Kemi is seated on a green plastic chair in the spacious Kitchen chopping carrots happily. She is bare footed, wearing a light blue jean trouser and a fitted burgundy polo. Her black braids are packed up in a neatly done up do. The chopping board is placed on her lap and the chopping sound echoes in the kitchen. Kemi derived pleasure from chopping anything. For some reason it was fun to her, she did it with so much relish. Kemi enjoyed how the knife would cut quickly through the carrot or onions or peas and then land on the board, she preferred using a wooden chopping board because the sound of her chopping was too soft and not loud enough on a plastic one. The activity was quite serious for Kemi and she got quite adept at it, chopping all the fried rice ingredients in less than 45 minutes.
Kemi was put in charge of all the slicing and preparation of all the required ingredients. Mrs Kalu wanted to do the cooking herself which was quite strange. Kemi reckoned that it was because her son Ikenna Junior was around. Kemi cooked most of the time in the house and she enjoyed it because ingredients were always bountiful, there was always too much meat and a variety of fruits to go with it. Kemi had a penchant for grapes, the seedless ones especially. She liked how she would crush it with her molars and the sweet liquid would splatter in her mouth, Kemi first tasted grapes in the Kalus house and ever since, whenever Mrs Kalu or her husband would send her to buy fruits she always bought grapes and guavas also, Mr. Kalu loved Guavas.
As Kemi began chopping the cabbage, her thoughts wandered to Ikenna Junior, it was almost 2pm and she hadn’t seen him nor heard his voice. She wondered what he would be like in person. She had seen his picture and he is patently a handsome young man. He looked around twenty one in the large framed picture of him that rested conspicuously on the sitting room wall. He was wearing a grey coloured suit in the picture and he had a very beautiful smile. Kemi has heard his voice, a number of times when Mrs Kalu was on the phone with him, on some occasions, Mrs Kalu would put the phone on loud speaker and Kemi would listen attentively as he spoke. He would talk about school, about the cool winter and hot summer, about girls and how much he missed his mothers cooking. His voice was so captivating, every syllable graced by the manliness of his tone. His accent was disappointingly somewhere between Nigerian and British. His words seemed to fluctuate from Nigerian to British twang. Kemi envisaged he would have a British accent, but she was still pleased. She loved to hear him speak.
“You must be Kemi, right?” It was the same voice Kemi heard from Mrs Kalu’s phone, but it sounded even better. She stopped slicing her cabbage abruptly and turned to stare at him with her eyes wide open. His smile was slick. “I am Ikenna…Junior”. Kemi couldn’t find any words. He was shirtless and sweating seductively. She needed to take it all in.
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