For the Love of Magdalene

Edidiong U. Essien

Every part of me wants an impossible thing. Magdalene the sensitive. Magdalene the elusive. She is nothing like us ordinary mortals, not a clay figurine inflated with lifegiving air. Doesn’t share our useless imperfections. Envy, indolence, acrimony. No, Magda is something else entirely. A pearl amongst swine will always stand out, won’t it?

We moved, together, to Sugarcane Valley. Together but separately. At the same time, is what I mean. Magdalene first, then me. A day apart, exactly three years ago. Fate? I believe so. Magdalene the pragmatist disagrees, chalks up our paths crossing to coincidence. She doesn’t believe in fate and its unknowable orchestrations, has no patience for that kind of metaphysical talk. It angers her. Really, she gets a little violent when fate is mentioned. Claws at her delicate scalp until she draws blood, plugs up her ears childishly, threatens to skin me without the mercy of anesthesia. Magdalene deals only in absolutes she can perceive.

We met at a train station. The ugliest place for a serendipitous encounter. Rotten fruit peels underfoot, overfed rodents slithering past turnstiles, evading the underpaid station attendants trying to crush their fat bodies, a smell of sour moisture, of perspiring skin following me doggedly. But the station’s repulsiveness made our meeting all the more memorable. More memorable than if it had occurred at a cathedral or library.

I’d just left a symposium my university hosted for graduate students, a failed event. Not enough canapés, too many hungry scholars. I cannot recall a single thing the panelists said. And how could I, on an empty stomach? Knowledge is sustenance, to a certain kind of person, but not to me. I prefer food one can touch and smell and ultimately consume.

I took off quite early. Strolled all the way to the nearest train station. A five-kilometer walk. At the station, I purchased a bag of salted peanuts from a vending machine with sticky buttons and a sunken protective screen. The machine shuddered once I pushed a rumpled note into the appropriate slot and discharged two more peanut packets than I’d originally paid for. I took them all, pleased at my good fortune. Some divine presence, I thought, was rewarding me for the suffering I’d tolerated at the symposium.

Hunger sated, I finally noticed Magda, long before she caught wind of me. She was standing too close to the train tracks, nibbling the keychain dangling from her wallet, absent-mindedly. I remember everything she wore that day. Khaki shorts, similar to the ones my grandfather likes, ribboned socks and a distressed blouse. The picture of impossible health. Her thick braids were glossy, teeth and nails too. She was more lustrous than any person I had seen in my twenty-five years. Magdalene shimmered, like her spirit had been doused in fresh Vaseline, like she’d been kissed all over by an indulgent saint, or a legion of angels. A consecrated pearl amongst swine. And there I was, smelling of other people’s sweat and my own, my face all twisted up, belly in shambles; I’d eaten the peanuts too quickly.

What clever thing could I say to pull her into my orbit, to keep her there? I mulled it over, by the malfunctioning vending machine with sticky buttons.  It was agonizing, a worse agony than fracturing a bone. This woman, this seraph pretending to be a human being, wearing grandfatherly khakis and Sunday-school socks, had me in knots and there was nothing I could do about it. I could only stare. Gawk, more like. As if I wasn’t an adult with above par intelligence and half of a graduate degree completed.

Look this way. Look right at me and I will say something to you. And because I willed it so acutely, she did as I hoped. Fate, like I’ve said. Magdalene looked over, not at me, but at the vending machine. It was having another groaning fit at the moment of my anxious petitioning. Another peanut sachet regurgitated from the machine’s guts, for no apparent reason. I hadn’t paid for the newest bag, either. Fate.

She noticed me, at last. Thanks to the vending machine, its inexplicable noises and behaviors. The watery quality of her eyes enraptured me. Made mine water, as well. What awful things had the seraph in the train station been forced to endure? Environmental pollution? Unfair ticket fees? Any ticket fees at all? A creature like herself needn’t soil her inherent goodness on public transportation.

I approached Magda with the bag of peanuts tucked under my arm. She observed my approach, quite coolly, hardening her posture until she seemed immense, formidable even in the adorable clothes she wore. Now what will you do? her demeanor seemed to say.

Here’s what I did. I offered her the peanuts. Gave the whole bag to Magdalene, tangling myself in the clever string of words I'd prepared on the way over. Something about divine providence and malfunctioning machinery. She didn’t say a single word, eyed me, as if I was a centipede in her path that had suddenly been granted speech. But she took the peanuts. I thanked her. I did, like she had done me a favor, not the reverse. And was I bothered? Not at all. This was my life’s turning point. Nothing prior to this day in the train station mattered. Not my foolish hobbies, casual acquaintances, or the graduate degree I was in the process of completing.

“Your number. Please,” I asked, begged.

“What will you do with my number?” she said, not sweetly at all. Sounded like an exhausted ruffian.

“Call you? If you don’t mind. Please.”

“What is your name?”

I told her, pulled out my student ID, without her asking for it. I’m not sure why. She’d really done a number on me, her apathetic dialogue, her confusing clothes.

“What’s yours?” I had to shout a bit. A train was pulling into the station. Commuters churned behind us, aggression in their steps, sending obese rats scrambling back to their dank hiding places.

“Magdalene,” she said.

“Magdalene,” I repeated. What a name. Sumptuous letters arranged so carefully, one after the other.

She conjured a piece of grease-stained paper from one of the many pockets on her khaki shorts, a pen from another, and scribbled illegibly on it. Handed the greasy paper over to me. It was an email address, I realized.

“We will talk, maybe later. My train is here,” Magdalene said. And she walked off, jostling the people in her way, like they weighed nothing. Elbowed backs, pinched a few obstacles, snarled more than once, pushed her way onto the overwrought train. My victorious seraph. Well, not mine yet, but I wanted nothing more, for this contradiction of a woman, this sweet-faced ruffian, to love me.

The train, engorged with impatient passengers, shut its doors and pulled away from the station, louder than it had been when it made its entrance. I waved it off, hanging on to the paper Magdalene had given me, the most precious piece of paper I could ever own.

Magdalene would tell me, much later, that she’d been impressed by my juvenile attempt at romance. The peanuts, the fidgeting movements I couldn’t stop once I entered her sphere of influence. She was overcome by the urge to dissect me, to analyze every drop of passion, every ounce of desire I was harboring in my arteries. She knew she wanted me, instantly. I was The Valley personified, crumbling with fetid beauty, and it aroused her.

The first email I sent, not the same day of our meeting but two days after. A brief one, testing the waters.

-Magdalene, forgive my delay in correspondence. Been busy with school. Do you remember me? The peanuts, the train station.

She responded an hour later. Her message had no regard for grammar or its restrictions. She capitalized whatever letters she wanted to, damned punctuation. I felt that agony once more, inside of me, a million fractures. How precious she was, how unrestrained.

-will you meet Me, somewhere

-Of course. Shall we get tea? Or coffee? Or wine? I’m not sure what you’d like to drink.

-i don’t drink. Caffeine Or Alcohol.

Magdalene wanted to go to a local art gallery. She sent several articles about the artists in residence, clogging up my inbox. Some photographers, a tapestry weaver, metalworkers, a sculptor who made recreations of musical instruments using donated body hair and fingernails.

I’d been there, with another woman. A former classmate of mine. Nothing serious, the visit. The day started on a literal high. We smoked a little, rode city bikes to the gallery, euphoric. Ate flaky meat pies before heading into the art sanctum, didn’t dust the crumbs of baked dough off our lips and clothes.

We ignored the exhibits, poked fun instead, at the other very serious gallery visitors. Made great nuisances of ourselves, like the children we were. In one of the gallery’s unisex bathrooms, my former classmate kneaded completion out of me, on her knees the entire time, pie crumbs wedged into the corners of her mouth, murmuring kind encouragement I don’t think I deserved. I came on her fingers, on the tiled wall beside her head. Felt immediately rancid.

Quietly, we rode our leased bicycles back to the university’s campus and had dinner with her roommates. The atmosphere, strained. The food, tasteless. Someone had overcooked sad looking servings of nkwobi. I left once we’d eaten, shook the girl’s hand before parting ways with her. Her roommates, three of them, stood aghast by the kitchen’s granite island. The collective pinched looks on their faces, solid irritation, is an image forever emblazoned in my mind. We never spoke again.

All this to say, I didn’t want to go to the same gallery with Magda. It was a cheap place to take her, forever ruined by my behavior in the gallery’s toilet, ruined more by the apparition of my former classmate on her knees, face beatific as she did this nice thing that made me feel horrid afterwards. I tried to suggest something different:

-What about another gallery? There’s one at my school. Showcases student artists.

-no.

That’s all she said. No. I acquiesced, ordered our day passes myself and sent her confirmation links. I didn’t want to upset her, not this early, not ever.

-sweet. See you Then. x

She never thanked me for the passes, and still, I didn’t care. Already, she was stitching my priorities to hers.

At the gallery, I was rigid, felt too stiff to engage with the full force of Magdalene’s allure, and was simultaneously worried that I’d be recognized as the bathroom ejaculator. Magda brought a little tape recorder along and spoke at length into its microphone. Descriptions of the exhibits she liked. Scathing insults for the characterless ones. She was carefree, glowing.

“Would you like to say something?” she asked, a half-hour into the date, thrusting the recorder under my chin. She wobbled her eyebrows, so I would laugh, and I did. I’d been following her silently, half expecting my former classmate to accost me, her hands covered in the mess I’d made. An irrational fear.

“Hello. We’re at the gallery, me and Magdalene,” I said, into the recorder. “Is that okay?”

“What do we see? At the gallery.”

“Right now? A photograph. A small one. Matchbox-sized.”

“And in the photograph?”

“A person. Peeling yams.”

“I don’t like the taste of yam,” she said, turning off the taping device, pocketed it.

“Why not?”

“Don’t laugh, if I tell you.” Magda seemed timid, no less angelic. Even more so.

“I won’t laugh. Never,” I said, solemnly.

“My grandmother told me this story when I was seven, I think. About why babies can’t speak anymore.”

“What did she say?”

“They could speak. Long, long time ago. Babies were such gossips. Talking all the time. Putting their mouths in business that didn’t concern them.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Long story short, a baby had seen someone do something awful. Steal another person’s property. The baby told everyone in the community about the theft. I’m not sure if I’m remembering this correctly.”

“What was the consequence?”

“The supposed thief killed herself. The embarrassment, you know? It was too much.”

“Shit. Really?”

“Right. All because of the gossip-monger baby. So, the god of that place ground up yams, and shoved the paste down every baby’s throat. They would never be able to speak again, not until they could think critically. That’s why baby spit up is white, and a messy consistency. Yam paste. Disgusting, right?”

“I see why you’re not so crazy about yams. Completely rational.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Never,” I said. Her face right then, was an open, vulnerable sheet. Dusky, in the gallery’s candlelight glow, where others, including myself, looked sallow. I wanted so badly to kiss her, in front of the matchbox-sized print of unknown hands peeling yam tubers.

The following month, she took me to a nursing home. A nursing home’s parking lot. We didn't enter the facility, not that day. She refused to.

“Smells like formaldehyde,” she insisted.

I sat there with her, in our car rental, waiting for something to happen, anything. But there was hardly any talking between us. We listened to a jazz album, a CD I’d brought with me, and I sang along, serenaded her poorly, got the lyrics mixed up, and the cadence. The album cycled from start to finish, we watched uniformed nurse aides and visitors stream through the home’s revolving doors.

Magda became drowsy quickly, and affectionate. She tucked her head under the safe tilt of mine. The jewels she’d braided into her hair pressed against my chin, but I bore the pain for her sake, for her comfort. And selfishly, for the intimacy the pain implied. If only my cheek and chin would fuse with the iridescent clusters flashing on her cornrows. Such a bond would make living impractical. How would I attend lectures, or eat, or touch my toes at leisure, with the head of an adult woman attached to my face?

Another date, a confusing outing, but everything about Magda was confusing. We visited a shrine. Not just any shrine, an abandoned one. Nothing to keep it company but rural fauna and insects desecrating its baobab frame. Sad thing to see.

“Who put this together?” I asked.

She didn’t know and had only heard of the shrine from a friend. A priest, Magda assumed. A priest who’d most likely forgotten where it was or intentionally neglected it. The cylindrical shrine lacked offerings, was veiled in spiderwebs and a thick skein of harmattan dust. Housed no warm sentiments or foul ones even, only maggots that twisted by its base.

Magdalene cut a button from my shirt’s collar with her sharp teeth, and placed the button on the shrine, a flippant action. Remember her disdain for the metaphysical. She asked me to hold her while she thought about the shrine. What it could have been. Her hands were cool in mine, felt like holding pliant marble. I wanted to know if the other secretive parts of her skin were as cold as the hands I held but was too afraid to take action.

We rested there, after her moment of reflection, in front of the lonely shrine out in the middle of nowhere, hours and hours. It was a Saturday. I worked on a paper I’d been assigned the day before, and she napped beside me, on the thick blanket I’d spread out to protect her sundress from grass stains.

If I were a different man, a more reckless one, I would have done this. I’d have kissed the pulse visibly throbbing at her wrist, would have lifted her onto the shrine’s collapsing ledge and fixed my lips to the side of her neck. Latched on tight, made uneven indentations on her throat with my teeth. If I had the strength, I could have parted her stocky legs, using my knee perhaps, or both palms, to get a closer look at the cotton briefs I knew she was wearing, lilac with embroidered turacos. She’d shown them to me on the drive over to the shrine, a quick look, lifted her dress’s hem, all casual and put it down, as I maneuvered the car I was unaccustomed to driving outside of city limits.

Two months after our meeting at the train station, we slept together for the first time. She’d invited me over to her flat. Slow cooked a fatty leg of lamb in a crockpot. Fed me bowl after bowl of tender meat and vegetables. Mashed ripe bananas in a cold mug, ladled coconut cream over it, and brown sugar.

Food cleared away, Magdalene sat me down between her knees and combed the tangles out of my afro. She massaged castor oil into my hair’s dry ends. Her hands, lava on my scalp. Not cool at all that evening.

“I’m on the pill,” she said, once my hair was a mostly knotless halo. I nodded, my throat dry. We did it there, on the living room settee, clumsy, unhurried. And slipping into her, moving in her, I knew I’d never experience anything similar to this, not with any other woman. She unmade me, reassembled my molecules in the span of minutes, kept me hovering too close to my limit. Dragged clawed fingers through my combed hair, and it hurt, but there was something else, superimposed with the pain she was inflicting. I had no choice but to melt. I was butter at the mercy of a scalding knife.

With distant ears and eyes, I heard the roar of dry wind rattling her flat’s shutters, saw Magda’s stomach heaving forcefully, her legs twisted, vicelike, over my hips and lower back, holding me near, her voice, airy, whimpering. Then: releasing all I had. For her. And she took it all, a serious look on her face, brilliance bursting from her pores, lulling me into a near unconscious state.

Magdalene and me. A cautious pair. She wooed me in her own way, did her best to fan the flames of devotion. What I wanted, I got, and I made my demands as ridiculous as permissible. Sponge cake baked by her hand, fed to me after our bodies cooled and untangled, post intercourse. Pieces of tulle cut from a yellowing wedding dress she’d inherited from her grandmother. Houseplants I suffocated in pesticide and water.

My seraph asked for little in return, and I gave it tenfold. Did she need to draw solace or satisfaction from my flesh, a fabric of purposelessness before we met? I allowed it. I allowed anything, would have carved out my own lungs and eyeballs for her pleasure, or fallen on a scimitar at her request. It was a rush to be the channel through which a person this ethereal could be content.

There was a scale we were balancing on, with Magda on one end and me on the other. It was out of equilibrium, and always would be, I thought, unless I offered something visible, something she could use, beyond insatiable prurience. My culinary skills would never compare to hers, but I made do with the limited tools of my arsenal: ready-made dinners. After fulfilling the parameters of educational welfare, I would diligently purchase fruit and boxed meals from a supermarket close to her flat. It was small, gleamed inside and out, like the surface of a sun-bleached nautilus shell.

The act of shopping for her was medicinal. As I browsed aisles housing genetically altered vegetables, fermented beverages, and prepackaged meats, I was separated from the world and its exhausting dullness. When weighing, with bare hands, the garden eggs, mangoes and udala my lover would eat, I fully believed that something more divine was at play between us.

More visits to the nursing home, nine more at least, always sitting in the car.

“The formaldehyde,” Magda would say, patiently, if I asked to go in. She continued to resist potential entry, wouldn’t explain the reason behind our vigil, did not name what it was we were waiting for, although I sensed her desire to be near whatever it was. A friend or foe, I wondered, but never ventured to ask. However long she wished to sit, staring at the revolving doors, I would do the same.

Before Magda told me about her grandparents, she brewed chamomile tea, using an archaic French press dug out of her pantry. We drink our tea unsweetened, usually, but that morning she dropped eight brown sugar cubes into her mug. Stirred the cubes until they dissolved to watery grit.

She was wearing a caftan she’d taken from me, loose, sand colored, its hem dragging on the floor as she puttered around the kitchen putting away our sugar tin and the French press. The caftan was sheer, I remember, and exposed the indent of her navel, every fluid movement of her hips, the fine hair surrounding her areolas. A devastating sight to behold so early in the morning. Outside the flat, another dust storm raged, loud, full of ire; it bathed the mosquito screen above the kitchen sink in dust that clumped as it settled.

“Do you have anyone? Family, I mean, living in The Valley?” Magda asked, sipping the tea I feared was still too hot and overly sweet.

“My parents live two hours away, by train. Valley-adjacent,” I answered.

“That’s nice. I have my grandmother.”

“What’s she like?”

“Hard to say, it varies now,” said Magda. “What are your parents like?”

“Bookish, very much so. And tolerant of me. Good people.”

“My grandmother, she’s barely literate. But rather expressive. She was. Loved telling me folk tales.”

“Not anymore?”

“No. Her husband cut her tongue out,” Magda stuck out her own tongue here, made a snipping motion with two fingers. “The folk tales dried up inside her. Would you like sugar in your tea as well?”

That’s exactly how she put it. No preamble, or sugarcoating. And she carried on, as if forced mutism was standard marital practice, kissed the nape of my neck on her way out of the kitchen, asked if I wanted carrots or potatoes with my supper. The violent picture she painted so sedately, with two fingers and her flattened tongue, stayed with me the rest of the day. A strange feeling brewed afresh, an unreachable itch inside my stomach.

My life seemed even more ordinary in comparison to Magda’s, following the gruesome revelation shared over chamomile tea. I was colorless, an eddy of grey nothing. No graphic skeletons in my metaphorical wardrobe. Ordinary parents, standard grandparents on both sides. Former academics, like my mother and father. All with tongues firmly attached at the root.

Meanwhile, Magdalene gained a new vibrancy. The love I had for her expanded. It stretched in my chest, warmed up my body, enlivened me. But I also shrank from her brilliance, aware of my own inadequacies. I made a greater effort to hide the more grating parts of what I was from her. When I shaved my face, I rinsed the lather and my coarse hair down the drain, obsessively scrubbing the sloped insides of our bathroom sink with bleach afterwards. I only defecated at university, if I could help it, in the admin building’s lavatory, or during my commute to and from Magdalene’s flat. To muzzle my insomnia, a recent development, I swallowed glossy sleeping tablets before bedtime. Without the pills, nightmares besieged me. Of a wide mouth, cracked lips, and the pink stub of a shortened tongue.

Inside Magda was subtle despair. Almost invisible. The size of a shrunken pea. Smaller than that, even. Subatomic. She hid it from me. Like I’d been hiding my banal tendencies. Belching openly, idle self-pleasure. Because we’d been cohabiting for a prolonged time, I eventually saw signs of her despair, one June evening.

The particular evening I speak of, we’d returned from a film showing. It was a foreign movie, all in Québécois, small English subtitles at the bottom of the screen for those deficient in the language, myself and Magda included. We took the train home after, discussing unimportant matters good naturedly. The movie, its characters, their silly capers.

At home, Magdalene mixed gingeritas without tequila, and we imbibed together in light spirits, or so I thought. I’d only just gone to the bedroom to put on my pajamas when I heard, in the flat’s toilet, a quivering, guttural sound muffled by the closed door. Compressed weeping. It was Magdalene. She emerged soon after, face dry, expressionless. As if she hadn’t been purging herself of tears a few short minutes before.

I asked later, when we’d settled in for the night: “Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” she said. “All’s well.”

But all clearly was not well. The compressed weeping continued, sporadically. Always in the toilet. I listened to it, my ear pressed against the door, mystified by the peculiar sound. How had I not noticed that Magda, a confirmed seraph, could be so downcast? That she possessed that ability, small and collapsible as it was? Wasn’t despair a feeling reserved for clay figurines, mortals like me? What could I do? What could I say? I was still frightened of alienating her with my pushiness, so I said and did nothing, at first.

Our lovemaking strengthened during this period. She was very giving of herself, more and more affectionate, but I recognized distress, underneath all that affection. She’d say, while I was inside her: “You are so kind.” And I couldn’t manage, the earnestness in her voice, her serious face.

I continued to drive her to the nursing home, more frequently it seemed. Almost every other weekend. Until one day, I asked the question eating away at me.

“Who is it you’re here for?”

She was quiet, looked wounded. Finally responded, “You know, already. You must.”

“Your grandmother? The one without—”

“The tongueless one, yes.”

“Don’t you want to see her?”

“I can feel her, from this parking lot. It’s enough.”

“What happened? Between her and your grandfather?”

In speaking these words, by asking this unambiguous question, I had split something open, similarly to how raw eggs are broken, exposing sliminess within. We would not be able to scoop albumen and yolk back into the halved shell pieces. But what a relief, to get it out in the open, to appease curiosity.

“He wasn't well. The men in my family become addled in old age. Their kindness curdles.”

She used the word “curdles,” evoking vivid pictures in my mind. Papayas decaying, softening from the inside out, becoming inedible. Mushrooms that reeked of ammonia. The shrine she’d taken me to, its multitude of maggots. A violent man aging rapidly, stooped over and habitually drooling. Armed with a knife, no, a machete.

“I don’t think he meant to disfigure her. He just got it into his head that she’d been unfaithful to him. And so, he cut her. Using my mother’s pinking shears,” she chuckled, mirthlessly.

“Magda. How awful.”

“My parents put her in this facility.” Magda pointed using her pursed lips, at the nursing home spewing and guzzling guests from the same opening, its revolving door. “And I came here, with my grandmother. It does her good to see a familiar face, every once in a while.”

“She’s lucky. To have such a devoted granddaughter. To have you,” I said, moved.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I look just like him. Her husband. My parents think so. And I can’t help it. Can’t pull his likeness out of my face, can I? So bringing myself to her, isn’t it selfish? Isn’t it cruel?”

“Keeping your grandmother company is cruelty? What is kindness, then?”

“Do you know what happened the last time I went inside? She hit me, right here.” Magda touched the highest point of her left cheekbone with two fingers. “Because I have him in me. The look of him, at least.”

“She might have been confused,” I countered, moving her knuckles away from the cheek that was struck, replacing it with my own hand. Magdalene the burdened. I pitied her poor grandmother too, maimed into wordless rage.

“No. She tried to say his name. His face is my face. I’d like to go home now. Please.”

She believed exactly what she’d said. That her existence was an imposition of cruelty on her grandmother. Magda had always been candid with me, never misrepresented her feelings, or lied, save the little one she told me when I first heard her weeping in the toilet. All’s well. But was that a lie? Was the despair I falsely assumed as something hidden always hovering in plain sight, waiting to be noticed? Perhaps. Wasn’t it my prerogative, as the man who loved her, to sift through the fossils of her feelings, like a paleontologist, and perceive her hidden truth?

The despair did not thaw. It retreated, slithering back into her body’s crevices, sequestering itself. As for the way Magda carried herself around me, it changed. She was looser. In her words, in her actions. She bombarded me with questions about the family I’d come from, what I was like as a child, the things I loved to eat before our paths converged, the meals I detested, and I supplied her with the answers.

My bland chronicles of youth entertained Magda, and so in retelling them, I was entertained too. Stories I had nearly forgotten were dredged up. The year I smashed my mother’s prized chandelier to bits. With a tennis ball. The first time I kissed a woman, at a convention I’d accompanied my parents to. How the woman’s mouth felt, smooth and decisive on my inexperienced lips. The smell of my bedroom, cloying body spray and peppermint fumes. My inexhaustible appetite for okra as a seven-year-old, and my revulsion for catfish; I hated the pin sized bones hiding within slippery white flesh. My brief stint in a choir. Upon learning about my musical past, Magda coaxed me to sing her a hymn, and I obliged, sheepishly.

“You sing well,” she said after I bumbled my way through three stanzas of “Amazing Grace.” “You must do it more for me.”

Magda volunteered more information about her family. I learned that she’d been born prematurely, with her umbilical cord wrapped around her tiny throat. And that her mother suffered fainting spells, a trait she luckily did not pass down.

“Imagine me, fainting,” she scoffed.

Her father was a chemist, and her mother owned a restaurant. “Nothing grand,” said Magda. A simple business frequented by frazzled office workers and laborers on their lunch breaks, dust from construction sites clogging their pores.

Her first memories of her grandmother: the two of them, alone in the house her grandfather built, shelling peas, coloring on envelopes, watering the thirsty plants competing for space and attention in the compound. Morning glory, banana trees, hibiscus blooms. The grandmother reciting folk tales in a sing-song voice, Ibibio poems too. Magda described, in detail, the nail polish on her grandmother’s toes, a color she’d thought was too girlish for an old woman, at the time. Coral pink, with splashes of luminescent glitter.

We continued to share these stories, emotionally charged at times, and before I knew it, we’d been dating for six months. We established routines suited to our individual strengths. Magda sorted out our meals. She planned multicourse feasts for our consumption, and I would clean. Dirty dishes, dirty clothes, the minor messes in her flat. Our flat. I had fully moved in at that point. She’d organize our simpler dates, and I handled logistics for the more elaborate ones (overnight visits to the seaside, touristy adventures to nearby towns by road or rail). I attended my lectures, and she worked, thirty-five hours a week, at a record shop located not too far from my university.

The love expanding in my chest matured, so I did as well. I shed my insomnia, before June simmered warmly into July, then August. Magda’s despair made fleeting reappearances here and there, but I didn’t fear it. What was there to fear? Nothing at all. I only had service to give, limitless devotion. The limbs to prop up her body when she wilted, the mouth that spoke reassurances, every one of my organs a dedicated servant to my seraph.

And when August waned, Magda asked: “May I show you something?”

“Show me.”

It was an album of well-preserved photographs from her early childhood and late teens. She unearthed the book from its hiding place, a box beneath our bed bound with velvet ribbon. In the album: photographs of a nondescript couple she identified as her parents. Portraits of Magda, four, five, seven years old, sitting on the bonnet of a peach sedan, legs crossed like a miniature lady. Magda brandishing dolls of varying complexions, wearing gingham dungarees, suede trousers many sizes too big, sleeping in a bed shaped like a canoe.

More photographs: dance recitals, sporting events, giant smiles on the faces of the ever-changing Magdas. Passage of linear time from child to teenager. A graduation ceremony frozen on film. The diploma hand-off on a stage covered in tinsel and balloons. Magda standing between another much older couple. Her grandparents, before the severing. Magda’s arms thrown around the shoulders of the man on her left, her grandfather, and the grandmother, taller than Magda, raising a hand to the person behind the camera.

When Magdalene sneezes, her toes curl inwards, then relax after the sneeze subsides. She has a Swiss Army knife, with a tortoiseshell handle that she carries everywhere. On the train, to the record store. She dislikes oysters, the slimy texture as they slide down her throat, the residue left behind on her lips, the briny aftertaste. She could survive on a strict diet of ripe mangoes and kilishi alone, eons if need be. Magdalene’s favorite books are never in English. Only Ibibio. She thinks she has her grandfather’s forehead, and so she hates her own, how narrow it is.

She doesn’t remember her grandmother’s voice, before the severing happened, worries that she will forget how I sound as well, if I somehow misplace my tongue. Magdalene has gifted me my own little tape recorder, pocket sized. Just in case. A minor contingency plan. She asks me to record myself speaking, as I go about my day. And I talk to it. To her. Whenever I can. Between lectures, on my evening runs. I’m thrilled that I can give this intangible thing to Magda, my voice itself. Seems like a paltry offering but she truly enjoys listening to my nonsensical ramblings. She listens to the recordings on the weekends, coiled on my lap like a warm kitten, smiling occasionally, and I see that she is as in love as I am, in those moments. I see it, yes, that Magda the Seraph deems me deserving of this impossible love.