Bire.
humans desire love. they want to see it written in your eyes that you adore them. they want your entire being to thrum with the need to cherish them. they want you to give your head for them and your heart to them but once that love comes in a form that they do not understand, then they turn their backs to it. is love not love regardless of how it might look, the shape it might take? if only oyiza had been taught, or maybe even seen, that love defies human imagination then maybe she would have spared the one thing that would have gladly shared its warmth with her.
the thing that came out of oyiza’s body was an abomination — never seen before, never heard of, not in oyiza’s generation neither in the history of our people. her nana said the thing was as a result of oyiza’s wandering legs, opening up at every chance it got to suck the three legged species in like a void. me, i didn’t agree with nana because those three legged species that aggressively flirted their way into oyiza’s void could not possibly have deposited such a creature in her. they were not as creative as that. i know because they all shrieked in fear immediately they saw the thing when nana invited all of them to oyiza’s delivery room to inquire who had done such a thing. despite their tales of exploits, of doing the unthinkable and seeing the unimaginable, they all shrunk at the idea that the thing belonged to one of them.
the thing was a monstrous beauty. its skin was the colour of unused coal, dark and shiny like it was freshly oiled. on its heads, two in number, grew hair the texture of grass and the colour of snow. i had never seen such shock of white on a black body. its eyes, all four of them, could not settle on a particular colour so each picked its own: black, brown, blue, and red. nana remarked that the eyes, so deeply saturated, made your skin crawl when the thing gazed at you. but it made my skin tingle in excitement, because here i was, in the presence of an unknown. after spending so long in the midst of the known, the predictable, the unoriginal, i gladly welcomed this upturning.
when a woman gives birth to a human child, there is a ceremony, a showing off. see, look, i have birthed a boy-child, a girl-child. there is dancing and eating, the child cooed over and treated like delicate china. “do not carry him so,” the new mother would shriek once you used the wrong hands to lift her human child. it is certainly not so when you bring a thing so unknown into the world. you do not show off your two headed offspring. you do not coo over the numerous colours of its eyes, no matter how pretty they might seem. when the thing tries to use its scaly, dried twigs of a hand to touch your skin, to memorize the face and body of the one it would come to love, the one who kept it in a bubble for 270 days, there will be shrieking and a morbid fascination. an indignation, how dare a thing so ugly and unloved reach out its hands and heart to its mother? humans can be arrogantly ignorant.
i named the thing for i could not bring myself to call him a thing anymore. Bire. i named him Bire because it seemed fitting. don’t ask why or what it means because then you would be asking me to explain the world itself away. did i tell you? that when Bire was born and the world knew he did not belong, women came around oyiza’s hut to wail like there was death instead of life. the red clothed priest chanted and shouted words into the sky as if asking a group of unknowns what they had done releasing this unknown into his territory. i could smell the terror he felt, foul smelling and acidic. the little children also came around to peep, to see this being that might join them in games one day and when they saw Bire, they did not stagger back in fear. instead, they stood in wonder and watched and i was proud of these human children.
maybe if i told you a bit about oyiza then you would understand why this story exists. oyiza was not familiar with being in the warm embrace of one who would gladly give a heart or a head for her. her parents did not stay long enough to know she would outgrow her lisp at age 10. she went on to live with her nana who was old and frail and did not have any warmth to share as she needed warmth herself. with her inner core left open to the coldness of this world, oyiza tried to keep her outer warm, see: three legged species. but no matter how much you try, a lie will never be the truth. i believed oyiza would later come to acknowledge this fact.
so a hundred plus twenty days later, when Bire cast his multicoloured gaze on oyiza, i believed it warmed oyiza’s freezing core. i thought she realised that Bire had four eyes because two were not enough to take her in in all her glorious entirety. Bire came prepared with a double of everything to lavish her with warmth and the sheer art of seeing that she had missed out on. when he used his two faces to smile at her and convey the words he could not yet say, “i am yours. you are loved. i adore you" because dear god he did, i imagined she saw what i saw the moment i set sight on Bire: an unusual form of love that still counted as love; a chance at warmth and beautiful disruption. when his strong grip held her hands, i said this to myself, “oyiza now understands that he means he would never let go and she should never as well.” so i did what i never did since the moment Bire arrived, i left oyiza alone with Bire to pay slumber a visit. i was sure oyiza now saw and knew; i thought she simply understood that love does not always come in one shape and form. i was wrong.
oyiza had murdered love. she did not know and would not accept that love defies human imagination. the women whispered words of congratulations at Bire’s early departure. the tense lines around nana’s eyes disappeared. the children wore their disappointments like a mask, no more oddity for them to look forward to on playgrounds. oyiza smiled but not so much to attract attention to what she might have done. i did not do much than wonder who would warm oyiza’s freezing heart now? who would smile double smiles at her? which hands would hold hers in a reassuring grip? she had extinguished the one flame that would have kept her from the coldness of this world because this flame, instead of being red, orange and blue, was all the colours it shouldn’t have been.
I was going through my daily dosage of memes and cute animal photos on the internet last week when I came across the real life story of a calf born with two heads. The love shown to it by its mother, the herder, and people on the internet made me cry so much. It was so wholesome I decided to write a story about it, with a twist of course. I also found out there’s an old poem about a two headed calf and I cried more because what in the beautiful coincidence?
