Masquerade Season

head slowly. “Pauly?”
“Mhmm?” The idyllic moment is lulling him to sleep.
“I’m working on this project now. I’m making a dress for that Nini Edoh actress. You’ve heard of her? It’s for an awards show.”
Pauly shrugs.
“Well, she’s a big deal. And if she likes this dress, I will get plenty of clients and maybe we can move to a bigger house, you know, with a big backyard where you and Ekene and John can play football.”
“That sounds nice,” Pauly drawls, his voice slurring.
“But I need something from you.”
“From me?” Pauly perks up. His mother expects things from him—to be polite, to wash the dishes, to be home before she returns from work—but she has never needed anything from him. Pauly sits up, wiping sleep away. “What?”
“I think the raffia on your masquerade would make a wonderful belt. I need just a little bit of it, you know. I’ve never seen raffia like that before. It’s so shiny and smooth! It will really pop against the orange of the dress.” His mother sounds out of breath; it makes Pauly wince.
He turns to look at his mother; the TV lights are traveling over her face and he can see her stare fixed on the masquerades’ corner, and Pauly understands it is them she’s been watching all along. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “You’ll have to ask them.”
“But they’re your masquerades,” Pauly’s mother reminds him. “You can do whatever you want.”
Pauly crawls to kneel in front of the masquerade his mother is eyeing. The raffia really is lush and long and lustrous; Pauly has always known this. “Can I talk to them first?” he asks his mother.
“Of course, of course,” his mother says, leaving the room.
Pauly cannot look up at the raffia masquerade’s visage. He stares instead at its bottom, where its feet would be, the raffia threads sweeping against the floor in slow motion. “Is it okay if my mum takes some of your threads?” he asks. “I’ll make sure it’s not too much. She needs it for her job.”
The raffia masquerade keeps moving, never still; it says, “We are your masquerades.” Its voice is like a drum, deep and reverberating through Pauly’s chest.
“Okay,” Pauly says, and calls his mother in.
She is already holding a pair of scissors, and she is smiling as she approaches them. She is gentle with the masquerade, smoothing a hand over it the way she had rubbed Pauly’s head, weighing the threads, sifting through them, smiling wider. “Yes, this will do very well,” she says, and when her scissors snip loudly, Pauly looks away.
Pauly isn’t sure if he is seeing this right, but the next day, it looks like the raffia masquerade is leaning a little, tilting, no longer as tall as his science teacher. Are the feathers of the third masquerade wilting? Is the aso-oke of the second masquerade duller, less red? When he pours from the keg of palm oil into their bowl, he keeps pouring until it overflows, the red oil running across the illustrated robots’ hands.
Pauly’s mother comes home around noon, earlier than ever. She says the actress loved the belt and has referred her services to all her friends. Pauly’s mother is so happy, grinning so wide that her pink gums are exposed. She wants to take him to Sweet Sensation to celebrate. Pauly is excited. They haven’t been out to eat in forever. He wears his favorite sneakers, he brushes his tight coils; then he and the masquerades stand by the door, waiting.
“Oh, Pauly,” his mother says when she emerges from her room, applying lipstick, dangling her car keys. “I don’t think your masquerades should come. This is mother-son time, and the restaurant might be crowded.”
Pauly looks to the masquerades and before he asks, there is that whispery voice saying, “We are your masquerades.” And Pauly knows he can tell them to stay. He does. “Stay,” he says, and his mother takes his hand.
At the restaurant, when Pauly’s mother says yes to him getting both ice cream and an egg roll alongside his yamarita, everything tastes chalky. He swallows hard as his mother calls him her good and perfect and obedient son. He nods at his mother’s promises: a new house, a new bicycle, more time together.
Pauly guides his masquerades on a tour through one of the neighborhoods where he takes his leisurely strolls. They noiselessly follow him through the cleaner streets with the tall palm trees, and grass that looks too green to be real. The raffia masquerade is still tilting, but not by much. The colors seem to have replenished themselves in the feathers, in the aso-oke. Pauly is glad.
“Look,” he says, pointing at the white house with two fat columns holding up a balcony. The wrought iron gate surrounding the compound is painted gold. “We can have a house like that and we can all stand up there and look down at the street and there will be space to dance in the backyard and play football.”
The masquerades sway beside him, silent.
When Pauly’s mother asks for a strip of the red aso-oke, Pauly starts to cry.
“Why are you crying?” she asks, folding herself to sit next to him on the floor. She strokes his head; the smell of her stale sweat mixed with the smell of the lubricant she uses for her sewing machine envelops him.
“It’s not fair!” Pauly says.
His mother leans back, away from him. “Not fair?”
“They don’t like it,” he explains. “They didn’t like it when you cut before.”
“Did they tell you that?” And when he doesn’t respond to this, his mother goes on: “They are yours. You can do what you want. What will a little bit of fabric hurt?” She turns to look at the masquerade beside the TV. “Look at that thing.” Her voice sounds breathy again. “It probably has up to forty yards of aso-oke on it. I’m asking for only half a yard, Pauly.”
Pauly cries harder. He can still hear the snip of the first cut, can see