Adyebo

I.

Her voice did not waver as she raised the forefinger

of her left hand and said, "My mother was taken

and then murdered before my eyes before I was thirteen.

I was sold among rebel commanders for nearly six years.

I have borne eleven children and lived through three civil wars

with both my hands still on my arms

and you will not stand in my way."

The young man pulled both lips between his teeth,

flexed his jaw, and stood to the left of a windowless steel door.

She pushed the door open. The floor was stained

with the black of old blood.

On a concrete table in the center of the room, flies

spun excitedly above a sheet that had been woven

with beige cloth but was now a supple fabric

of dripping sandstone.

Leading with her right foot, she took four steps

and pulled the sheet up by a corner and exposed

the bruised, livid feet of a tall man.

II.

His right cheekbone was pulp and the kinks of his hair

were holding his brain close to his head. The flies sprinted

on ravenous quests and they were permitted.

What more could be done?

His lips were gone and his face was split in a terrible yawn.

His ribs rose like quills or the spines of mountains through the skin

of his sides. His right knee was bent in a grotesque way, connected only

by one large ligament as if it had been torn by a medieval rack

and everywhere the blood had hardened.

His throat was cut and he had been castrated. In a grin red as a wave,

only six teeth, all molars, were visible. Hunks of his skull were missing

as if someone had been idly pulling pieces of bread from a round loaf.

One eye hung by nerves and veins but its color was impossible to discern.

"Eggplant, eggplant," she whispered, slow as the spring.

"If they have done this, why not bake him too?"

III.

She strode from the morgue. Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply

and for a moment the room was a meadow

and there were no men with uniforms

and no future years of keening the dead, and he was still

forgetting to rinse his mouth with peroxide after eating corn.

She opened her eyes and said without emotion,

"Yes, he is of my body."

She walked out of the building quickly, leaving her relatives

to show the policemen the identification card of Joseph Adyebo,

aged twenty three years, bludgeoned to his death after being found

in the bed of a rich man's son.