Sonskins

i.

On a night of open flight, when healers take on the skins of their familiars to battle sickness, we stand rigid over our catatonic sons.

Our special peppersoup has barely dried off their lips.

ii.

Before this night, we peer into their dreams, through crisp dense hair. They dream of palaces for us, helicopters with blades of gold spinning, burning, cradling us in the noon above city heat, trips to the World’s Wonders with their dead fathers kissing our cheek in the sun-decayed CANON square after, reams of overwrought handmade fabric in cool tones, spilling pearls, diamonds, sequins, stained with a drop of the weaver’s blood as a gift, they dream of palaces again, of dogs splashing in fountain and barking the moon to fullness, of obedient house girls willing to suck on our split fingers and take over the chopping of the ugwu and the onions, the frying of the chicken and the pepperfish, the cooking of a perfect pot of jollof.

Our sons dream of saving us from this desolation in which we sit like stubborn mules in mud. They wish to erase the agony that their births and their nurturing have inscribed on our faces, and yet, their dreams are empty of wives.

iii.

In these dreams that we gaze into beneath the scalps of our sons, we find them after wading through their motherdreams, hiding in the grove. Apples surround their feet as they grasp onto each other, naked except for tattered wrappers, rasping beneath their low moans.

There is a beast devouring our sons, under leaves fading away into gold.

Their wet skins glisten in that light of netherworlds. We have no body so he can’t see our faces collapse as we behold his sin. His dream falls to tatters, corroded by our silent shout. He doesn’t let go of his beast until he startles awake, and in the slowness of his eyelids drifting back to sleep, taking him back to his grove of beastly desire, he wonders why the room smells of hot anointing oil.

iv.

So, on this night when the very air seems to bristle with the nagual, we take off our sons’ skins.

As we peel off the furred slabs of pumpkin yellow, coal black, and cocoa, we watch the bark infusion in the peppersoup bind the ends of their nerves in tufts of muted lime fire. We slip off the long gloves of their arms, the trousers of their lower body, the breastplates of their torso and the masks of their heads.

Our sons are bare, glistening, squirming things. Their nerves burn in lightning paths under the exposed pink-red-cream bruise of their subdermis. We cover them with a blanket of bitter leaves and step into the heat of their fresh skin.

v.

Now, we remember the names of the men that the Beast used to lure our sons and we hunt. On this night of open flight, the air aids our parting of space to slip through shortcuts, to find them in their rooms asleep or eating, wrapped around other men, kissing their oblivious wives.

Our sons have been busy. The Beasts have a network spanning everywhere. They touch everything with their filth, their sticky desires, their abominations of family and love. They think we are our sons when we walk out of their walls into their homes.

Some of them, the ones who live alone, soften immediately, running over to kiss us rough or soft. They palm our bodies and try to draw heat, then they look into our eyes as our fists find their throats.

Oh! The rush of breath’s struggle to be free, and our insistence that it not be, that it be quiet, fuels our sonskins, causing heat to rise off us and we smother them.

Others are startled, waking up at midnight beside their taboo lovers, or their wives, to see the shadow of us standing bare and naked. They beg us as our son. “Why are you here now? How did you get in?” We pull them close into smeary kisses, as their wives and lovers wake. They look into our eyes and see we are not him.

We take their skins off while they are fully awake.

vi.

As this night tapers to an end, the skins loosen around our jaws and hips. Flaps start to tear up along the spine. The skins we have harvested hang over our left shoulder.

We return home, to the mats of bitter leaves under which our sons rest. We dust off the leaves, now dry and ready to crunch, and give our sons back their skins.

We know they will wake soon, hungry to find the Beast again. How futile our midnight errands seem against this force that no witch, Bible or pastor has been able to remove. A wildness! Ready to corrode the very foundations of the love that birthed them with its lust and its possession of their flesh.

The heat they seek which we can never give them. The heat of the touch of the Beast with which no woman can compare. This heat better than our platters of peppery food and our washing of their clothes, our peering into their dreams, our weaving of their futures and our birthing of them. They are incapable of resistance, incapable of sacrificing this desire for us.

We will find a way to make them see what we want. We have birthed them so they will give us glory, show us what we could not be.

Our sons stir in the thrum of the coming day. Their skins firm against their bones. We return to our empty beds and lay the taken skins over the mattress before going to sleep with smiles on our faces.

vii.

On some other night, not one of open flight or of the full moon, we find the girl. She walks down the street alone, her eyes say she is running from something. It is past 11pm. We steal her, as the Beast has stolen our sons, and then we execute our vision.

Our sons wake up again. We ask them of wives, marriage and children. They fumble around as usual, unable to find the courage to tell us what we already know, then end up with, “In my own time, Mama.”

We smile. They are all above thirty and have lived under our skins for much longer. Their sorrows are our sorrows. Our joy is theirs. Now, we will give them happiness.

We bring in the girl, wearing the skin of our sons’ kin.

© 2020 Dare Segun Falowo

About the Author

Dare Segun Falowo is a queer writer of the Nigerian Weird. Their work  (subconsciously) draws on Yoruba cosmology, Nollywood and pulp fiction. They have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Dark Magazine, Brittle Paper and Saraba Magazine. They  haunt Ibadan and tweet @oyodragonette.