend, a warm wave sweeping through me. I had told him happy new month the day before over the phone, surprised that he had called at all, after everything. Now, with my father walking ahead of me, I was beginning to doubt the happiness of this month.
Sunlight streaked in, boldly, golden rods of morning. His black Bible sat in his huge palm. He rocked back and forth in his chair. It was a long disquieting time. I gawked at his close-cropped hair, a little bald at the front, his full curvy moustache, and tried to ignore the crazy pace of my heartbeat.
Suddenly, he got up and walked to one of the book-laden shelves. His 53-year-old gait had not quite slackened, even with hours and hours of praying and fasting and reading his Bible. He pulled out a leather whip and, stretching it noisily, walked over to me. Something bulged from his pocket and a prescient shiver ran down my legs.
“Why are you not in school?”
I started to stutter. I stopped, took a deep breath even though his eyes had begun to redden at my slowness to respond, and said, “I told you, Daddy, I—”
THWACK!
Was that how death announced itself? The whip snaked through the air in a flash and curled around my neck. Stinging pain rushed up my head and filled my eyes with fluid instantly.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! He went on whipping me.
I lived in the Horizons, Nevada, USA. I lived in an apartment. I had neighbours. They were most likely listening to all of this. They were most likely praying I would take it just as silently as they had always taken it, as I myself had always taken it. I could have just crashed to my knees and let my father’s whip do the speaking. But I chose that moment to break and burst back. As my neck and face flamed and itched red, I peered through the thick of my tears at my father. I wanted to ask him, “What exactly did I do to you, Dad?” but the words that came out of my bleeding lips were:
“Am I a Quality Street box, Daddy? So that you only choose what works for you and leave what does not? Am I not your son, the wholesome little lad whose warm tiny body you held to your chest and whose pink nose you kissed at babyhood?”
My brother walked in then. I imagined that he had been pressed to the door of the study all along, listening and waiting. I wondered if the streaks I barely caught on his face were tears. That moment was my epiphany. There is just something about moments. I realized that things would no longer be at the point they used to be, with me saying those words to my father and my brother walking in immediately after. I just knew.
So I was not surprised at all when my father pulled the pistol from the pocket of his trousers. He had once threatened me with the gun. His work did not come with a gun. How he got it, I would never know. Maybe there was an Association of Fathers Who Need Drastic Measures for Drastic Sons. He glowered at me, pointed the muzzle at me. His eyes seemed to say, “I’d rather have you dead than have you gay.”
I started crying. I felt so small, even smaller than 14 years old, and I wished I had never been born.
***
I was his cheerful son, and perhaps this mattered in the story of my death or not, but I was the cheerful son between his sons and he did not think of the bursting possibility of wholesome loves being redeemed from unwholesome situations—before and after pulling that trigger on me.
I heard someone scream—it couldn’t have been my brother; I had never heard him raise his voice so high. I fell to the floor. My cap rolling off. I was jerking. New favourite words have opened up in my chest and midriff. These wounds were different, new. Not a shrivelled burn. And even as my eyes closed, I started—quite strangely—thinking of the holy Nigeria of my father’s dream, and how much applause over my murder would hail from there. For, I had a good father.
What killed me was not my father’s bullets. What killed me was what I expected of people. What I knew about them. How quickly it would be forgotten by human beings that I was a 14-year old boy. Tortured for years by his father. And then killed by same father.
I could never truly understand why—the “why” is unspeakable.
Written for Giovanni Jones Melton [G. Jones],
Who was killed by his father in the year 2017.
Enit’ayanfe Ayosojumi Akinsanya is a Nigerian storyteller. He authored ‘How to Catch a Story That Doesn’t Exist’, a queer short-story collection. He won the 2022 Itanile First-Position Award, the 2022 Arts Lounge “The Green We Left Behind” CNF First-Position Prize, was recently longlisted for the 2023 Afritondo Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the GTB Dusty Manuscript Prize in 2018. His works appear on Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, One Black Boy Like That Review, The Shallow Tales Review, Fiery Scribe Review, Livina Press and other places. He is 28 years old. Loves to watch sitcoms & Netflix, and read poetry.