Her Madam was a mad woman. Chinelo knew this; she also knew that this madwoman"s bite was usually as poisonous as her barks. "Chinelo!" she would cry, like one in intense agony. If the girl did not appear at that first bark she would be greeted with a blow to the mouth on her appearance. Her mouth had grown accustomed to these blows.

"Are you deaf!" the woman would scream.

"No, ma," the girl would reply, blood soaking into her gums, reddening her teeth.

She had lost three front teeth to these blows already — two from the upper jaw, one from the lower. She had no use for them anyway; she never smiled. Not even when Lucas, Madam"s boyfriend, had said she was pretty. The smile had started in her heart, swelling, but could hardly make it up to her lips before it fluttered and died, along with the warmth the compliment had produced.

She sensed that Lucas liked her. She did not have the courage to like him back.

It was Lucas that pinned her down with his strong arms and knees as her Madam pulled out two more incisors with rusty pliers.

The hunger had been nibbling at her insides for the past three days; it had now taken on a vicious gnawing at her mind as she fried chicken that evening. The aroma taunted her sanity, tears stung her throat. She succ.u.mbed; she tore a few strands from one of the unfried pieces and sucked on it before chewing and swallowing. The browning of frying would conceal the white wound inflicted on the piece of chicken. She had underestimated her Madam"s malicious meticulousness.

After intense inspection of each piece, the woman asked, "What happened to this one?"

Chinelo was too tired to lie; she had grown so weak she just wanted to die, to be killed. "I bite small," she confessed, in the small voice of a dying thing.

Now as her jaws erupted in red, flaming pain and her mouth filled with blood she wondered why her Madam had not just killed her instead. Perhaps, death is too easy. This pain, the way it reverberated through her head like a billion pieces of death, would last for a long time.