by Fey Ugokwe
My little rum cake of contempo fiction, Wifey, a novella by
the very bones of its facial structure, but novelesque in sheer textile length,
was originally slated to be a short story--one that I had planned to sprinkle
in as part of a fistful's collection of my just-inked, soul-parsing,
socially-conscious shorts.
But as my mind, fingers flew, the characters reached
out, around, and grasping, ran off with me--their humanity and 21st-century
pathos pushing me just past dear, sweet Convention and its nattily-clad
entourage of stylistic limitations. And so the rest is, well, herstory--my shy
but inchingly steely, easy-blushing and beautiful, Caribbean-blooded,
Miami-born, virgin of a main character's herstory, and I suppose, as her
willing, weary potter, mine too.
Now, the nickname "wifey" I first
frequently heard bandied lovingly about, seemingly several light-years ago, by
a much younger, male cousin of mine--himself a graduated frat brother, and his
wife the same a soror, just like the two main characters in my book--when
either sugar- or sly-speaking to his equally effortless, twenty-something
spouse. Hearing him cool-hurl the word up into the air like a crisp, fab
firework--and being a woman who was specializing at that time in the
highlighting and addressing of sociopolitical issues and disparities--it made
me hmmm about some other households in the nation, wherein conversely, in those
very same moments, the term "wifey" was instead perhaps being
wielded, to demean, control, decidedly down-spirit. Since then, the moniker
"wifey" has become a much more widely-used, pop culture reference to
one's wife; seriously fab, gift-of-a-girlfriend; or a superlative,
should-be-spousey stranger or acquaintance--thus triggering my memory in the
now about that 'what if' I'd imagined, way back when.
Complete that roux by
folding in the beginnings of the recent domestic and world events of
socioeconomic crisis; and stir in throughout a bold, galloping blend of the
ever-fragrant, uniting-and-dividing grains, proteins, and spices that are food,
race, money, sex, religion, chemical and fermented influence, and all things
multicultural; and there you have steaming ready, beckoning, before you--in
heaping paperback and digital form--the unique dish of a hopefully, filling,
fiction read that is Wifey. I do hope it plays nicely about the
eager-aching-curious mouth in your mind, and that the complex flavors of its
queries and commentaries linger well on the tongue of your sociopolitical
thoughts--long after you've digested its last startling, giggling, haunting,
zinging, smacking textual bite.
When life as a curiously paired, young married couple in California--in the midst
of a growing state and national economic crisis--becomes literally unworkable,
Rodney, an earnestly toiling, playboy of a husband, unilaterally determines
that he and P.V., his ambitious but naive, exotic wife, should relocate to Texas. So P.V., a
struggling sophomore realtor and avid foodie, and Rodney, a newly unemployed
marketer and sports addict, sell virtually everything they own and embark upon
a downsized existence in the heart of North Texas--Dallas. But an eerie and
horrifying morning dream that P.V. previously experienced becomes a dark and
ever-unfurling, pain-filled prophesy that ultimately threatens the very
foundations of their humanity. Sex, depravity, despair, and an uneven pavement
of good intentions lead to a black, one-way road with a shocking and
hair-raising end.
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***** ***** *****
Fey Ugokwe was born in Washington,
D.C., to immigrant parents--one
from British Guiana, South
America, and the other from Nigeria, West
Africa. She was subsequently raised in Pennsylvania, and attended both college and
law school in Massachusetts.
Fey is an attorney, and the founder of a socially-conscious media activity. At
the age of three, she was taught to read and write by her maternal grandmother,
a British-trained schoolteacher, and has been writing fiction and poetry since
a child. She received her formal training in novel writing, genre fiction
writing, contemporary fiction writing, and political fiction writing in Massachusetts, where her
professors included renowned authors at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Her interests are, namely, in genre, contemporary, and political
fiction, and she has a strong interest in uniquely combining the essences of
the three, in order to highlight the underpinnings of the human experience.
Her latest book is the contemporary fiction, Wifey.
Connect &
Socialize with Fey!
Wifey
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Book Excerpt:
But
then one day, unexpectedly, the sun rose sweepingly black upon the state—and it
wasn’t the only one—and they awoke to find themselves holding onto nothing but
what was standing in three dimensions, and what little they had jointly saved.
They had eagerly spent—as if single college co-eds—without much store-housing,
always encouraged by the reality that together, they could easily generate
sufficient and more. So, in the fresh darkness, their carefree, economic
togetherness began to crack, splinter, web. It all started when on a Monday,
Rodney’s bosses assigned him to train a new marketing team member from their
New York office, and then summarily that Friday, swiftly laid him—and his
entire marketing unit—off, except for the one employee he had been forced to
mentor. The fragmenting downspiral continued with P.V. realizing that the
once flock of eager, wild-eyed buyers had run, scattering well deep, into
hiding. Accordingly, she helplessly—an additionally, inexperienced one—watched
as her real estate-for-sale listings inventory rolled and aging sat, month
after nail-biting month. Resultantly, for income, the two began to snatch away
anxiously at the rest of their dwindling, pea-sized savings, and at the vapors
of P.V.’s plummeting realtor commissions.
Suddenly,
the two together were thinking older, living older—too much older than their
individual years. They began redefining the meaning of frills, and withholding
those like penny-pinching pensioners, things they once thought of as basics,
that they used to, in better times, allow themselves without blinking. And so,
they were struggling to maintain no longer the burgeoning, middle income luxe
that they had begun to build, but dearly, just the very safe that they had at
least, once been. Yet, somehow, the very last to be redefined—to go—were
Rodney’s expensive man-crew weekends away to revel, and the first to be jettisoned,
long before the redefining, P.V.’s buffering girlfriend trips to cook and
soothingly dine. And then one day, in the choking grit and dust wake of it all,
for the first time—inclusive of the days of their respective singlehoods—they
were broke, miserable, and officially stuck with someone. They were left
id-minded, like runaway children caught up in a typhoon at
blind-side—force-dragged into an undertowing cycle downward and downward still,
eyes squeezed shut intermittently and little arms looped, each round the
other’s, league by league in the under together.
****
Rodney
awoke with a jolting, eyes-up-open-in-a-flash, start. It was as if a hypnotist
had bid him loudly, firmly to wake up—snapping fingers together with an equal
harsh force, to facilitate his return to full reason. His eyes were the only
part of him that first moved, and he let them do the work as he lay there—rest
of body static—by increments perceiving, breathing in the morn. Yellow-white
rays of California
sun were just beginning to stream slightly in through the luxe, half-slanted
open, teal linen blinds. They shifted to illuminate too, the lower tips of the
matching, clean-lines-contemporary window treatments that neatly boxed both
windows. At an angle out like a tipping domino, the elongated shadow of the
window loomed on the pristine—and real—white oak floorboards. Rodney twisted
slightly to ease a twinge of pain, the minor injury a result of having slipped
and almost fallen the night before, on the pristine, white and grey marble
tiles that paved his and P.V.’s master bathroom. P.V. was a heavy head to his
chest, her mass of black, medium-length, hot-curled hair almost neatly
contained in the crook of his elbow. She was still breathing in the realm of
sleep, but her little body was tossing and gesturing at intervals, as if
walking and acting in that unseen world. And at that very moment, in fact,
forever unbeknownst to him, P.V. was indeed dreaming—of Nani.
In
the dream, Nani appeared physically as her normal self: she was a
beautiful—almost brown—bent-forward-midway-at-the-waist and thin, but
wide-bodied, woman. Her parabolic bearing always made her seem as if she were
perpetually giving salaam, a
condition caused by her incorrigibly poor posture as a girl, and the late
stages of osteoporosis in her end years. Her smooth, black hair was parted in
the middle, and streaked with coarser, fly-away strands of white, all
disappearing into a long braid that peeked out again near her waist. She
was standing in Trinidad, outside P.V.’s
parent’s first home together, in an alcove portion off the veranda that was
sheltered by the low, Spanish-tiled roof of the house. In the distance, P.V.
could see the blanched sands of the beach, and the sparkling, green-blue waters
rolling and retreating on its thin lip. But Nani was oddly barefoot—and
alarmingly sheathed from top to bottom in a white sheet that was wound about
her body in sections, as if on a mummy. She was muttering and curved over a
roti flat pan and board, spindly fingers slightly floured and glistening from
the oil mix. One roti was already sizzling on the flat pan, and to her left,
there was a large, white china plate with a royal blue pattern, heaped high
with all that she had previously cooked.
The
sky suddenly darkened into a night, with a large, spinning patch of daylight in
the distance—and bright, rich, almost blindingly deep-blue flowers began to
fall out of the air to everywhere. The blooms, each as if clovers springing out
their vivid blossoms from a single stalk, dropped on top of Nani’s head and
onto her shoulders, immediately bouncing off on impact to the area around her.
And they fell onto the food and preparation table, sticking into the mixing
bowl containing the remainder dough, and blanketed the entire surface of the
ground and tiled veranda floor. One huge stalk fell violently and lodged behind
Nani’s ear, its tip caught in her hooped, gold earring.
And
Nani seemed to abruptly become aware of P.V’s presence—whipping about sideways
to face her, straightening completely up from the waist as would have been
impossible for her, braid jerking to and fro with the immediacy of the motion.
In her right hand was the stack of roti, topped with the new roti that had been
in the pan—which was still gleaming—a flaky, beckoning nourishment, slightly
charred and golden in spots. And grunting, face ashen and gaunt, she extended
the breads to P.V., wrinkled right hand shaking out an urgency for her to take
them. But when P.V. reached for that right hand, Nani moaned and extended her
left, which—flesh inexplicably missing in parts—began to gush a dark red blood,
thick from the palm and up over like discovered crude oil, from deep within its
center.
Title: Wifey
Author: Fey Ugokwe
Genre:
Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: Pink Purse International
Pages: 154
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0615764908
ISBN-13: 978-0615764900
Purchase at AMAZON
