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 3

I did not sleep after that. I sat in the middle of my room with the egg cold against my chest and I listened to the silence the way you listen to a snake that has gone still, because you know it has not gone far.

At dawn I unwrapped the egg. It was just an egg. White, ordinary, the kind you buy for a child’s breakfast. My mother had said the egg was a vessel — a cup that holds whatever is poured into it. She had not said what would happen if what was poured in was hatred. She had not said anything about voices.

I went to work that day with the smell of burial still under my nails. I held every crate as if it held my life. I walked slowly on the wet concrete. Nothing happened. No slip, no shatter, no scream from the supervisor. The afternoon passed in the ordinary machinery of feathers and feed and the sharp smell of eggs, and I came home to a quiet street and an untouched garden — the garden that was already, even then, beginning to forgive me.

New green was pushing up through the red dust where the bitter leaf had died. It looked like hope. It looked like accusation. I did not know which.

For three days, nothing on the other side of the fence moved. That was worse than war. In a war you hear the drums, you smell the smoke, you know where the enemy is standing. This was silence — a compound so quiet I caught myself holding my breath to listen, and finding nothing to hear. Mama Beatrice had always been loud. She laughed like a cockerel at dawn, she drummed her neighbors’ gossip across the fence, she called greetings down the whole street. Now her side of the world had gone the quiet of a room where someone has died.

I began to dream of the goats.

Every night it was the same. I would be standing in my garden in the dream, and the two goats would be there, alive and whole, eating my bitter leaf, and they would look up at me with their strange amber eyes, and one of them would say — in Mama Beatrice’s voice — “Why did you bury us, Joyce? We were only hungry.” And I would wake with my heart hammering and the smell of red dust in my nose.

I told nobody. Not Joshua. Not my mother. A woman who has buried two animals in the dark does not go around telling people she is haunted by their voices. She carries it. That is what I did. I carried it to the poultry farm and back, I carried it through the market, I carried it to my garden every evening, where I watered the new green and apologized to it, though I could not have said for what.

On the third afternoon, I was sitting near the back wall, pulling the first of the new weeds, when her compound woke up around me.

It was her daughter. Amina. She had just come back from the market — Amina who owned the fabric shop in the town, who sold lace and velvet and the stiff silks the rich women of the neighborhood fought over for weddings. Amina, who I had always thought of as the calm one, the one who minded her own business like me.

She was not calm now. She was crying in her mother’s parlor, and the wall was thin, and the evening carried every word across like a rumor.

“Mommy, I don’t understand what is happening!” she wept. “Since last week, not one customer has entered my shop. Not one! All the rich women who booked expensive lace — they have cancelled. Every single order!”

“Shh!” Mama Beatrice hissed. “Keep your voice down. Do you want the whole street to hear our business?”

“How can I not shout?!” Amina’s voice cracked. “The interest on the bank loan is climbing every day! If I do not pay by next week, the bank will come and lock up my shop. My shop, Mommy. Everything I have built.”

I stood behind the fence with the weed still in my hand, and I could not move.

Somewhere inside me, a small and ugly part of me — the part that had buried two goats — smiled and said: *This is just the beginning.*

And I hated that part of me. Because it was the part that sounded like Mama Beatrice.

I went inside and did not touch my dinner. I lay on my bed and I thought about the egg, and the voice, and the shop, and the loan, and I tried to tell myself this was justice — the woman who had laughed at my tears was now drinking her own. An eye for an eye. A goat for a garden. Was that not what my mother had promised? “No weapon formed against you shall stand.”

But that night, at midnight, I did not do the ritual again. I sat on my bed with my knees drawn up, and I listened to the silence on the other side of the fence, and I realized the silence was not triumphant. It was broken. It was the sound of a woman’s house collapsing inward, one room at a time.

The next morning I called my mother.