The Freak

She spots the first police near the post office and takes off, slippers in hand, fearing for her life. That's what anyone in her shoes would have done. Yetunde is not the type of woman to just run off after seeing a man, especially one in uniform, but that's the thing you do when you've just murdered your husband. She doesn't have much of a choice.

She's not a murderer. She doesn't even come close. Cyanide poisoning doesn't equate to murder now, does it? But it's the first time she's taking a life; first time she's snapping the life out of someone so close to her so she's weary of everyone in general.

The next time she sees a police officer, she doesn't remember to hide. He comes up to her and puts his hand on her wrist. What she feels first is the coldness of his grip, the way each finger feels foreign on the skin of her hand. The inside of his hands are coarse as if all he's ever done in his life is hard labor. She wants to ask him this but Yetunde suspects he isn't going to like the stretch of questions from her so she shuts that down along with every possible indecision.

The street isn't busy which makes her grateful. How horrible it would be if they'd caught her down at Limit Road where her house and her mother's house sit wretchedly, waiting for time to speed past.

The policeman who has her is almost the same age as her. Yetunde recognizes the stench of cheap perfume in his uniform and the scar on his upper lip. He's the boy who came to her school years ago, accompanied by his father and their maid, claiming that he was a good kid, just mentally unstable sometimes; the one who sat next to her for all of the first year, refusing to say a word. She recognizes the scar and the tightness in his jaw. He doesn't recognize her. She's grateful for this too.

He pulls her along with him to the corner where the open gutter reeks of dirt, old water, and black goo. A red-bellied lizard pauses on the ground near her feet to wait for her. She glances down at the lizard, obsessed with the way he can't seem to keep still. He leaves her standing with the police. It's the sun she hates the most in all of this. When the yellow ball in the sky splinters around her, it feels like a thousand needle pricks in her arms. It is stark and concrete around her, visible at every angle.

"What are we waiting for?" She asks him.

"Shut up."

There's a kind of arrogance that comes with power. Not that political nonsense where everyone is just plain arrogant. It's a different kind of power, one where people like this man feel untouchable. Invincible. It's power given to people who shouldn't have it. When he tells her to shut up, that's the only thing she can think of. He's misusing his power but she has killed a man and this is Nigeria. There's no real law for that kind of thing.

The other officers start to arrive. He's been waiting for his guys. They're four in total when she finally decides to count and not one of them is smiling. The man who holds her buys for himself a sachet of water. He doesn't ask if she wants one too. Her throat is dry from all that running but he doesn't seem to care.

He puts her in the back of a car. It's not even one of those cars assigned to police which bear the blue stripes. This one is old and dusty and smells of tangerine and cigarette smoke. Two others get in the backseat with her, one to her right and the other to her left. One sits in the front passenger seat, chewing gum and the other drives the car. They get to the station and pull her out.

Her mother is already there, crying, shivering in the sun. Yetunde sees herself in the woman in the way mothers mirror their daughters but she doesn't cry. When she walks past the woman who birthed her, they share a look. Warm. Distracted.

"You didn't kill your husband," she cries. "You tell them, baby. You are no man-killer."

"Go home, mama."

"You hear me? You didn't kill your husband."

"Okay."

* * *

It's not quite so bright when they take her to an interrogation room. There's a table in the middle of the room and two chairs but there are two policemen in the room so they make her stand. She doesn't mind.

"Do you know why you're here?" One of the men asks. He's the one with the smooth, dark skin and big eyes. She calls him big eye in her head. It's funny. She likes the name.

"No," she answers.

"You killed your husband," the second one says. He's the one who caught her. "That's why you're here. Do you know what happens to people who take a life?"

"No," she answers.

Big Eye helps out, "They tie you to a big pole and they send a firing squad out for you. Do you understand now?"

"Yes."

"Good."

She's a forty year old woman but they speak to her like she's a child. She hasn't been arrested before but she suspects this isn't strange or new.

Scar says, "How did you kill him?"

"I didn't kill him," she says.

"Don't make a fool out of us!" Big eye slams his fist on the table. He's angry now. "We know you killed him."

"How?"

Scar frowns. "What?"

"How do you know I killed him? I wasn't even home when it happened. I want a lawyer."

I want a lawyer is what people say when they've watched too many foreign movies. Nobody asks for a lawyer these days. What she should have said is how much they'll be collecting from her.

Big eye sneers. "You want a lawyer? Then, you're guilty."

"I didn't kill him."

They don't take her fingerprints. If you're being transparent, you take fingerprints but being honest or transparent doesn't get the big dough. Yetunde has that supermarket she started with the loan she got from the bank. If they're lucky and provoking enough, they might get thousands of naira from her.

They ask her to write a statement. She doesn't know how to write. It's been a long time since she dropped out of secondary school to marry Oti. And writing—it just takes too much time.

Scar helps her write. All she has to do is explain. She tells him that she woke up in the morning and made breakfast for Oti and the girls. She took the girls to school and then she went to her shop.

"Supermarket," he corrects her.

She frowns at him but understands that he is the one helping her write her statement. "Supermarket."

He nods. "Go on."

But she's already done with the story.

He tells her they will investigate his death. He tells her they will come for her. Then, he asks her to drop something for the boys. Which means he wants her to bribe them. That's what all of this is. The arrest, the interrogation. The statement. Everything. It all comes down to this.

They start out by negotiating. No, she can't just give them fifty thousand naira. What are they? Dogs? She goes higher to seventy but Scar declines the offer.

She makes the transfer to big Eye. One hundred thousand naira. They let her go. Her mother isn't outside when she comes out. She treks all the way to her daughters' school to pick up the girls. When they ask where their father is, she doesn't know how to explain it to them.

She doesn't know the correct way to tell them she put the poison in his food. That she came back home, through the back door, to make sure he was dead. It's not an easy conversation. Not many children will like to hear this kind of story so she tells them, very gently, in a voice that can only carry lies, that he had a little accident.

When they cry, she holds them to her chest. She pats their backs. She cries with them, even though it is the most difficult thing she has to do. Crying for her husband. It's hard.

He had to go. The first time he put his hand on her, she lay sprawled on the floor for hours, bleeding. He brought in a clean towel and warm water and massaged the area under her eyes where his fists had hit the hardest and he kissed her and cried in her arms.

The next time, there were no kisses but there was a lot of crying.

The last time, her girls had been in the room.

When they cry that he is no more, she joins them. She isn't crying for him but for the girls. They will forget about him in a few months but he will never leave them. They will see him in every man who yawns and stretches out his hands beside them on the street. They will see him everywhere: on the bus, on the street—in the faces of anyone who comes close to loving them.

She knows what she's done but they don't.

She puts the girls to bed. Yetunde tiptoes around the house, praying, dragging his spirit out. When she goes to her room to sleep, she sees him. Her husband. Crying as he promises he will change.