Screams Unheard

🚨 Content Warning: Dark Themes Ahead 🚨

Hello love, just a heads up before you dive into this story - it contains some intense and dark themes that might be sensitive or triggering. If you're not comfortable with topics like [rape, violence, and murder], it's totally okay to skip this one.

Your well-being comes first. Take care and choose content that suits your comfort zone. 💙 #ContentWarning #StaySafe

I think everything falls into perspective for me the moment I catch sight of Grandma’s stiff, lifeless body in the intricately designed, over-the-top coffin.

I wait for the pain, hell I’ll take any emotion, even elation, but nothing comes. Deep inside my unfeeling heart is a void I can’t seem to fill.

Blinking slowly, I turn away and spare a few glances around me. The chatter increases as the large, canopied tent in front of the tiny, mud house Grandma lived in occupies more and more people. I don’t live in the village with these people but even I know there’s no way all in attendance knew Grandma or even cared when she was alive; some probably thought she had died a long time ago.

I scoff loudly with a roll of my eyes from where I'm standing, behind an unsuspecting woman dressed in complete wine-colored òfì, ignoring the startled look on her face when she finds me right behind her.

“Hmm, Àyòká …”

The mention of Grandma’s name has me floating towards the hushed conversation between a man and his wife, both immaculately dressed in the ànkárá my family chose for this funeral.

“Àyòká was a good woman, so selfless, ehn,” the wife says, clicking her tongue as she takes time in adjusting her already perfectly tied gèlè.

“I agree,” replies her husband with a curt nod of his head. “Remember that time she went back to the farm to harvest proceeds to sell because Ìyá Rèmí needed money for her ailing son’s hospital bills?” He shakes his bowed head. “That woman was a strong pillar to us all.”

I walk around some more, listening to strangers sing praises of my dead grandmother and still feeling nothing.

Somehow, in my attempt to avoid my sobbing mother who is being consoled by my father and her cousins, I find my way back to the aisle where the open coffin is placed for everyone to see. I don’t need Aunty Bísí pinching me again for not having the decency to at least shed a tear for Grandma.

I had barely restrained myself from yelling at her through the sting of her reprimand; it’s not like I can force the tears out of my eyes. However, telling her that would have surely earned me a smack from my father alongside a snide remark of how I’m more stone than human.

I cock my head slightly to the side, thinking whoever dressed Grandma up in her favorite, white-colored damask ìró and bùbá has an outstanding tolerance for dead bodies.

Despite the nice things being said about her, I can’t seem to get Grandma’s nagging out of my head. The old woman never seemed to understand why I don’t care about anything or why I rarely ever speak to anyone without yelling angrily or breaking down in tears.

She would spank me for refusing to do house chores or help my mother in the kitchen, banging furiously at my door whenever I stormed off and locked myself in my room.

Once again, everything falls into perspective as a dark thought slithers through my mind.

‘At least she can no longer bother you.’

Hm, funny how I never really thought of how death renders people- even the most powerful and influential of us all- completely powerless. We can’t live forever, so what does it matter if a person’s inevitable death is sped up just a little sooner?

It isn’t until I feel a tap on my shoulder that I realize my mouth is curled up in a smirk my parents have long since tagged “devilish”.

I swivel to see Aunty Bísí standing beside me with a scared look she quickly erases, and I realize how I must look, standing over Grandma’s coffin with that sinister smirk on my face.

“Bámiké, go be with your mother,” she commands through gritted teeth, and without a backward glance at Grandma, I saunter away.

The dead has already granted me the weapon I need anyway.

---

Two days later, and I can feel him. How I always can is beyond me, but when the feeling of something slimy and cold slithering up my skin engulfs me, I know he’s here.

Much like his arrival that first time, it’s the dead of the night, my rickety old door squeaking open to let him in, and I know better than to scream for help… it never comes.

I swallow the tangy taste of bile that threatens to rise from the deep hollows of my throat and spill all over my untidy bed- which is a revelation of my restlessness. The sinking feeling of dread in my rumbling stomach does nothing to discourage me from keeping a tight grip on the shiny, red-handled silver knife beneath my fluffed pillow.

I’ll be damned if I let go of my lifeline.

That ugly face, the one that haunts my nightmares, is the first to be revealed. I don’t even have to look before knowing exactly what he looks like. Right down to the tiny scar above his left, bushy eyebrow, I have his features memorized.

Next emerge those bulky, thickly veined arms that lead to the rough, dark hands, whose touch never fails to make me throw up right after the deed is done. The legs that pin me down forcefully, holding me in place so I have nowhere to run when he penetrates me, soon make their appearance and before I can blink, the monster is fully in my room.

Unpleasant memories of my time with him flood my mind and I tremble helplessly before the man I have sworn to render as powerless as Grandma’s stone-cold body in that elaborate coffin.

His wide smile holds the confidence of someone who knows he has me under his complete control. I won’t tell on him, not after he’s threatened to kill mother and father in their sleep right after he ends my own life. And with the seemingly undeterred access he has to me, who is to say he doesn’t have the capacity to do exactly that?

I wait patiently, ignoring the tremor in the hand that’s hidden under my pillow, until he leans over me, his dark, soulless eyes peering into mine with a promise of pain and shame.

I wait, refusing to make a single sound even when his hand reaches up to graze my cheek.

Far away, I can hear a muffled voice echoing around me and asking if I’m okay, but I embrace the dull sound of my beating heart instead as it increases and increases.

His smile grows even wider than I ever thought possible and when his slimy, wet tongue darts out to slowly lick his lying lips, I can no longer wait.

With a war cry, its significance being that I finally end my enemy, I drag the hand that’ll soon lead to his doom out and watch with satisfaction as the sharp knife finds its dwelling in his neck.

Over and over and over again, I stab. Thick red liquid drips onto my hand and nightshirt, spraying all over my face and into my screaming mouth, but I don’t feel real peace until I see the life leave his eyes.

The knife clatters noisily to the ground and just like that, my dark room morphs into the bright room that is our parlor.

I’m kneeling on the couch; knife in hand and on the floor next to the couch is a body with its face down.

I raise my head just as mother and father walk in.

“Bámiké! What have you done?” Father booms with widened eyes as Mother’s screams pierce my ears and the entire neighborhood.

Jerkily, my hand reaches for the body, and I move the face so I can see… but it’s not the face of a monster staring back at me.

It doesn’t take long for me to realize... I have killed an innocent man.

---

Once again, I’m in a situation where hot tears should be building in my eyes whilst my stomach churns at the verdict that could be made concerning the despicable thing that I have done, but I feel absolutely nothing.

I just continue to stare at the pot-bellied, gray-haired man with a double chin, seated across Mother and I on his swivel chair, as he munches on a pack of chips in an irritating manner.

The handcuffs around my wrists are starting to burn from my constant straining against them.

I turn slightly to see Father standing in a corner with a female police officer who won’t stop touching his arms. Although I doubt he notices her poor attempt at seduction with his head bent in devastation and a shaky hand on his hip.

If it weren’t for our neighbor, Màmá Tòmíwá who ran in, no doubt attracted by Mother’s screams, I know for a fact that Father was ready to bury the body and skip town with us. His “No one has to know” speech had been interrupted the moment Tòmíwá’s mother made her entry alongside the rest of our curious neighbors who didn’t waste time calling the police on us.

Of course, my frozen self, leaning over the body, still clutching the bloodied knife was evidence enough of my crime.

My attention is brought back to Mother and the fat policeman when she begins to tell the story that stayed secret between us three- me, Mother, and Father- for so long.

“He was her father’s nephew who came to stay with us pending the time he’d get a job here in the city. We never knew, I swear, we never knew…” Mother breaks down in tears just as the policeman leans forward, his interest in her story quite vivid on his ugly face.

I keep my eyes forward, but my ears are strained enough to pick up on even the tiniest sound.

Mother sniffles, her sobs reducing as she continues. “He would sneak into her room in the night while her father and I slept and do unspeakable things to my baby. It went on for so long, and she wouldn’t scream, she never did…”

Mother is wrong; I did scream… she and father were just too deaf to hear my pleas. There, in the slamming of my door, angered tone, discomfort around the monster, even my piercing silence as I sat staring at nothing in particular, my screams were loud and clear.

“…threatened to call the police, we found him hung in the backyard the following day. He’s been dead for a year now.”

I blink. Mother is wrong again. The monster isn’t dead. How can he be when I see him anytime I dare to close my eyes? When his smirking face is everywhere I go?

He’s not dead, I want to scream, the way I did a week after mother and father said he committed suicide, but I fear they’ll stare at me like I’m crazy the same way they did back then.

He’s not dead.

“What are you going to do to my daughter? She’s only fourteen, please Ògá Olópàá.”

“I understand the trauma your daughter must be enduring, but the man she killed was an innocent plumber who was there to help you fix your broken pipe. He had nothing in common with the man who abused her, and your neighbors say she’s quite an unusual child,” says the policeman.

I snort; the plumber was a man too, wasn’t he? He probably would have done the same to a helpless girl like me. I probably did the world a favor.

The sound I make draws their attention to me for a second before they continue their conversation.

I just sit there; staring straight ahead like the possibility of me going to jail does not matter at all. Perhaps going there is what I need; surely the monster wouldn’t sneak into my cell with all these guns lying around.

Maybe I don’t need to render him powerless like Grandma, maybe all I have to do is run far away to a place he will never find me, or maybe I need to go where Grandma went instead; if I’m dead…

“Why is she looking at me like that?” I faintly hear the policeman ask Mother.

“Bámiké,” she whispers and then taps me. “Fix your face,” she glares at me when our eyes meet.

The smirk falls from my face and just as I’m about to resume my staring contest with the wall, something happens.

The double-chinned policeman is no longer seated on the swivel chair. In his place, staring back at me is the face of the monster with his blasted smile silently mocking me.

“How?” I find myself whispering.

How is he here again? Oh, how I wanted to believe Mother that the monster is truly dead.

He’s not dead.

He’s here to torment me again.

I’m shaking now and I can’t fight the blistering cold that overwhelms me.

“Bámiké! Bámiké!”

I don’t know who is calling for me and I don’t care. All I see is the growing smile on the monster’s face.

When he throws his head back in wild, manic laughter; rage, rather than blind me, clears my eyes and I stop thinking.

I lunge…

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

• Òfì- Yoruba traditional attire
  

• Ànkárá- A kind of clothing material
  

• Gèlè- Head tie
  

• Ìyá Rèmí- Rèmí’s mother
  

• Ìró- Wrapper
  

• Bùbá- Blouse
  

• Màmá Tòmíwá- Tòmíwá’s mother
  

• Ògá Olópàá- Chief Police