The world around me would rather not believe a woman like me.

Words from my lips would stain the pretty pictures of the revered idols in many hearts. Their idols are marked as untouchable for the gates they keep and the things they’ve made scarce to sustain their power. These idols have special spaces on many tables across the land, presiding over pleasurable feasts, and dispensing palatable decadence or indulgent comforts.

My true stories would trigger the ones wrapped in the comfort of lies; they would snort and ask, ‘What the hell is this bitch saying?’ The unity of voices speaking from sincere hearts would spread my new description, a description that would sometimes function as a name. These believers would effortlessly form a mob and all hands would be on deck to stop every voice of reason.

I was that witch who would attend geomorphology class, dressed in silk skin-tight knee-length mini-dresses, high heels, and a carefree smile. I would sit like the rest of the class to listen and learn; unaware of the mark of the eyes stuck on me, the eyes that had taken to my body like flies would take to fresh shit.

I was the one who twisted Dr. Lawson’s thoughts into lewd stories, painted vivid pictures in his mind, and gave a secret longing to the thing between his legs. I was the one who charmed his lips and forced my lecturer to speak words he would have reserved for his lovers.

Dr. Lawson then booked a room in the hotel across the forest reserve opposite the university. He waited in bed, bare-chested under the sheets.

No one would see the tears I cried in my bed, because they dried; tears I cried because the man who was the first person to describe me as a witch had, at some point in the past, made it clear that I would linger on campus, stuck and unable to pass geomorphology, no matter how hard I tried, until I come to the hotel of his choice to do what should be done.

My secret tears would then fall on different beds, years after the act, triggered by the words that flew in the air like birds and got to places where they carried weight.

I would grieve for another woman who cried for the audacity of a student found in bed with her husband. I would be the witch whose singular satanic mission was to wreck a marriage that had hitherto been flourishing.

Do you remember that other word that rhymes with witch?

I had to bear that cross Dr. Lawson’s wife placed on me. As a child my late Mom would talk about the cross Jesus bore on Via Dolorosa, on his way to Calvary.

After the incident at the university, I decided to turn to Jesus with my new cross, certain he would help me since he’s had an experience with one.

I became a different woman – a woman with ankle-length skirts and loose-fitting gowns and sandals, something Virgin Mary would probably wear, something a man would see and foresee a good wife.

I met a man inside an overcrowded Lagos bus on a Monday morning, who gave me a pamphlet and told me, with a calm smile on his face, about the love of his heavenly Father.

He introduced himself as Pastor Mukiga. I told him my name.

His words weren’t like geomorphology; they were deeper. He wanted me to know that the Lord had provided a place for me in his congregation.

I loved the smell of his perfume. I loved the freshness of his lips, and the way they parted when he called my name. I didn’t like the ease with which I loved many things about him at the same time, but he was talking about heaven. I was sure I would be safe with him when he said there wasn’t a sin so big that the Lord would not wash away.

I began to see how much I needed Pastor Mukiga.

I joined the women who would wear large hats, close their eyes firmly, and lift up their hands to sing for the love they were getting from above.

It didn’t take me long to begin to get the love.

The first time I got alone with Pastor Mukiga, behind the closed door of his office, he unraveled in the poetry of his words, and in the subtleness of his drama. His mask left his face in a way only an artist could get rid of it.

I hadn’t even realized how tense I had become, but the expert kept telling me to relax, he wanted me to stop making a big deal out of this because was I not aware that the lord forgives? Then his lips touched my ear and his words made me turn to look at his face, to be sure some outlandish transfiguration had not happened. Lifting up a loose-fitting skirt didn’t take much effort for a man who must have been doing it for long.

But when his wife shocked us by walking into the Pastor’s office unexpectedly and saw the things her husband had taken off me, I knew I was in trouble, I knew I would get a new name.

The wife didn’t even look at me like I was a living being. The following morning she left her husband. For eternity.

When the news of the split spread, I became the seductress, the temptress, the one with the slow-blinking, heavy-lidded eyes who had been planning this for years and had done something like this as an undergraduate.

I became an ashewo, and anytime I try to talk about Pastor Mukiga and what really happened that day, it would seem like I’d be talking to dry bones, because who, in his or her right mind in this society, would believe an ashewo?