The house was on the same street as a bakery whose only offering was penis-shaped waffles. Rufaro didn’t like American houses very much. They looked paper thin like doll houses that would lift off into the clouds if a strong wind came by. American houses didn’t have gates, walls, or fences, an architectural oversight that Rufaro didn’t quite understand. Haelish, Massachusetts was somewhere between Salem and Boston and an ocean away from Bulawayo. She knew immediately that she didn’t like this small town whose name sounded like hell in her mouth.

Her new husband unlocked the front door, its metallic squeal a prison cell door slamming shut.

“Welcome home,” Brian said.

Rufaro plastered a smile on her face like the women at the kitchen party taught her. The kitchen party was a day before her white wedding. Brian had already paid her lobola in full. Her bride prize being paid in crisp US dollars had been the talk of the neighborhood for weeks. Brian hadn’t even tried to bargain down for her. Rufaro was supposed to be happy, to shove her worth into every single woman’s face like a shiny medal, but she felt like a broiler chicken with a hefty price tag on a grocery shelf. It didn’t matter how much had been paid for her, she was still going to be eaten. At the kitchen party, she was surrounded by tetes in colorful doeks brandishing tightly wrapped gifts and advice about how to be a good wife. While they ate queen cakes and scones, and popped pink balloons, she’d practiced the ear-to-ear grin with all her teeth, putting every Colgate ad and working clown to shame. The trick was to be elastic. When a smile never reached the eyes a woman had to put her entire face in it grinch-style. She stretched her face until her cheeks tore. Her mama taught her how to wipe away the blood with makeup wipes and cover the rip in her face with Fenty Beauty full coverage concealer.

“Uwache burugwa remurume wako uchidetemba kuti his soldier won’t work for anyone else but you,” Tete Moreblessing said winking and making a hand washing gesture with her hands to show off how to enchant her husband’s underwear. The women around her erupted into knowing giggles. This started off the round of marital coaching meant to arm Rufaro for the battle ahead.

“Always feed your husband. The stomach is their weakness,” Tete Alice said to a round of enthusiastic nods from the other women. “Mix your monthly blood with the beef stew and serve it up with sadza nice and good. He will never hit you.”

“If he cheats on you,” Tete Thandiwe said pointing out the window at a garden lizard running across the yard and climbing on the wall. “Cut the dzvinyu’s tail. Bake the pieces into the vetkoeks. He will never stray from his home like a dzvinyu doesn’t stray from the walls.”

“The most important thing is to figure out what his thing is and figure it out fast,” mama said.

“His thing?” Rufaro asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” mama said not offering more. “We give you these recipes but you must adapt them, add your own spice. Each man is different. Each man has his thing.”

• • • •

Think of me as a vacuum. I clean up. I suck all the shadows that make children afraid of the dark, I exorcize the tikoloshi under the bed. I feed on all the filth that humans excrete.

Think of me as an air purifier. There is more than oxygen in the air, there are energies that make this world sick. I remove them.

Think of me as a black hole swallowing and collapsing all the bad things.

Call me obsidian. Call me coal. I am the color of a freshly tarred road, charred timber, and the deep black of space. Energy, or as I like to call it venom, is yummy. Grief is gourmet, a three-course meal deserving a Michelin star. Jealousy is a salty, savory snack like a plate of matemba or packet of groundnuts bought from an old lady at the musika. Anger and hatred burn when they go down, exploding with flavor. The most delicious is fear with a side of hatred. It’s cold, creamy, and so so sweet. A lovely dessert after a fine meal. There are so many tasty venoms in this house I could almost cry from the rich buffet, if I were capable of crying that is.

• • • •

The front door opened to a long, dark corridor that reminded Rufaro of the countless ZESA power cuts back home and how her family couldn’t afford candles so they just sat in the dark telling each other scary nganos. Rufaro’s favorite was about the ghost bus in Gwanda. The story goes some buses are driven by the dead. Ngozi move like vultures always circling places where horrific accidents occurred. The dead picked up a man whose car had broken down on the main road, took him for a ride on a ghost ZUPCO for seven years. The ghost bus raced to Harare and back, sometimes it took a detour to Bulawayo. Sometimes the bus crossed the border like a malaitsha to South Africa and Bostwana. When the ghosts got bored, they kicked him out of the bus and left him naked in a sango somewhere far from home. The man could never find his way out of the woods.

A light flickered on and off overhead. Her suitcases, the only thing she’d brought from home, disappeared into a closet. She felt around for the walls and let them guide her toward a musty lounge with a sticky coffee table. Flies buzzed around a glass with clumpy yellow milk.

“Sorry I don’t do much cleaning,” Brian said, embarrassed. “I guess that’s why you are here, to help me out.”

Brian gave her a tour of the house. They descended down to the basement to a boiler gurgling. A porcelain hello kitty figurine waved slowly at Rufaro from the second step. This was Rufaro’s first time in a basement, another American architectural marvel.

“Here’s the laundry machine,” Brian said. The washing machine’s circular glass door was like an eye following her across the room. Rufaro stretched her smile to its limit, the gash in her face widening like an open mouth ready to bite.

Next, he showed her the kitchen. Even though the overpowering smell of Lysol wafted through the air, the kitchen was incredibly dirty. He promised to fix it up to make her more comfortable.

“Your mother said you like reading,” Brian said, gesturing to the empty bookcase in the lounge. “You can fill it up with whatever you want.”

The gesture meant to be sweet and thoughtful filled her with rage. She’d started reading books in grade six when the mobile library bus came to her school on Fridays. The bus was an initiative by the Bulawayo public library to get books to children in government schools without libraries. She and her best friend Pinky would wait ravenously all week for the bus to pull into her school to pick up another installment of Sweet Valley High. She’d checked out a new book on the day her parents told her she wouldn’t be returning to school.

“We can’t afford the school fees anymore,” baba had said.

“But Sindiso and Sam are still going,” Rufaro wailed.

“Your brothers need an education,” baba had said. “There is no use in wasting money we don’t have sending a girl to school. Don’t worry you will just get married.” The unspoken part was that her father thought she’d received just enough education to help her future children with reading, writing, and maths homework. What more did a girl need to learn?

Rufaro refused to take off her school uniform, she even went to bed in it, squeezing her eyes shut and praying that somehow the uniform would turn into a key that would allow her through the school’s gates. She marched to the school in her uniform. The headmaster was standing at the entrance with a list of students with outstanding term fees. He turned away each of them at the gate. The headmaster would not let Rufaro in so she plopped herself down on the ground and sat cross legged in silence at the entrance. Embarrassed, the headmaster called her parents to come get their child. Rufaro would not move even when the clouds darkened, and rain drenched her green uniform. Baba and her brothers had to drag her away, kicking and screaming. That night mama burned her uniform, each thread melting to ash. Mama locked her inside the house for a year until school was like a dead relative no one talked about anymore, a ghost that lived in the floorboards.

• • • •

So far Brian seemed nice enough. Rufaro didn’t really know that much about him. His face was a perfect symmetry that begged to be rearranged. She wished she could add a mole to his cheeks, a scar to his forehead, or a crook to his nose. He was unbearable to look at, like when someone drenched themselves in an expensive perfume, the scent turning from sweet to an overwhelming assault. For their first meal together, Brian ordered penis-shaped waffles for her from Mr. Weenies Bakery down the street. The cream-filled waffle was light and fluffy, the chocolate syrup drizzled down her chin. Brian licked his lips while he watched her eat.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Rufaro asked. Brian’s dinner plate remained empty.

“I’m feasting my eyes,” he said.

The story of how they met was the furthest thing from a meet cute. Two weeks after Rufaro turned twenty, Brian, who’d made a life for himself kudiaspora as an engineer, decided it was time for a wife. He travelled back to his hometown, Bulawayo, in search of one. What family would turn away a green card for their daughter in these times when bread and butter had disappeared from dinner tables? Eager mothers paraded their daughters before the returnee. He’d politely turned each of them away.

Brian’s parents lived across the road from Rufaro’s family. Rufaro sat kudiaspora by the verandah reading a book. When school was taken from her she’d turned to worlds inside her books to fill the gaps. Of course, the aloof girl reading a thick book caught Brian’s attention. He’d hopped the fence, marched to the verandah and asked. “How would you like to live in America?”

• • • •

The first night in the house the walls moved, sliding toward each other as if they meant to crush her where she stood. Rufaro ran to the front door to escape and found that when she swung the door open, an invisible barrier pushed her back into the house. She banged against this barrier until her knuckles bled, a hollow thud echoing back at her.

“Why can’t I leave?” she asked Brian when he came back home.

“Why would you want to leave?” He said. “Your life is here with me.”

The next day, when Brian left for work, Rufaro called her mama on WhatsApp.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said.

“You’ve found his thing,” mama said. “When we recite our vows, they are a spell binding us to that person forever, binding us to their thing.”

Mama told her that every husband had a thing. Some men liked to suck on their wives’ nipples, fattening themselves on breastmilk until the women were drained husks walking who hungered so much they ate their own children. Some men shapeshifted into ravenous beasts at night, crunching bones and mauling faces. Mama told her a ngano that many believed to be an old wives’ tale but doesn’t every ngano have a nugget of truth? Mama told her of Simbimbino, a young boy who watched his father dig a hole in the middle of their maize field and push his wife in. Upon hitting rock bottom, the wife transformed into a pig. The husband salivated at the pink of her plump flesh and left to gather firewood to make a bonfire that night for a feast. That was his thing, you see. While he was gone, there amongst the endless rows of green maize stalks, at the bottom of a dark hole she sang to her son. Upon hearing his mother’s voice in the body of a pig, Simbimbino threw a ladder down to get her out before his father could come back and eat her.

So you see, mama said ending the ngano, being trapped inside the house wasn’t the worst thing.

• • • •

When the walls settled down the next day, a new room appeared. It was a nursery. The room’s walls were covered in Barbie pink wallpaper. A pram rocked back and forth in the corner. In the center of the room was a cradle where lay a wooden doll shaped-like a palm-sized scarecrow. The wooden doll was dressed in a blue onesie with the name Simbimbino embroidered on the front. The wooden doll had human eyes. Big brown eyes that would have been adorable on a chubby toddler. The big human eyes watched Rufaro enter the room.

“Mama,” it said.

Simbimbino let out a piercing cry that Rufaro could only describe as a crow. Some primordial instinct told her to pick up the thing.

“Thula thula, thula sana,” Rufaro sang the first lullaby that came to mind. “Don’t cry, Simbimbino.”

The doll latched onto her left boob and suckled. Rufaro and the doll locked eyes as its sharp teeth grazed her flesh.

• • • •

When Brian wasn’t looking, Rufaro’s lips were downturned as if two weights had latched onto the corners of her mouth and were anchored to her feet. Dark shadows swirled around her, a cyclone wrecking everything in its path. The shadows were everything she’d ever felt that hurt. The heartbreak of growing up in a country that was a pot of boiling water, slowly meant to singe her out of her mind. The unmooring of leaving home so young. A marriage that stripped bits of her each time. The burden of having to send money back home to the same family that had put her in this position by taking away any tools she could use to be someone else. Rufaro was haunted by who she could have been. I named the shadows around her venom, pulling them inside me until they became nothing.

• • • •

Brian showed her how to order books from Barnes and Noble and have them shipped to their address. The first book she bought for her shelf was You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi. The girl with gold braids on the cover caught her attention. Rufaro liked romance novels because women got happy endings in them. When she read of Feyi and her messy best friend Joy, she got off on their freedom. She thought of her own best friend Pinky. Pinky’s family were outcasts, mapostori whose beliefs were so fluid they blurred the lines between indigenous spirituality and Christianity. They wore white robes, shaved their heads, and bathed in holy water. They refused to worship under a church, preferring to hear sermons preached on top of a mountain, under a rock, on top of a tree, anywhere but a building. Fed up with mapostori congregations taking up space in public parks and the sides of major roads, the government offered to build them a temple. The mapostori not only refused but took offense at the offer. Spirit cannot be contained by walls and needs to be out in the open air.

A madzibaba in red garments always showed up weekly to Pinky’s house to lead an all-night prayer at an open fire in their yard. The madzibaba threw holy water around the house from a cleansing bowl and asked the family to say their wishes into the air. During full moons, Pinky would place tea leaves inside a jar and leave it out in her yard and retrieve it the next day.

“Moon tea,” she’d say brewing the leaves, inhaling the steam with a satisfied sigh. “We are most powerful during a full moon.”

The moon tea was a reddish-brown color and tasted like regular Freshpak rooibos when Rufaro tried it but Pinky insisted it would unlock this and that energy.

Pinky told Rufaro about how her family was given special rocks by their madzibaba that they all dropped into the holy water. The rocks warded off evil.

• • • •

Every day Rufaro sat by the window watching the cars go by while she stitched the gash in her face with a crotchet needle and fed the insatiable doll. Simbimbino wouldn’t let go, it was always feeding. The daily face mending gave her something to pass time. She always imagined mama’s voice shouting, “fix your face.” Band-Aids and makeup had long proven to be ineffective against the bleeding. The more she smiled, the bigger the gash grew. She accepted the gash as a part of her face now, like a nose or eyebrow or maybe a big blackhead on the forehead.

Rufaro started growing things to pass the time. Mint, parsley, and sage at first. Then bigger houseplants like snake plants and pink string of hearts. Every day she tended to her flowers and quickly saw blooms. She experimented with all the outlandish gardening tips and tricks she found in online forums. One woman online said she added earthworms to the soil in her planters and it did wonders. Rufaro ordered two hundred and fifty live worms with Brian’s credit card. When they arrived, she picked up a fistful of the dark soil and watched the little brown worms wiggle between her fingers. She liked the worms more than her husband. Her books, her plants, and her worms were the only thing that belonged to her in this house.

Rufaro hated cleaning the house. Whenever she cleared a stain on the kitchen counter, another would materialize in its place. Grease and dust multiplied like tumors as if cleaning fed them. She was exhausted from the endless scrubbing. Her hands hardened and blistered in just a few months. The house was just as flimsy as she’d surmised when she first saw it, a house of cards with cracks in every crevice that needed her calloused hands to hold it up. The house trembled like an earthquake whenever Rufaro wasn’t laboring as if her sweat nourished and soothed the house. When she went up the stairs to rest, the stairs writhed like a worm burrowing through the ground. Instead of taking her to her bedroom, the stairs shifted toward the basement door. In the basement, the washing machine churned laundry between two giant laundry baskets the size of swimming pools. When she folded the clothes, the pile extended all the way to the ceiling.

• • • •

Unlike the other women who went to Rufaro’s kitchen party bearing neatly wrapped gifts, Pinky came with me—a polished black dombo the size of a fist. She dropped me in Rufaro’s hands.

“It absorbs bad energy around you,” Pinky said. “Brings clarity. Helps you to know who you truly are.”

“I know who I am,” Rufaro said.

Pinky cocked her head curiously. “Do you?”

“How exactly does this black rock absorb bad energy?” Rufaro said, rolling her eyes. She examined me skeptically. She thought I was shiny and pretty and nothing more than that.

“You’re supposed to get me gifts I can use when I’m married like pots and pans and manapukeni, not madombo,” Rufaro said.

“A friend doesn’t gift you pots and pans,” Pinky said. “She gives you protection.”

• • • •

Frustrated, one day, she grabbed a dining chair and smashed the window screaming, “Let me out!” The window shattered, the shards shooting at her like tiny missiles. The spray would have looked like rainfall to anyone watching.

When Brian returned, he bandaged her like he was handling an egg.

“The more you try to escape,” Brian said, “the more it will hurt.” He spoke to Rufaro as if she were a child who’d stuck her hand down a termite mound and gotten stung.

“Why me?” Rufaro asked. “Out of all the girls, you chose me.”

“Unenharo,” Brian said, his eyes glimmering. “That stubbornness, that stone cold resolve. I want to break it.”

• • • •

Rufaro didn’t unpack me from her luggage until two months into her stay. I was wrapped in a zambiya at the bottom of her bag. She took me out with care, thinking of her friend.

“You’re supposed to protect me huh,” she said. Rufaro talked to me the way she talked to Pinky. Not only did the house prevent her from leaving, now whenever she tried to call Pinky, her friend’s voice was the bray of a vuvuzela. Rufaro couldn’t make out any of the words. The house was jamming her calls to Pinky.

“I think Feyi should have fucked the dad earlier,” Rufaro said, explaining the plot of the romance novel to me ever since the house cut her off from her friend. “The son ended up being trash anyways.” Even though I couldn’t respond, I liked our gossip sessions and I couldn’t wait to hear what happened in the next chapter. I imagined what it would be like to be inside the book, what the character’s venoms would taste like. Rufaro imagined herself in the book too. Rufaro craved choice, youth, and a pair of wings. I gobbled up all her envy, rage, and sadness but this time it made me ache like eating too many sweets. Feeding on Rufaro’s venoms wasn’t satisfying anymore. I needed something more substantial, a real meal. I began to wonder if I could get to the source of her venoms, what would it taste like?

• • • •

“It’s a full moon tonight,” she said, wincing at the doll still attached to her breast. “Pinky always told me that we’re most powerful during a full moon.” Rufaro watched the sun go down, counting the minutes until Brian returned. “The women at the kitchen party said I can adapt the recipes they gave me.”

Rufaro moved to the kitchen, grabbing a cutting board and knife. The knife was blunt. She longed for the traveling knife sharpening men back home. The knife sharpeners roamed neighborhoods like ice cream men, instead of selling ice cream they sharpened knives and sealed pots. They rode on their little bicycles, the flaming torches for sealing pots strapped to their backs. They whistled and sang the little jingle, “namapoto namapoto namapotoooooooooo!” Women would emerge from their houses holding pots with holes in them in one hand and blunt knives in the other, blades glistening in the afternoon sun. Rufaro grabbed the sharpener Brian got for her from Walmart and sharpened the blade with freedom on her mind.

She placed the cast iron skillet on the stove. “At the kitchen party, the women said using the tail of a dzvinyu makes a husband not stray from home.” Is there another recipe to get rid of him? Rufaro would not dare say the thought aloud lest the house was listening. She knew the house wasn’t her friend, it wasn’t on her side, it couldn’t be trusted.

At the dinner table, Rufaro grabbed the stainless steel chef’s knife, the sharp point aiming for Brian’s throat. The house revolted against Rufaro’s attack to protect its master. The floors shifted and spun. Rufaro was flung out of the dining room before the blade could reach his throat and found herself in the kitchen, chained to the sink.

“Did you really think you could beat me in my domain,” Brian said, following her into the kitchen. “I’m the man of this house.” He stood in front of her, his furnace breath against her skin. “I’ve been good to you. I’m a nice guy. This is how you repay my kindness.”

“You think trapping me here is a kindness,” Rufaro said.

Brian walked towards the fridge chuckling. “My father told me you shouldn’t be too nice to a woman, I should have listened to him. You had freedom before, books that I bought you, TV to watch. Now I’m going to keep you chained to that sink.”

• • • •

Rufaro lost count of the days she spent chained to the sink. Brian would come into the kitchen for a glass of water. His gulps unbearably loud, the water dripping down his chin as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. He was waiting for an apology that wouldn’t come.

“Have you given up yet?” he said. “This can all be over. You’re making this harder on yourself.”

A single tear rolled down Rufaro’s face and disappeared into the gash on her cheeks.

“I made you mahewu, it’s been sitting in the fridge for weeks,” Rufaro said. “It will go bad if you don’t drink it soon.”

He smirked. “You know my favorite drink.” he said. “Is that your way of apologizing?” She nodded.

He took the jar of mahewu out of the fridge and gulped it down. Rufaro smirked.

Suddenly, the tiled floor underneath his feet turned into a mud pit.

“I added a special ingredient to the mahewu,” Rufaro said, the gash in her face stretching into a smirk. “Worms.” Brian tried to move, to free himself but he was trapped in the mud.

“Stuck in the mud,” Rufaro sang the little jingle children sing when they played stuck in the mud. “Somebody has to be it, that’s you!” Rufaro pointed at Brian flailing in the mud. “If you put a lizard tail in your husband’s food, he won’t stray. But I figured out that if you put worms, you can make him sink into the ground like the worm he is.”

“Get me out of here, Rufaro!” Brian screamed. “You won’t get away with this!”

“In this story, I refuse to be the pig at the bottom of the pit,” Rufaro said, reaching into her pocket with her one free hand and taking out the rock.

• • • •

Rufaro takes me out of her pocket with her free hand. “I didn’t believe in magic before when Pinky told me about it,” Rufaro said. “Now I do. Pinky told me this dombo can absorb bad energy. Perhaps I should test it out.” Something stirred in me that I couldn’t quite understand. I examined it some more. It was a hunger, an overwhelming desire to hurt Brian. Had I found the source of Rufaro’s venoms? Should I eat it? I’d never fed on a human before, all I’d ever done was absorb the energy in a room. Could I eat a human? But wasn’t everything in this universe energy, including humans? I focused on Brian, the mouthwatering smell of him. I pulled him toward me.

• • • •

Rufaro held up the rock toward Brian. At first, Brian didn’t budge. He was an immovable sack of energy wrapped in flesh and then suddenly, an invisible force was dragging him across the mud toward Rufaro. A flash of light and then he was gone, swallowed whole by Pinky’s rock. The vows enchanting the house fell, the chains around Rufaro melted to dust, the doll lost its teeth and fell to the floor. Rufaro grabbed Simbimbino and tossed it into the fireplace. It let out a shrill cry as it burned. Rufaro stumbled toward the kitchen counter, her hands shaking. The rock was warm in her hands like a baby’s belly, full from a good serving of Brian. Rufaro limped towards the front door, turning the knob gingerly. She inhaled deeply, savoring the outside. She dialed Pinky’s number and took her first step with her best friend’s cheerful voice humming in her ears.