FLASH FICTION|CHRISTMAS STORY

A Sum Of Two Or Three Wishes

It was the third Christmas

A.I Image generated by the author.

It was the third Christmas since Ruth disappeared without a trace on a winter evening like this present one. And the Kefas, broken as they were, were already settling into a life without her.

At the kitchen, that space with the faded and peeling wallpapers, a noisy extractor, and a tabletop gas cooker — a space that could contain only two if they walked with their backs touching — her mother busied herself slicing the fat onions that looked more like large grapes into slim rinds.

They were nothing like the ones she bought all her life in Chibok. Chibok onions were spicy. They made the nose and eye water in seconds. These were tasty like apples, and as insignificant as it was, the onions reminded her of the many ways their lives had changed.

The klop klop sound of the knife mingled with the fridge’s hum, drowning the hum of Joy to the World from her lips. Two years back, singing was like an abomination to her. It always felt as though she was betraying Ruth if she expressed any sort of happiness.

The scent of spiced turkey wafted from the shiny oven opposite the fridge — the prize she had received as the second-best cleaner. A prize grudgingly given to her because the customers at the Marriotts, which she cleaned impeccably thrice in a week, attended. In the past three years, she had been overlooked, just the way all the members of her family had mentioned being overlooked one way or the other since they moved to America.

The first two times, the award was given to Tom, a redhead colleague who was not only always tardy but was once accused of theft; the third time, it was given to Nancy, a twenty-something-year old blonde who spent more time chewing gum than cleaning rooms. She had been surprised when her name was called; her fellow staff were even more surprised when most of the customers applauded her more than the winner — a man whose prize was a vacation ticket. It was five years of being in the country, but America had its way of reminding her of her alien status, of her place at the bottom rung. She still wondered if she would ever understand why it’s called the home of the free. She had never felt even a bit of the freedom she felt as a young girl beneath the Mandara mountains in Chibok.

Back in the present, she smiled as she inhaled the scent of the rice and Knorr chicken-flavored broth bubbling in the pot beside her. Suddenly, her hand froze, and her ears pricked. The knife clattered noisily as it hit the wooden floor.

“Mummy, you see, Knorr is always better than Royco.”

Of her three daughters, it was a thing only Ruth would say; the rest were too distracted or not interested in cooking. And it would have been better if it were cooking alone; they were like their father, too self-absorbed.

It was why she had wished that abomination in her heart. Why wasn’t it them? Why was it Ruth that was taken?

When she turned, all she saw was the fridge with the pinned picture of Ruth and her siblings between hers and their fathers. A picture they had taken in the year that they arrived from Chibok — white-faced asylum seekers fleeing to greener pastures away from the dreaded Boko Haram bandits on brown-soiled Chibok.

She touched her hand to her throbbing chest and made a silent wish — a wish she no longer believed in. Like the layers of the onions, the faith, hope, and belief that had defined her had been stripped off gradually in the past three years.

Ruth’s father flipped through the newspaper from where he sat in the IKEA rocking chair in the living room, with its white walls blinking in the places where the Christmas lights hung. Flames cracked from the wood burning in the brick fireplace, but he could still feel chills creeping into his body. He pushed his stockinged feet deeper into the shaggy carpet.

When he was still a young teacher in Chibok, a sleepy town in Borno State, he had thought America was heaven — a country of perfection. He once told a friend a joke, that he was sure that when Jesus finally came, he would land on the Statue of Liberty or Times Square with its dazzling lights and stunning screens. Armed with his golden trumpet and legions of white robbed and blonde-haired angels. Even if he wondered then why angels weren’t dark skinned or nappy haired.

“Where else would Jesus go if not America?” he added with the assurance of a fanatic. He had been so sure then.

Five years later, he doubted Jesus' return, and if he did return, he could bet that Jesus would avoid America with its drug and prostitute-riddled streets– America with its beggars and addicts whom none seemed to pay attention to.

There was no way Jesus’ holy feet would touch the soil of an America that allowed topless women to protest against the right to kill their babies or the America that allowed men to kiss men. This America, where his favorite daughter was snatched from the street by their neighbor, who the police discovered, left the area that same week. The same neighbor who police were yet to find with the speed at which they found black drug dealers.

Or maybe Jesus would. After all, what had Jesus been doing in the past three years of their tears, sorrow, and search?

After all, all the pastors had told him and his family with that vacuous assuredness of religious people. An answer that felt more uncertain than certain. They all said that the Lord worked in mysterious ways when he had asked them why such misfortune befell them. He folded the paper and glanced at the fireplace.

“You know, Dad, I know when you get a better-paying job, we will buy radiators instead of using the fireplace.”

The pain that had formed a tight fist around his chest since the police declared Ruth a missing person two weeks after her disappearance–the pain that had ebbed slowly in the past year–began again. He remembered the words she had said to him that evening after he sent her to get him liquor from the African corner shop close by. He could tell that she did not approve of his drinking, but rather than say it or act it like his other daughters, who would roll their eyes like their mother whenever they saw him with the bottle, Ruth was the only one who treated him differently. It was as though she understood that his addiction to the bottle was because of the gaping hole that the fear of being unsuccessful in America dug within him.

While in Nigeria, he had never feared the end of each month. He never worried. His meager teacher salary took care of his family and other hangers-on. Food was never a problem; the land he inherited from his father brimmed with cowpea, onion, tomato, and maize.

But here, each month-end brought an ache and an emptiness as his life took on a disturbing pattern of bills and debt. And because he needed courage to stay sane in the land of the brave, he sought refuge in the bottle.

His eyes misted with suppressed tears, and to keep the sobs from bursting out, he bit hard on his lips.

He knew everyone were pretending to forget today,

To shed tears would be to remind them. It would be to yank the blister off a fresh wound.

He stared at the flames, hoping to see her face or hear her lively laughter amongst the cracks and pops. He hoped that somehow the police would be right and that she would be alive. And like he had thought since the day she was taken, he hoped that whoever took her, Mr. Sam or whoever, he hoped for them that hell was real, and Hades would be their portion.

In the room above their parents, Ruth’s sisters, Anaca and Anaya, svelte teenagers with gleaming melanin skins that earned them equal amounts of friends and enemies, were dressed in crop tops and cargo pants.

Their puffy fur-lined jackets hung from the door of their overstuffed wardrobes.

“Should we tell them, or should we just sneak out?” Anaya, the elder, said. She dragged the lipstick over her lips. It was a rhetorical question, and she asked not because she needed an answer, but because she always talked when nervous. She had already decided to go to the Christmas party with or without her parents’ permission.

“We already know what they will say, especially since today is…” Anaca exhaled. She looked up for the first time. Outside their window, little tufts of snow fell from the sky and added to the already white carpet on the street.

“We can’t keep missing all the fun because…” she balled her fists and shut her eyes. She had watched her parents relationship fall apart in the years since the disappearance as though Ruth was their only center, the glue that held them together.

But Anaya wouldn’t have minded if they hadn’t begun to pay all the attention they once paid Ruth to them. It wasn’t just too much; it was too late and because she saw through the facade; it was too annoying.

She exhaled. She couldn’t say the name out. She still felt that searing guilt, that thing that wound around her neck whenever she remembered that she should have gone on the errand.

If she had not pretended to be sleeping when her father called her.

Even if he was rarely drunk, she hated that he drank. Drinking reminded her of Chibok, of the men who drank daily while their wives worked, the men who later joined the terrorist sect, the ones their father testified against during the trial. The men whose supporters burned their house down and threatened to kill them before their father was told about an asylum program.

“I just wish the cops would find her or that …that,” Anaca couldn’t say the words too. She didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, and TikTok. But she didn’t also believe that their younger sister, whose chirpiness and precociousness annoyed her, could be dead.

She knew that to believe it would animate it and make it true and she didnt want a world where that truth was a reality.

At that moment, she also wished to hear Ruth sing aloud with their mother in the kitchen or laugh with their father in the living room.

Or tell them how many chemicals were in their cosmetic kit. It would be the best Christmas gift ever if that happened. She thought.

About two miles from the Kefas’ home a solitary figured trudged through the snow. Her hair, once lush and dark, fell to her shoulders like gnarled roots. Her dress which was riddled with holes and crusted with dirt and debris, hung from her bony shoulders. A bloodied vodka bottle dangled from her bony hands.

She could see only as well as someone who had spent a thousand days in a dark basement, but she trudged through the snow with the precision of a guided missile. Everywhere looked different, but her feet never missed their path. Her eartips were frozen, and her fingers felt like stone, but she trudged on, as she had been doing for an hour.

Every day for those one thousand days, she had thought about one thing: her family, one place, her home, and one mission–to spend Christmas with her family.

It was the same thought in her head when she smashed the bottle against the back of her captor’s head; Mr. Sam, her smiling neighbor who had abducted her.

The same thought was on her mind when she pulled the keys from the pocket of his prone and bleeding body.

She didn’t know how long she had been gone, but with the twinkling lights hanging from the trees and doorways and the heavy snow, she could tell that it was like that evening when she was abducted. She could tell it was Christmas.

And she was sure that she would finally hand the drink to her father, help her mother in the kitchen, and tease her sisters.

For the first time since that night when the bag was placed over her head,three years earlier, Ruth Kefas smiled.