Ayomide Bayowa

Leaking Water

Something bit me. I slapped myself, stirred, and leaped away from my bug-infested mattress, huddled against the door, wide-eyed. The entrances to the beach house rooms had no rotating planks, and the night was beginning to feel like an answered prayer; all the doors were open. Back home, our neighbours’ children scratched the wall of our townhouse apartment at zero hours, like squirrels digging through a basement wall, disturbing enough to wake me. Jake’s room light was on, and his door was unlocked, so it seemed he couldn’t sleep, either.
Meanwhile, I heard an alien-like pocket spaceship crackling from my mom’s room. It was so loud that if there were an actual invasion, everyone else would get adrenaline and escape, except her. Sleep had taken her before any potential death. My ears perked up, and my ultrasonic eyes saw through the wall from a similar angle, Jake and my mother’s new man stepping on each other’s toes. Jake stormed out with my mom’s car key air-tagged to the centre table, throwing things in anger, including his wallet. Sad to say, he got pulled over and life-mattered by the cops for failing to play it cool during their jittery questioning about the driver’s licence in the wallet he had left behind. At the contact zone, the man caught my eyes in a brisk B-roll, startled by my presence. The fridge he left open beeped for closure, for survival, like the pager of the state’s public hospital doctor reading Jake’s bullet wound. When asked, the man claimed he was fast asleep that night, as nobody bothered to ask me what had happened.
The tips of my toes creaked the floorboards of the beach house at this moment. My mom was sensorily unresponsive. The not-well-fastened valve in the washroom hissed water in sporadic droplets. From her curtained doorframe, her wheezes synchronized with the night sounds of the shore, struggling against the sea sand sluggishly. Her new man, however, had emptied the embrace of her left arm. That polar bald creature! Awake with me was the familiar rush to sniff around down the stairs, gowned as light as possible. I hoped to glimpse my mom’s boyfriend sipping some Baileys from his beloved crystal glass at the small table. Even though I couldn’t stand him, my vision was impaired in the dim light without my glasses. I figured he must have been at the waterside so late because I, too, sometimes found myself drawn to the water’s edge by the enchanting breeze I heard from my window only in the afternoon. I learned that some shady individuals dealt drugs there, and it doesn’t get any less pharmaceutical at night.
Darkness and sleep formed a drowsy solution in my eyes; then, I took to the hideous, uncomfortable chair nearby. When the man arrived this time, it was barely morning, and it was raining outside. In my dream, I saw a skunk farting on our balcony and then wandering freely. As I tried to chase it, a car sped by with its full headlights on. The door to our washroom clicked loudly, and I woke up. To avoid scaring him again, I sat by the stairs, well mixed with darkness and sleep. He brushed his teeth so hard that it made my gums cringe and bleed. He dropped the clothes he took off by the laundry basket and sprayed deodorant before returning to the bed he shared with my mom.
“Talisha, Talisha,” I heard him say, probably shuddering her from the skin to the bone, “A nightmare.”
As I drew closer, she grunted, stretching her arms and legs, bundled up in sore postures all night.
“Talisha,” he droned again, then she squinted her eyes, sitting up. “Andre, what happened,” she replied. He dreamt.
He orchestrated this break to a place with a unique atmosphere— free from annoying grief allergens, with fewer concerns about time and less need to be aware of loud, persistent alarms. He suggested it was the farthest we could get away from Jake’s keepsakes—by bringing his ashes to empty in the water. He would have loved this place, daring his athletic arms to wrestle the waves in warm-ups before representing the school swim team at nationals upon our return. Whether win or lose, he’s somehow far up the banks, leagues ahead of his friends, in a way none of them could ever match.
The part of the board I was on squeaked, and Andre asked who was there. I stood out of the shadow, partially visible. He looked like a night driver with poor headlights, staring carefully through the dark, minding his speed— his eyelids blinking slowly, like motor blinkers.
“Kiara, baby,” Mom said. “You can’t sleep, too?” Her open arms asked for my head on her chest, discarding her feet into her slippers.
“What is it?” she asked me, her eyes—with boogers and fading white outlines like mascaras formed from dry saltwater; (un-)consciously rubbed off during the stretch.
“Are you just waking up?” her man asked me, and I said I had been awake and downstairs for the past couple of hours.
“Where did you go to?” I asked, and his eyes met with my mom’s. He looked high, unlike an eagle—a dove: their eyes up close, dear bald smokers. I bet he almost swore on his sagging belly that he went jogging in sandals.
“Oh no, Andre, don’t tell me you was out tonight for some,” my mom said, now fully awake with two of her fingers stuck in a demonstration of a smoke, a self-wrapped one.
“Hell no.”
“You say?” she asked, moving closer to him.
“No.”
“You sure?” she stopped sniffing.
“Whatchu mean young lady, uh?” he looked at me as if I planted a drug in his possession and called the cops on him. Then he asked if I had dreamed of the washroom again because the last time I had, I had wet my bed and crawled to their room, just like that—until they woke and saw me, isolated in the dark.
The baton of questions dropped right there from my hand onto my thighs, and I kept quiet, holding back further talk like an intentional saliva in my mouth—that little stunt. Like the sea holding back water from the shore, he held back a truth that could send some wave down her cheeks, a salty one. The same tongue he used to lick glues on ’em grabbas. Though unsuspecting of her, he might have relapsed. Her sweet look at his dry landing sported wave hair and the back of his head, with layered flesh; she quickly trusted that maybe I had sleepwalked and didn’t know what I was saying. And it didn’t matter because she found a safe way to ingest seawater and retain a healthy kidney, remaining well hydrated and alive. If I were her, I would have urinated in gallons in volumes more than the salty lies fed and probably died seeking a perfect donor for my failing kidney.
After I locked the door behind me, I was very much awake. The bathroom tap was sealed shut, and my skin was surprisingly cellulitis-free. I had made a damp map of myself on the mattress with no way out from this man. I’ve caught him once darting around my basement, like a squirrel, every other night, as he remotely overturns hell by the dining room, searching for a PDF that is not even missing from the broken system he supposedly inherited from his father, accusing Jake of deleting it; wanting to destroy his life.

Ayomide bayowa

is a Nigerian-Canadian absurdist poet and playwright. Before earning his B.A. honours in dramaturgy and creative writing at the University of Toronto, he was a Theatre Arts fellow at the University of Ibadan. In 2021, he was short-listed for the Adroit Prize for Poetry, won the June/July 2021 edition of the Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, and was a semi-finalist for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize with the same manuscript, Gills. Published as his debut poetry collection by Wolsak & Wynn in 2023, he was a finalist for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize.