1.

You came, Aretha, even when I did not ask you to. You came boldly, screaming bloody murder into our ears like a tiny demon banshee, numbing our cochlea, testing the depth of our collective patience.

Your mother, Sabbath, had you named after the infamous Aretha Franklin because she was convinced your shrieks were art, a divine ordination, reminiscent of the way the Aretha wailed and sang so beautifully. I merely shrugged when she chose the name. What does a man care for the ululations of a child cursed into his life?

I watched you sleep for hours, waiting for something to tug at my soul. For closure, for a quick flutter in my chest, for a semblance of recognition, for a love which forever eluded me.

I am cursed with a brutal honesty so you must forgive me when I say I did not find you beautiful. I often wonder how people summon the courage to lie so blatantly in the face of something so new, so pure and untainted.

There is nothing aesthetic about the wrinkly redness of a newborn. Thankfully, you had taken none of Sabbath’s horrid features but you had her feistiness, her wrath, her implacability. Your eyes were flames trapped in choroidal matter, your newborn bawling was a mutiny, and from the first day I beheld you, I knew you were born to judge me.

2.

Dear Aretha,

I am such a hardy fool for forgetting that you do not begin a letter without the proper formalities. But the gravity of my guilt surpasses any modicum of politeness I can muster. I am upturning the contents of my mind after all these years with a bottle of Jack Daniels in my hands and a goddamn epiphany in my heart. So forgive the raw brutality of these words, there are no ways to euphemize them or put together the bits and pieces of my charred memory.

When my own father died, I felt myself lay in that casket as him, assaulted by sympathetic teary eyes and nasal fluid blown forcefully into silk handkerchiefs. Those closed lids were mine, those stiff arms, that flesh, perfunctorily enclosed in his favorite suit by some impatient mortician was all mine. I was him, save for the hoary specks of grey in his hair, the pronounced crow feet, and the haunting rigidity of death.

It was awkward, witnessing a replica of myself lying stiffly on the white foam that lined the interior of the coffin. His portrait stood on a lone table surrounded by chrysanthemums, lilies and carnations woven into an elaborate wreath.

I remember, in the midst of that deluge of tears, a tough looking woman who squatted to my level, held my shoulders and stared into my eyes for what seemed like eons. She was a distant relative, one of the many whose names I had forgotten.

“Your father, he was a good man. A good, good man.”

I nodded in agreement.

She held my hands tightly, so tightly that my fingers seemed to crush under the weight of her grief, under the urgency of her expectations.

“Promise me you’ll make a good father,” She said. “Promise me, Okon.”

3.

Have you learnt about Salamanders yet? They possess an innate ability to regenerate an entire limb. This miracle is dependent on macrophages, a product of their immune system. With its help, they can replicate to perfection every slope, every dotted peculiarity of the limb that has once tasted death.

The macrophages are a function of their immune systems which are passed on genetically, so a Salamander whose ancestors could regenerate limbs is expected – in the absence of deformities and unforeseen adaptations– to continue in that fashion.

I am my Father’s son, his spitting image, the thief of his genes. But the very thing which had sprung forth life in him is a decaying black burden in my chest, bereft of any hope of resurrection, stripped of any chances of regeneration.

4.

If Sabbath had a colour, it would probably be a blinding yellow. So brightly did her energy glow that the world seemed to be a backdrop to her existence. If Sabbath had a sound, it would be one of crashing waves. She reduced everything in her path to the mundane and asserted her individuality by subduing whatever she encountered. She had known authority all her life, and as a skittish man hiding under the veneer of a faux society-imposed masculinity, I was more than glad to hand over the keys of dominance to her.

She wasn’t beautiful the way I had always known beautiful to be. She had widely spaced eyes on an impossibly large forehead, a flat nose and painfully thin lips that made her the butt of the jokes in high school. She was nicknamed ‘axolotl’ and plagued by the fact that everyone she met mistook her for an inexperienced fraudster because of her looks. But did she care? No. Your mother personifies headstrong.

She had an ardent carriage that made it seem like the ground shifted beneath her feet, her mannerisms drove me into the madness of longing, but above all, it was her smile that endeared. The spread of tissue over rock hard enamels, the parting of those brown lips to reveal the pearly secrets beneath them made me feel complicit, like we both shared a secret I was ignorant about.

We were so in love, so alive. There were no doubts, no questions, no hesitations. Two months in and we were a married, giggling, carefree couple. You can guess, people called us stupid, but the spontaneity of our relationship thrilled me to no end. I should’ve listened to them you say?

It was all good until that Wednesday when I lounged on the Sofa and she danced to Mayra Andrade’s Afeto for me. Her long blue satin gown twirled around her like an unfurling petal and filled the air with the scent of patchouli, her signature smell. It was all good until she shrieked, “We’re having a baby!”

I was too stunned to speak, so I retreated into a shell and peeked at her morosely from the tiny window blinds that were my eyes. Her excitement shrivelled as soon as it had appeared. She realised I didn’t match it. Have you noticed how she reads minds? I reckon you have. It frightens me till this day.

“What is so inconceivable about having a child, Okon?” She had asked.

I couldn’t tell her that until that moment, I had never pictured myself as a father, not even in my dreams. I had never imagined myself as a fully involved patriarch with another being taking a piece of me, swimming in amniotic fluid, bombarded by the paradox of choice and pressured to win the genetic lottery. Would it take Sabbath’s unflattering looks or inherit my angular jaw and perpetually vacant expression? Would it take Sabbath’s gracefulness or be stuck with my natural clumsiness?

There was and is nothing more frightening than the permanence of a child, the entirety of their existence taking up the rest of your life like a terminal illness.

I had ruffled hairs and doled out money to kids who played football on the streets under the setting sun. I had congratulated my friends with back slaps and crass jokes about a goal scoring spermatozoa, but this, this experience, all of it wasn’t for me. Not me. Some of them were genuinely happy, but I saw the burden in the eyes of some. In the way they found solace in football banters and swigs of alcohol.

They couldn’t leave because they had no right to complain, because their wives had known and will know pain; the pain of childbirth, of adolescent gimmicks, of disappointments, and they could not let them walk that path alone. I watched them, weighed down by the mental exhaustion of spreading out their funds like dough, patiently waiting for 18, 20 years when the child moves out and they can become themselves, if they have not already forgotten how to be by then.

Sabbath had seemed more amused than angry when I did not respond. She simply approached me with a flourish and cupped my chin. “You would have to choose then. If you aren’t going to have this child, then you aren’t going to have me.”

And just like that, Aretha, you became a gamble.

5.

There is a general animosity towards fathers who leave, and you bear the brunt of it. They label your childhood traumatic, unstable, incomplete. They tell you that you have a propensity to love men who never stay because you desperately long for that hollow in your chest to get filled, and it doesn’t matter if it gets occupied by shrapnel and hot coals.

I know I should apologize harder. I should grovel and explain that blood is thicker than water, punctuate it with other guilt tripping statements that would shove you into a deadlock of forced forgiveness. But you are too smart for that. You would rattle off the fact that blood does not necessarily make family, that a man who leaves behind a kid and a wife pregnant with triplets for 15 years deserves scorn and torture, not forgiveness.

You are at liberty to curse me, to chant the imprecatory psalms over my head like a canticle. How does a flimsy letter make up for lost years?

But I do not seek pity, Aretha. Your mother would hear nothing of a divorce and I was tired of drowning my guilt in a bottle of Royal Circle, pretending to love and making videos where I smother your baby face with fake kisses to some cheesy music playing in the background, all for Sabbath to post on her twitter page for likes and retweets.

I was willing to stay, Aretha. I was willing to suck it up like a ‘real man’ but when a year later, a sonographer looked up at me with what I have interpreted to be a vicious grin and announced that we were having triplets, I knew I had to leave. Your mother and I had a heated argument that night. We spoke in whispers and bitter grimaces in order not to wake you, but our fury was almost palpable. I stormed off to the kitchen on the brink of an apoplectic fit and fetched a glass of water to quench my rage. That was when I saw it.

I had forgotten to take the trash out and ants had begun to mill around the perimeter of the bin. Irritated, I stomped on them, crushing their chitin, channelling my frustrations on their fragile backs. Not a single one escaped.

That night I slept fitfully on the sofa because Sabbath had stuffed my corner of the bed with Ghana Must Gos and any scrap of uncomfortable material she could find. I dreamt that I was outside the house and the ants began crawling up my legs. Some nestled in the dermal space between my body hairs while others inched their way up my trousers leisurely, stinging hard as they went. My feet were covered in a mass of mocha brown in motion as the ants left not a single piece of skin to be seen. When they got to my knees I finally remembered to run and stomp. I ran with the wind slithering between my thighs like a tucked tail, like a rude reminder of my bloody cowardice.

6.

Was it selfishness or just a flippant disregard for new life? Was I born with a heart that bore no space for purity?

I am that father who has lost the ability to love his own child. The paternal instinct in the proteinous sequence of my genes has been vandalized, glitched, reduced to an abysmal waste. There was no space in my heart for you or the triplets. I ran because I couldn’t stomach the guilt nor fathom my inability to love something as precious as you. I ran because the angst ate me up from the inside and I was driven to self destruct, to venture on a permanent apoptosis.

I didn’t want you in my space, in my life, in Sabbath’s arms. When you had awoken one night, crying and kicking for hours, reeling with the stench of fecal matter that had soiled our blanket and seeped into the foam and I suppressed the urge to suffocate you with a pillow, I knew one of us had to go. If I stayed, I would’ve done so with a rope around my neck and my feet dangling above the floor. I had to leave, to live.

I once argued with my therapist that I was surely destined to be on the ASPD spectrum. She refuted my claims, stating that if I was empathetic enough to send Sabbath ninety percent of my income and one letter for every week you have lived (which I am certain she shreds on sight) as a form of atonement, then I couldn’t be classified as a sociopath. Oddly, it felt like I had been rejected by the cool kids at a party. I desperately wanted a diagnosis, a term, an illness, anything to explain why I am wired this way.

7.

I caught a glimpse of Sabbath once at the mall. I almost did not recognize her with the low cut and the black patch on her forehead. I heard there was a fire incident. I never checked. The sun had burned her skin into a scabrous blackness and etched a mien of servitude into her stroll.

Sabbath with the fiery temperament and sass who had once ignored me for two weeks because I intended to surprise her and made her show up in a ritzy restaurant wearing the wrong colour of lipstick. Now, she walked around as though toil had vanquished all her oomph and personality. I hid behind a rack and wept in the open, right there in the middle of the grocery aisle.

I hate to think that I was the one who broke her. I steel my mind against the thought that she still loved me despite the fact that I absconded, that I had occupied such a large space in her world that my absence had spooned her out and vacuumed her spirit, leaving behind an empty husk of a woman.

8.

Please do not think this creepy but I know that you work at Papa Sunday’s every day after school, that you love to wear your hair in a neat tight bun and you deliberately wear one sock slightly higher than the other. Perhaps balance is an anomaly, or you love the contrast that subtle chaos makes with the stringency of the bun.

I watch you from my parked car everyday as you skip to school with the triplets trailing behind you. You four make a good team, a tight little coterie bound by the trauma I created.

I skulk around the perimeters of your life, afraid of the certainty of my rejection, repulsed by the fact that I still do not feel love, only the guilt that comes with having abandoned a responsibility.

9.

Your manager would deliver this letter to you when you get to work because I bribed him to. Well, after we had a brawl because I demanded for a pay raise on your behalf. He is old and bitter and you work too hard.

Remember what I said about that distant aunt at my dad’s funeral? Well, I did not mention that when I did not assent to her promise, she shook my shoulders and screamed the question into my face until a relative pulled her away. They had said she was under a grief induced psychosis, I say she had a premonition of what I would become.

I know people. They would not be satisfied that I have been ensconced in this misery for 15 years, that the freedom I sought now tastes like ashes in my mouth. They would say, “Haba! Why don’t you wait to see if the child would reach out to you? Why don’t you try one more time?”

Thank you very much, but I have never been interested in how a thing ends, only the middle which I have missed out of. I do not want to treat you like an afterthought, as though I have finally realised that you are the inevitable consequence of coitus. I do not want you to stare blankly at me with those huge brown eyes– a strange man, standing hat in hand at the threshold of your house, claiming to be the father you never had. People have reacted differently over the years. My family treats me like a pariah, but my friends pretend to ignore. In a way, society has my back and it doesn’t.

You may ask, why me? Why don’t you write to the triplets? The day I left, you were silent. I climbed into my Peugeot 504 and waved goodbye to your mother. You clutched to her wrapper and stared at me like you knew, like you could foresee the callous indifference with which I would thwart the security of your childhood.

15 years is a long time to stay without a woman so yes, there is one. We had agreed that there would be no kids but nature has played a cruel joke on me. Here’s a quick advice– never rely on the ‘authenticity’ of contraceptives. Never. He was born yesterday and diagnosed with cretinism. He has your brown eyes but he doesn’t scream as much. This is my second chance at redemption. I will love him even when he throws tantrums, when he drools, when he blubbers and stumbles under the glare of public scrutiny and discrimination. Forgiveness is too much to demand from you, so I am writing this letter to let you know that even when I missed out on your middle, there is a new, difficult beginning and I won’t mess this up Aretha, I swear, I won’t.

Erere Onyeugbo is a Medical Radiography student at the University of Nigeria, Enugu campus. She is forever awed by the beauty of fiction and the power it wields. Her writing can be found on the Kalahari Review, Africanwriter and medium @Erereony