A Real Man [flash fiction] by Amatesiro Dore

Happy Mothers’ Day from Amatesiro Dore, Ivrea 🇮🇹

Eyewu couldn’t understand pretty men with soft voices who catwalk. She wondered why anyone would choose the life of a second class citizen accustomed to pain. Her ideal man was a bulldozer head on top of a tree truck neck and bricklayer chest, supported by yam tuber arms, with an appropriate beer gut, above a dangling snake between timber and calibre legs.

She found him at the University of Lagos. Kunle was the rumoured Capo of a secret cult on campus. He looked like the man of her dreams, sounded like him, and swaggered like him. He didn’t know Beyoncé’s maiden name and he pronounced Adele as though it were a Yoruba name.

She was mesmerised when he recited We Have Come Home at his convocation party. A real man who knew poetry would make a great husband, she thought.

Get Amatesiro Dore’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

She was reassured of his manhood and ability to discipline their children by the slap he gave her after she complained about his weekend getaways with his guys.

She believed that a single man with a good job and a house of his own must be in want of a wife. So she couldn’t understand why Kunle wasn’t forthcoming with an engagement ring. Was it because she couldn’t make him cum?

One day, after five years of failing with her mouth and centre, he nudged her head beneath his sac and he whimpered like a kitten as her tongue slipped into his rear. He moaned and urged her to slip a finger inside him. He jellied and quivered, like she would, and released his children on her face.

It became normal until she was pleasing him more than he pleased her.

When she found the dildos in his closet, she wept because the sizes were larger than she ever received. She believed it was the role of men to inflict pain and the duty of women to enjoy it. She couldn’t understand a man who derived pleasure like she did. She would have stayed if he was the giver but the thought of him writhing with pleasure while receiving a yardstick from another man made her leave his life.

As she returned home from his loveless arms, her bags filled with shame, she wondered about the signs she had missed. It was the poetry, she thought, real men don’t recite poetry.

They don’t read at all, she said.