Winner of the 2022 Contest in Prose. Read judge Amina Cain’s blurb here.
Fracas Street
They have the same face but one sister wears it better.
The almond-shaped eyes that twinkle on one sister repels people when the ugly sister stares. On her unsmiling face, the lips are like a shrivelled piece of fruit that may or may not be good to eat, but none of the men of Fracas Street have been brave enough to try.
When asked, “What’s wrong with your sister?” The pretty sister smiles, says, “She’s harmless.”
No one wonders: why harmless? The men are too busy ogling the round, jiggling flesh on her chest and lower back. The women are admiring the thick, flat twists dangling from her head and the way her features sit proportionately on her smooth brown face.
Only Matias, who lives in the shack two doors down from the sisters, is curious. Only he finds it strange that the sisters moved into the tiny house on the corner when Fracas Street was in a slumber so deep no one heard a thing. Not the sound of a van reversing into the yard or the voices of people instructing each other on how to manoeuvre furniture into that narrow door.
Matias likes to fix things: clocks that no longer tick, moody radios that refuse to speak, roofs that leak and let bugs in. Things like this make Matias cock his head to the side and scratch his goatee for a solution. The men of Fracas Street watch him with wary eyes, but the women silently wave Matias over when their unhandy or neglectful or full-of-empty-promises men leave for the day. So when the ugly sister doesn’t return his smile or laugh at Matias’s jokes when he buys a tomato from the table she sets up at the front of her house every morning, Matias takes it as a challenge, as something he must fix.
He starts studying the ugly sister, notices that her eyes constantly search the branches of the tree that shields her from the sun. But he misses the frowns on the faces of the women of Fracas Street as they watch the pretty sister, who is always well-dressed and on her way out, but also seems to have time to chat with their men and play a game of pada with their snotty-faced children.
One day, Matias brings the ugly sister a white-winged bird. He’s put it in a cage he’s made from recycled wire. The ugly sister’s smile is so open Matias can see the soft pink insides of her mouth.
Every time she sees him after that, she asks how he knew to gift her the bird. “Unaziba bwa?” Her voice is as sweet as a chirp.
“I know things.” Matias winks and walks away.
In these moments, he forgets about the thinning heels on his shoes, the mended patches in his belt, and carries himself with the gall of an accomplished man.
Matias keeps returning until he finds himself stumbling out of the sisters’ home.
Next time, he tells himself that he’ll remember the details: the colour of the blankets on the ugly sister’s bed, the taste of her skin, the sound of her voice when she tweets into his ear. But nothing sticks. Matias’s mind is turning into a sieve.
Then it becomes difficult to tell the sisters apart.
The confusion is dizzying.
Although he enjoys their company, it’s the no-longer-ugly sister he really wants.
But it’s only when he opens their mouths that he can tell who is who. Fingering through their afros is another way to identify who is laying beside him. He keeps finding bird feathers in the pretty sister’s hair.
The morning someone sees Matias standing naked outside the house on the corner, all the residents of Fracas Street run out to watch.
The air is hot with stale breath and gossip. Chamber pots brimming with urine are forgotten under unmade beds. Hungry children lick sugar raided from cupboards out of their palms as they wait to be fed.
“What’s happening?” Someone asks.
Because Matias is a methodical man, he cocks his head to the side and rubs his goatee as he tells them what one sister whispered to him. That they roam from town to town, harvesting wonderful memories, thoughts and feelings, leaving behind what they have no use for—pain, doubt, fear. There are so many like them, but no one remembers them, and those who do teeter between suffering and longing because they have been touched in a place no one should be touched.
“No one has lived in that house for years,” someone repeatedly interrupts Matias until the details get jumbled up and Matias’s head hurts from having to start his story all over again. Frustrated, Matias runs into the sisters’ house and emerges with the birdcage.
Everyone clamps a hand over their noses and backs away.
Matias sees for the first time that the birds inside are stiff and lifeless. He also sees the lies in everybody’s eyes. They too remember the sisters whose stay was brief like white puffy clouds but forceful like the rains that always leave their street slippery with mud.
Finally, Matias squeals the colours of the blankets on everyone’s beds, the salty taste the women’s skins leave on his tongue, the sounds they chirp in his ear.
The men pick up sticks and stones and run Matias out of their street before he spews their secrets too.