Masquerade Season by 'Pemi Aguda (red white royal blue txt) 📕

His mother has warned him not to bring strangers home, yes. So, in this second thing, he is a disobedient son. But Pauly is sure she will understand that masquerades aren’t things you pass up, especially when they belong to you. And isn’t it his mother who always says never to leave his belongings lying around? Never to lose them?

Pauly doesn’t know what appropriate conversation with masquerades sounds like. Should he ask where they have come from? Would that be impolite? Would that be looking a gift horse in the mouth? Or should he ask what they do for fun? They don’t look like they’d want to play football, staining their materials, which have somehow stayed clean through that bush passage. But maybe he shouldn’t presume. Are they similar to pets he has to feed?

He finally speaks up. “Can I offer you biscuit and water?”

The red aso-oke masquerade bends forward, cloth rippling like a wave, then straightens. This voice is soft too, but more slippery, silkier than the feathered masquerade’s. “Palm oil,” the masquerade says from behind its silver mask.

“You want palm oil?”

“Yes,” it says, the s slinking out, drawing long. “Only palm oil.”

Pauly’s mother arrives from her seamstress job in the middle of this conversation.

“Oh,” she says when she steps into the room, lugging bags of vegetables and fish for dinner in one hand and bolts of fabric in the other. She stands there for a long moment, looking at the masquerades, her body not quite in or out. “Oh,” she repeats. “We have company?”

“These are my masquerades,” Pauly announces. He stands tall, all of his ten-year-old height. He spreads his hands toward them, as if they are an art project of his making. He waits for his mother to be impressed.

But she says nothing, just enters the living room fully, shutting the door with her foot. She walks past them to the kitchen and dumps her purchases on the counter. She is in there for a few minutes while Pauly squints at his masquerades, wondering if their sparkle has somehow muted, wondering how she is not standing beside him, in awe of these shades and textures.

She reappears at the door to the kitchen, holding a knife. “Does this mean I have to make dinner for five?”

“No,” Pauly answers, happy not to add to her troubles. “They only eat palm oil.”

“Good,” his mother says, returning into the relative darkness of the kitchen. “Good,” Pauly’s mother repeats. “Because I’m tired.”

Pauly’s cousins want to know what the masquerades can do. They stand really close to the softly moving figures in their backyard, football suspended. The boys reach fingers out to touch Pauly’s masquerades, but withdraw within inches of actual contact.

“I don’t think they need to do anything!” Pauly responds, annoyed that the boys cannot just glory in the glistening of the beads, the luster of the raffia, the vibrancy of the feathers. “They’re masquerades.”

That first night had been weird, having the masquerades in his room, stuck in the corner with all his action figures and Lego. But after he had startled awake several times, the rustling of the first masquerade’s raffia began to soothe him; the moon snuck in through a gap in his curtains and passed through the beads on the aso-oke, and they refracted light, dotting the walls and ceiling of Pauly’s room with stars; the embroidered patterns on the third masquerade’s skirt seemed to him like complete stories in a secret language known only to him, the silver threads glinting alive in the night.

“Jeez, calm down,” Ekene says now, walking away from Pauly and his masquerades. “They’re cool and all, but if they’re just going to stand there—”

“Whatever,” Pauly says. He doesn’t need to be here with his cousins when he has three masquerades. “I’m going home,” he announces. The masquerades glide behind him, as if backing his decision.

On the streets, Pauly kicks pebbles. The masquerades are quiet and now he regrets leaving his cousins.

“But is there anything you can do?” he turns to ask.

At first, he is sure they are ignoring him, but then the red aso-oke masquerade does the wavy thing again, silver head bowing down, then lifting up. The raffia masquerade hops and spins around on the spot. The feathers on the third masquerade rise, like a bird getting ready for flight—the feathers stick out in their million directions and Pauly steps back.

The masquerades dance. Out in the street, they twirl and contort and somersault. Pauly feels transformed, transported to another world, a brighter one than his summer holiday has given him so far, more radiant than the heady rush of scoring a goal against Ekene. The masquerades feint left, then jerk right, they jump and fold and twist and spasm and feathers flutter and cloths flap and billow and beads clink and jangle and the plumes blur and raffia palms create a ssshhhh-shhshshshh wind that is the background pulse of their dance.

Pauly’s mother leaves her sewing machine for the evening and comes to sit with him. He is watching a movie about a group of teenagers solving crimes with their pet dragon. Static horizontal lines flicker across the screen intermittently, eclipsing their adventures.

Pauly moves to sit on the floor beside his mother’s legs, leans his head against them. It is rare that she pauses work to be with him. In this moment, he is happy. The masquerades are next to the TV, swaying as usual. There is an almost-empty bowl of palm oil at their feet. It is Pauly’s favorite bowl, the one with the robots holding hands. Pauly had spent a huge chunk of his afternoon staring at the bowl of palm oil, trying to catch them eating, but whenever he looked away or dozed off, he found the oil depleted. Now, he allows them their privacy and mystery.

He has his masquerades; he has his mother: it is a tranquility Pauly revels in.

His mother runs her hand over his