Excerpt

"Akara Oyimbo" by Dare Segun Falowo

On the sixth day of February, in the year that they declared all the Nigerian houses be painted white and grass-green, Mrs. Lola Joy who lived in the largest house on Ada Goodness Street choked on wedding cake and died.

She lay stiff on the black rug of her mansion with a smile on her face. The cake had been really good.

At the moment of her death, she was forty-nine years old and a busy mother of three children; Fortune Joy, Justice Joy and Joy Joy. She had been a stern mother in her lifetime and her ability to mix cake batter whilst doing other activities such as: breastfeeding, frying fresh fish or dodo, counting the beads of her glow-in-the-dark rosary, driving a bus with her newborn twins in elbow etc. was quite remarkable (until the electric mixers came from Japan to relieve her of a bit of pride and a lot of pain).

She had married Emenike Joy of Joyous Song Records, three weeks after they had first crossed elbows to drink chilled Star together on a hot Lagos beach under silky moonlight.

She fell in love with the exuberant Igbo man fiercely and moved into his home, where she began to bake even more fiercely. She had run the Joy Joy Joy Bakery from the kitchens of all their four homes in Lagos.

Twenty years after she had baked her first cake, a droopy muffin in an oven made from a heated pot filled with dry sand, she had eaten her last; a buttery fruit cake, whorled with cream and held with honey.

She had learnt to bake at her secondary school, Our Lady of Blessed Grace, under the tutelage of Sister Persistence; who loved to wear lipstick, drink of the sacrament and play card games on Sunday nights. Sister Persistence had strong pliant fingers and a quick tongue with which she dispensed her knowledge. The girls would gather round in their light blue habits, ironed and perfumed to perfection, with faces that beamed with an absence of mind, and watch as she plucked round heavy cakes from the ugly black oven, clutching their rosaries like they were praying with all their might not to fall into the pits of Hell, which they knew in that moment, would smell like cake.

Lola Joy, then known as Sister Peace, often felt her mouth water alongside her sisters' as they watched the cakes cut up and sent to Mother Superior's office. She could feel an almost terrible power in the way the cakes called on primordial hungers through the nose, and she thought once; maybe it was cake and not bread that was Christ's flesh, and Sister Persistence had gotten a hold of the recipe from the Passover.

She knew that if she took proper notes she would be able to eat all the cake she wanted once she left school and had enough money. Sister Persistence always gave them small creamy cubes at the end of class and they would testify that her baking skills were divine, sent from the bosom of Jesus' Mother Herself, confirming Sister Peace's suspicions.

Joy Joy, teenage heiress already adept with a rolling pin and scary good at icing sculptures, found Mommy asleep on the carpet when she came in from school. Mommy always complained that the carpet was too soft and encouraged a boneless idleness in the family.

Joy Joy was humming along to the vulgar Nigerian pop that often ran through her mind like a narcotic, escaping from her lips in uncontrolled bursts. Her mother always explained to her that the Church was against her taste in such ghetto musics, often vocal about how much she believed they attracted demons, and randy teenagers who smelt of old marijuana and sweat.

Unaware of her mother's true state, Joy Joy eyed the cake that stood on the table in the parlor and the knife that lay by it, shiny surface fuzzed with batter and icing. She slowed down into tiptoe and pulled herself up to the front of the cake with stealth, a domestic Jane Bond. Her nose was instantly filled with the rich creamy cloud that came with freshly baked Joy Joy Joy cakes and made most humans lose control of everything for a few moments, the thought of a slice being quite destabilizing.

She picked the knife, cut a large dark wedge, edged with cream and dripping honey that begged to be licked, and ate it over her mother's dead body.