Shock Me I Shock You

The new game Oyin and I invented is called Shock-Me-I-Shock-You. We play it whenever our parents aren’t around. Often, Daddy is at work, bawling at his students for not understanding ordinary differential calculus. In the kitchen, Mummy will be flipping àkàrà balls in a pot of sizzling òróró or eyeing the burglary proofs like a burglar at a dress rehearsal. Sometimes, when the sun is at its hottest and the heat makes things crackle, she goes out into the yard. You will find her squatting by the jacaranda, heaping spidergrass cuttings around it for reasons even God wouldn’t know. From the window, Oyin and I watch her for a while. We try to guess what she’s whispering, why her lips move so quickly. Eventually Oyin decides it’s not our cup of garri—that she’s Daddy’s responsibility—so we pull down the curtains and sit on the centre rug to play Shock-Me-I-Shock-You.

We take turns making shocking revelations, factual and not. We call them bombs. After a bomb is dropped, we study each other’s face for reactions. If I express shock, curiosity or even amusement at a dropped bomb, Oyin wins and promptly decides my punishment. Punishments usually come in the form of archaic, Bible-sounding commands: Thou shalt wash my clothes today! or Thou shalt scrub my toilet today! Just like that. As a serial loser in the game, I always get to respond, Ay, Master.

Oyin says I respond like an adult caught stealing toys. She doubles over and cackles hard, like the witch I sometimes think she is, while I serve my punishment. I hate her in moments like this. But I far prefer these moments to when Mummy steps in and whacks her across the face for being so fat and lazy.

*

Mummy is on the phone with someone, and we’re playing Shock-Me-I-Shock-You.

I say, ‘I ate my shit last night.’

Oyin does not flinch. She’s a crowned-witch, I tell you. She replies, ‘I saw two cockroaches dancing inside our éwédú soup this morning.’

‘I caught Mummy reading about drowning on her phone.’

‘Samson promised to give me slimming tea if I allow him to touch my breasts.’

My toes clench. Oyin watches me, her eyes painfully focused, but thankfully she doesn’t look downwards at my toes. She might seem like she knows the first person to fry àkàrà in Ibadan, but she’s a child. Nobody should want to touch her breasts. She’s smart and cunning and wicked with words. Those qualities should be the focus, right? I’m wondering if I should surrender, then ask her if Samson had truly asked to touch her breasts. But she jabs at my shoulder, trying to make me laugh or shout or something. I’m not letting her win so easily today, so I slip back into game mode: ‘I like boys.’

She pauses, inclines her head. I know she’s trying to ascertain if it’s true or I’d said that for shock value. She knows what it means for a boy to like boys, I’m sure, but we’ve never talked about it. We don’t talk about anything in this house. We can’t wake up, for example, and crawl into our parents’ duvet to say we’re scared. Or we feel we’re not loved enough. Words like that are too heavy, too alien, for utterance. I watch Oyin as I think of the things I’ve always wanted to say. I feel so lonely sometimes, Daddy. I love you so much, Oyin. Mummy, do you know, when you’re happy, I think maybe things are not so bad? Can we just sit down someday and watch TV together? There’s a piece of Vitafoam in Oyin’s patewo braiding. I want to reach out and flick it off. But instead I say, ‘Look at your hair. Vitafoam everywhere like you’re their ambassador.ʼ

‘Samson touched my breasts,’ Oyin says.

‘What?!’

‘Checkmate.’ She reclines, victorious. ‘Thou shalt pick my beans today!’

‘Ay, Master!’

‘Louder!’

‘Ay—’

Just then the door squeaks and Mummy breezes in. She’s wearing this ankara gown with a wide, shapeless train and flappy grandmama arms. In it, she looks like a deflated whale. Fins, gill flaps, tail and all. She struts up to Oyin like some Queen-of-the-Coast and twists her ear. ‘Instead of picking beans, you’re here playing, àbí? How will you not remain fat?’

I stand up, but my toes clench harder, so I sit back down. ‘Stop saying that,’ I protest, but Mummy wheels herself towards me, cocking her head, as if to say, Or else what? I recoil.

‘Remember someone’s picking the beeeeeans,’ Oyin sings, Scooby-Doo style, and flees kitchenward.

*

Oyin will be 13 this September. Mummy says her breasts shouldn’t be that big, but they are because of excess fat. She’s clumsy, Mummy says, because of excess fat. She opens her mouth like a caved-in soakaway and expels yellow shit because fat has clogged up her brain. She always says these things at the dining table. The TV is muted. It casts an eerie kaleidoscope of lights on the wall photos. Daddy removes his dentures. When no one engages with Mummy or corroborates her condemnation of Oyin, she pushes her chair backwards and storms out of the room. If Daddy says something unrelated, like, Akoredele, has your maths improved now, she slams the word chatterbox on him like an accusation.

I often leave the table just as Oyin does. We scurry downstairs and duck under the staircase. Here, our parents can’t find us. I want to tell Oyin she’s perfect the way she is, but I hug my knees instead. Everyone calls Oyin fatibombom at school. Of course she launches her own attacks, lẹ̀pa pánlá, dumb Dorothy, ìdí dọ̀ti-dọ̀ti, but, you know, a single person cannot defeat a crowd of wild bullies, so she eventually runs to the caravan behind the library to cry. I’m aware because, sometimes, I follow her secretly. I don’t say sorry to her. It’s not the way we’re raised. To bring yourself to utter something as vulnerable, you have to dilute it with humour—Look at your frying-pan head, oya, sorry—or a jab—Pẹ̀lẹ́-o, òníránu.

Once I’d planned to confront Oyin’s bullies. Leave my sister alone, I wanted to say. She’s as fat as a drum? You all are as thin as slippers. But Dominic talked me out of it. ‘They will call you woman-wrapper,’ he said, and, in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘in front of girls.’

But this thing with Samson? Even God cannot sway me. Granted, Samson is Mr Abimbola’s son. He has this nasty attitude of rubbing it on everyone’s face: ‘I’m the principal’s son in case your memory has gone to Monaco.’ He has friends in every class. He calls them followers. On cue, they trail him like a herd of horny billies sniffing the buttocks of a nanny goat. But I’m an SS2 boy with nobody to stick up a pinky, let alone a whole fist, for me. This disparity mustn’t discourage me, I know, thank you. If I find out he actually touched Oyin’s breasts, trust me, I’ll make semo with his entire family’s destiny.

*

I don’t realise I had been dreaming until Daddy shakes me awake. He’s wearing the pyjamas with the dancing paisleys. Up close, you can see the razor bumps on his chin. The shiny scar on his forehead stretches and contracts like it’s whispering his dirtiest secrets to me. ‘Oyinade, a common girl, is awake,’ he says. ‘And you’re still sleeping. Ṣé this is how you’ll be a real man?’ He storms to the door. ‘Brush your teeth and come for morning prayers now-now!’

As we link hands to pray, my thoughts drift and settle on Dominic. In my dreams, he is taller. His voice doubles and vibrates like he’s Satan dishing malicious orders from an underground cave. We’re kissing in the library. Violently. As if we’re animals or something. The shelves topple. The books plunge to the floor. Their pages flutter like little flags in enormous distress. Wind whistles by, flings the shutters open, slaps them closed, dislodges a few from their hinges. Once, we hear a plop, and we struggle to peel ourselves, much like velcro, from each other’s embrace. We are in my parents’ bathroom. A yellow bulb flickers as though signalling for help. In the bathtub, Mummy drowns quietly. Balloon-sized bubbles waltz around her mouth, her nostrils, her ears. Her matted hair sticks to the porcelain. There’s a shredding sound. It’s her dress ripping at the chest. When I see her scaringly enlarged breasts squeezing out, I turn to bury my head in Dominic’s chest. But he’s gone.

Dominic says I’m his best friend. But I want to be his baby, the way Kafaya is. That’s why I help him with his assignments. History, English Language, CRS, Literature and Civics. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to tell him. I want to be your baby too, Dominic. And I’ll be able to do other crazy things too. Like telling Oyin it’s not just the games—I really like boys. I like Dominic. Maybe then, she, too, will tell me how Samson touched her breasts, and then we can deal with him together.

*

Oyin and I are studying. She lies on the sofa close to the window. Her legs pedal slowly in the air. There’s a glint of sunlight in her hair. I place my New General Mathematics on the table and mostly stare at the muted scenes on TV. An endless field of flowers, yellow like mangoes. A wildly bearded man runs after a sari-clad woman. When he catches her, eventually, snow like bleached breadcrumbs begins to fall in slow-mo. Why is it always a man and a woman, Zee World? I don’t like it at all. But I hate studying more. I enjoy looking up random words in the dictionary and making sentences with them. I enjoy thinking about impossible things. What if people warbled like chipmunks and tortoises sang hymns? What if babies were born from clenched toes? Where would I go if I could fly? I enjoy reading stories and making them in my head too. In my heart of hearts, I want to be a storyteller. But Daddy is telling everyone, even his university colleagues, that his son Akoredele will become a renowned pilot.

*

When Daddy returns from work, he stretches out on the sofa. He yawns like he wants to swallow the whole of Ibadan. He prattles about his incompetent HOD (‘Women can’t be trusted with serious administration!’) and his unserious students and the high-handedness of senior lecturers who brag about PhDs they cannot defend. Oyin takes off his shoes and socks. It used to be Mummy’s job, but these days she does nothing but stare and cook and scream. Dinner is ready. Moi-moi and chicken sauce, served with akamu. Sugar in Mummy and Oyin’s akamu. No sugar for Daddy and me because sugar can give a man erectile dysfunction, and what is a man without a functional penis? Daddy removes his dentures, three of them, and slips them into the bowl of water. I like to watch the movements of his scar as he chews. He passes strips of meat to Oyin and leaves me the bones because I have to grow strong teeth and stronger bones. Bones are a source of calcium. Calcium is essential for being a man. He probably had a truckload of calcium delivered to him as a teenager, hence his bodybuilder muscles.

He gives me the guyman handshake whenever I recite correctly the first 20 elements in order. When Oyin gets her integers right or effortlessly mentions 50 animals and their zoological names, he pulls her into a hug. I often dream of being hugged by Daddy. But as if he reads my mind, he flicks me a look and explains that soft-soft things like hugs are for the ladies.

*

When I say, ‘Daddy hugged me today,’ Oyin puts a finger to her lips. ‘There’s a weird sound from the kitchen,’ she says. ‘Shhh, listen.’

‘Or you’re abdicating the game?’

‘Save your grammar for the people you can impress, Korede. Are you coming or not?’

In the kitchen, Mummy is wearing only a bra and Adidas shorts. She’s trying to dismantle the burglary proofs with her hands. Her back is covered in a cellophane of sweat, her breathing loud and laboured. ‘Mummy!’ Oyin and I scream at once.

Her eyelids are dark, and they look like there are tennis balls inside them. ‘I was just bored, ṣé you get?’ she says. ‘Now, you two, out of my way.ʼ She breezes past us, waving and grinning like some Hollywood celebrity parading herself in an African village.

‘I’m pregnant,’ Oyin says.

On cue, I reply, ‘Mummy’s knuckles are peeled, and there’s blood on her navel.’

‘You can’t drop two bombs at a time!’

‘Checkmate. Thou shalt trim my jacaranda today!’

‘You can’t do that, Korede. Only one bomb at a time.’

‘We haven’t invented that rule—’

‘We’re inventing it now! Drop two bombs, you lose.’

‘Okay, okay, don’t cry—’

‘In case you missed the memo, big girls don’t cry.’ A long, yucky hiss. ‘Daddy touched his HOD’s breasts járe.’

‘What?!’

‘Checkmate. Thou shalt wash my undies today!’

‘It’s like madness is doing you.’

She spins in wide circles, flapping her hands like she’s hailing two cabs at once. ‘That’s why you love meeeeee!’

*

On TV, a man is smacking his crotch against a woman’s buttocks. She chuckles, then tries to move away, but his hands are clasping her tiny waist. I’m watching them, wondering if he’s hurting her, when Daddy throws a cushion at me.

‘You’re barely 15 and you’re watching people kiss?’ he says. ‘Thank God, I didn’t allow you people to be using phone-o. Look at my friend, Kehinde. Can you imagine, Omoladun, that Kehinde’s children are now watching blue-films and—’

‘You talk too much,’ Mummy says. ‘Jesus!’ She throws her hands apart like a defeated gamer and walks out on him.

Daddy changes the station. A white man, big and hairy as an orangutan, is kissing his sons goodnight. ‘Imagine,’ Daddy says. ‘How can a man, a full-grown man for that matter, be kissing his children’s cheeks? Boys for that matter-o. Why will they not turn out weak? Or, worse, practise gayism?’

‘Daddy!’ Oyin says.

‘What? In fact, no more TV. You people should come and show me what you studied today.’

Oyin is able to solve algebraic expressions. She plucks a page from her rough note, and in minutes, the paper is a complex swirl of numbers and letters and brackets. I manage to explain my understanding of digestion, but Daddy says my explanation is more of storytelling, and science deals with empirical facts. I don’t know what the duodenum means or the evolutionary reasons why cows are polygastric, so he stares at me like I strangled his mother. I am denied the guyman handshake. When he reaches to hug Oyin, she recoils. ‘I want the guyman handshake.’

‘Ah-ahn, Oyinade! You floored a whole Akoredele, and you still want his handshake?’ He chortles, and the scar quivers a little. ‘Very soon, women will climb up our heads and make àmàlà on top.’

But he gives her the handshake, anyways, and I try not to get too jealous. Oyin is my sister, after all. One shouldn’t be jealous of one’s sister.

*

Dinner is irú rice. We’re eating it with dòdò and pọ̀nmó sauce. Daddy likes to eat everything, even fruit salads, with sauce. It’s all weird and creepy, but Oyin and I don’t have a choice because it’s Daddy. He unhinges his dentures, lowers them into the water. Everything is quiet except our spoons digging through the rice, our forks stabbing dòdò, Daddy’s knife slashing pọ̀nmó. Then Daddy says, ‘Omoladun, what happened to your wrist?’

Mummy clamps her hand over the wrist. ‘I had an accident while cutting potatoes for lunch.’

‘It’s a pity I can’t come home for lunch anymore. Once I get my doctorate and stop being a junior lecturer, by God’s grace, my workload will reduce.’ He leans to touch her chin. ‘Then I’ll be around to prevent my baby from silly accidents.’

‘How did you see the wrist, by the way?’

‘Ah-ahn?! Ṣé you’re not my wife anymore ní?’

‘So, you notice everything about me then?’

‘Why not?’

‘Like?’

He sighs. ‘The belt in our wardrobe that I don’t remember buying. Some of your diary entries, where you complain of being bored and stuck and wanting freedom from everything. Everything, including me and the wonderful kids God gave us—’

‘Wait—ʼ

‘I also saw the number you saved as Therapist FB. FB for Fine Boy, àbí?’

‘Facebook.’

‘I called the number. Guess what? It’s a man.’

I badly want to leave the room and have Oyin follow me, so we can play Shock-Me-I-Shock-You downstairs. But Oyin, I can see, is having the moment of her life. She’s leaning forward, her palm on her jaw, her eyes all bright and focused.

‘Dear Mr Akindele Atekoja.’ Mummy begins to chuckle. ‘I am writing to inform you, sir, that men can be therapists too. Yours faithfully, Moladun.ʼ

‘You think it’s a joke? Why are you talking to a Facebook therapist? A male Facebook therapist with a Casanova voice?’

‘Oyin.’ Mummy is making circles with her spoon in the air. ‘No more cheese and butter, ṣé you get? You can’t get fatter than this.’ She carefully guides a spoon of well-paved rice to her mouth. ‘Do you like the dodo, Akindele? Or should I fry another one?ʼ

*

 I’m lying in my room, filling my head as much as possible with thoughts of Dominic so that he’d appear in my dream tonight. I imagine him laying down with me. His hand sneaks under my singlet, up my nipple, up my neck. I slide off my singlet and lay on top of him, skin to skin. When we resume, I will lie that he broke up with Kafaya in my dreams. She tried to poison him. Or maybe she got pregnant, and his mother insisted he must stop seeing her.

I’m closing my eyes, seeing smudges of Dominic’s favourite jersey, when a knock throws me awake. ‘Open up, Akoredele. Since when have you started locking your door?’

Inside, Daddy sits on my bed and scans the room. ‘Hope you haven’t started masturbating?’

‘Ah, Daddy. No-o.’

‘So you even know what it means already. Anyways, do you know this thing, AI? My colleagues are saying it can answer any question and solve complex problems?’

‘Yes, Daddy. Which one do you want? ChatGPT? Grok? Gemini?’ I want him to be impressed by my knowledge of these things. But he just hands his phone over and asks me to do whatever I think is best. I am able to install ChatGPT because of Dominic. Whenever he sneaks his phone into school, he allows me to use it. While Mr Solade spreads incomprehensible figures on the blackboard, I hunch below the desk and read Rudyard Kipling and L. Frank Baum and similar stories I find for free on Project Gutenberg. Sometimes I look at black men with skeletal chests and bulging crotches. I delete the histories before breaktime. Then I follow Dominic and the other boys and Kafaya to the school garden where Dominic dials random numbers and says, in what he considers an American accent, ‘What’s goin’ on, mhen? Yo, shit, fuck you, mhen.’ I pretend to find it funny, the way Kafaya and the boys do. I laugh while I orchestrate ways to put Dominic and me together in a toilet or an elevator or a bedroom.

*

Mummy is on the phone again. She’s pacing the parlour like she’s high on something, running a finger down the wall, kicking a Fanta can out of the way, thumping on a burglary proof, chewing her fingernails and swallowing them. She steps outside to ask whoever she’s calling if they don’t get bored, ‘—at least sometimes, not all the time, you get?’ She says, in a quiet voice, that she gets bored and tired. And incarcerated too. ‘Well, maybe that’s a strong word, but that’s how I feel sometimes, you get?’ She laughs a tight, short laugh. ‘I look at birdcages and railings and burglary proofs and doors, and I feel like a prisoner. You get, àbí? You don’t understand?’ Her voice is gruff and desperate. ‘Why don’t you understand?’ She sits on the passage floor and whispers that she finds flogging herself with belts interesting, and she’s cut herself twice, and sometimes she feels like doing it again and again. ‘Hello? Are you there? Is it network? Hello?’

I’m in the parlour, my toes painfully clenched. I’m trying to loosen them. At the same time, I’m trying to understand conservation of energy. Oyin is out shopping with Daddy. School resumes next week, and we need books and Yale Cabins and new uniforms.

When they return, Daddy hurries through a bath and changes into casual clothes. He plugs his phone into the socket while announcing, in an unnecessarily loud voice, that he’ll be back before dinner. Oyin has gone into her room to smell her new books, I’m sure, to carve her name in beautiful calligraphy on the front pages. I type Daddy’s date of birth into his phone. It unlocks, surprisingly. I want to ask ChatGPT why Mummy tried to remove the burglary proofs, why she cuts herself, why she feels trapped. Then I come across Daddy’s question: gud evening, ChatGPT, plz how do i knw my wife, omoladun atekoja, is cheating on me?

*

On resumption day, I walk over to the field speckled with yellow wildflowers, and there’s Samson sitting on a log. His voice is rough and grown-up, and he’s telling his followers about an apparently funny holiday experience. When I tell him I’d like to see him, in private please, he arches his eyebrows and says, ‘Have you fucked my sister?’ I say no. He glowers at me. I feel my legs giving way under me. When I cannot think of a joke to douse the tension, I skitter away.

All morning, I try to push the image of Samson touching Oyin’s breasts from my mind. I think of Dominic. His silly Americanisms. His long, slender fingernails. The waistband of his boxers when he raises his shirt and, in the fashion of Hollywood gangsters, indicates an imaginary pistol in his belt loops. I think of the way Kafaya pulled him away when I tried to hug him this morning. I think of how easily he’d allowed her to take him. I think of them doing things in the toilet. I think of Samson doing things to Oyin in the same toilet. I hold my head because I feel it spinning and splintering.

*

In the afternoon, Mr Abimbola sends for me. Oyin is in his office already. Looking out the window, hands in pockets, is Daddy. His shirt is badly creased and misbuttoned like he’d been shamelessly thrashed by a bush-pig. ‘Something has happened at home,’ he says, quickly-quickly, Eminem-like. ‘Go and pick your bags. Let’s go; let’s go.’

On the street, by an abandoned Volvo covered in grass, he stops the car. He leans back and starts to cry. It’s so funny, the way his crying sounds like a serial burst of farts, but instead of mirth, I’m feeling incredibly uncomfortable, as if I’d seen his nakedness with a million other spectators. I want to stuff wool into my ears. My toe-cramps are killing me. I’m gasping. I want to scream. I want to scratch my armpits so badly. I want to step out of this car and run for my life.

‘Korede,’ Oyin whispers from the backseat. I turn to her, grateful for the reprieve. Over Daddy’s voice, which has quietened to sobs, she says, ‘I asked Clinton out today.’

I reply, ‘Mummy cuts herself on purpose.’

‘I stole a girdle when Daddy and I went shopping.’

‘I punched Samson.’

‘Jesus! Korede!’

‘Checkmate. Thou shalt sing like a chipmunk for two hours straight today!’

‘Ay, Master.’ She glances at Daddy’s neck and quickly looks away. ‘Let’s play another round. I go first—’

‘Akoredele, Oyinade.’ Daddy sniffs, then continues. ‘Your mother … She got chemicals and left a note and—and—’ He looks at his hand as though willing it to continue where his voice has failed. ‘If I hadn’t come home for my power bank, maybe—I don’t know; I don’t know.’

He’s shaking like electric currents are pulsing through him. Someone with an I-pass-my-neighbour-generator voice is commanding èṣù and Ṣángo to descend on whoever stole his pretty Hausa goat. A child is being smacked repeatedly by his impatient mother. The sky is dirty grey. And something apparently bad has happened to Mummy.

Oyin has her hand on the door handle. ‘Let’s go, Korede.’

‘Where?’

‘Just come.ʼ

‘But I can’t untangle my toes!ʼ

‘Ehen? What should I now do?ʼ

‘Maybe tell me where we’re going?ʼ

But she’s already climbed out. I follow, hopping, until my toes straighten. We hold hands and tear through the street. When we spot Daddy’s car coming in the distance, Oyin steers us into a tarpaulin shed overgrown with brown-tipped bushes. I want to ask Oyin what she thinks might have happened to Mummy, what Daddy meant by her getting chemicals and leaving a note, but I slam my hands to my face instead. Something rattles behind us. We watch an orange-headed lizard, with a blade of grass around its tail, scurry outside. Oyin says, ‘I found slimming tea in Mummy’s purse,’ and I respond, ‘Really?ʼ and she raises a fist and says, ‘Checkmate! Thou shalt burst all my pimples today!ʼ Instead of Ay Master, like the rule stipulates, I start to cry. She stares at me. Her face is as blank as a well-wiped blackboard. In my mind, I’m urging her to say the words. Say: I love you, Korede. Say: Look at me, Korede; we’ll be fine. Say it over and over again. Chant it. Make it a mantra.

But Oyin takes my hand and, with her forefinger, begins to draw tickling circles on it. ‘Can I sing?ʼ she asks. I am quiet, just sniffing and wiping my nose with the back of my hand, so she begins: ‘Korede is a fine boy iya-iya-o….ʼ

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2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist

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