My New Neighbor’s Goat Kept Destroying the Food I Grew in My Compound — I Warned Her Many Times, But She Ignored Me… So I Decided to Teach Her a Lesson

Chapter 2

I did not poison their water. I am not that kind of woman. What I did was worse, because it was clever, and because it looked like innocence.

I took the peels of cassava and yam — the parts that carry the poison — and cooked them into bait, soft and smelling like food. I laid them at the edge of my garden, inside the rope I had told Joshua would never hold a hungry goat.

“Ropes mean nothing to them when they are hungry,” Joshua had said.

“Let them try it today and see,” I had answered.

All through my shift my hands shook. Every bell, every voice, every clatter of a crate was the sound of discovery.

I came home and found her goat lying dead in the red dust beside the rope. The other goat stood over it, nuzzling it, confused. I killed the second one quickly, so it would not suffer, and I buried them both under the plantain trees, deep, the way you bury things you want God not to see. I covered the fresh soil with dry grass until no eye could tell.

A week passed. No screaming. No police. No Mama Beatrice at my gate. Then came the day I dropped the eggs.

Ten crates. I had carried ten crates every morning for two years without breaking one. That morning my foot slipped on wet concrete, the crates tilted, and the world went yellow. My supervisor screamed at me in front of everyone. Half my month’s salary, gone, in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

I sat on the floor among the shattered shells, and I felt it — the certainty, cold as river water — that this was not an accident. This was a hand. Mama Beatrice had drawn the battle line, and she had struck first.

I called my mother in the village, sobbing into the phone.

“Ahnn ahnn,” my mother said, calm as prayer. “You don’t need to fear. Battles like this — this is what we love most. I gat you covered. Stay inside your house tonight. I am coming.”

That evening she arrived with an egg wrapped in white cloth, placed it in my right palm, and told me what to do at midnight.

“Stand in the middle of your room, facing her wall. Call her name three times. Speak everything in your heart. The battle is no longer yours.”

At 12:00 AM I did it. I held the cold egg to my chest and called her name, three times, into the dark.

Beatrice. Beatrice. Beatrice.

The candle flame bent toward her wall without any wind. The egg went cold in my palm, cold as a grave.

And from inside it, a voice that was hers — and not hers — whispered my name back:

“Joyce. You should have buried me too. Because now I am going to bury you.”