Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé

which ruled her life by force or default, took what energy stores she had left.
    The doctor handed her a Centers for Disease Control brochure on type 2 diabetes and treatment. On the cover was a youngish-­looking white woman slicing a tomato in a bright kitchen with a vase of cut flowers on the table. She wore a fashionable yellow sweat suit, and a man smiled adoringly from the doorway of the ­adjoining room. When Brenda opened the inside flap of the brochure, there was a list of dangerous related conditions: blindness, amputation, gastroparesis (stomach illnesses), atherosclerosis ­(vessel disease), heart attack, stroke. At the bottom, it read, “It doesn’t have to happen to you.”
    Brenda knew many women with diabetes, including her supervisor, a rotund mahogany-brown ball of congeniality. She was the kindest to Brenda when Horus’s trial began and told her to take as much time as she needed when she heard about the verdict. “I’ll be praying for you,” she’d said. When Brenda started to “show,” her boss bought her a gift bouquet with a bottle of prenatal vitamins stuffed inside. “Take those horse pills every day, and take care of yourself, Brenda,” she had said. “You don’t want to have sugar problems later.” In most places she’d frequented, the condition was a casual part of discussions among women. Pricking their fingers with elegant devices pulled from purses, nodding their heads in satisfaction when the light turned green or the white strip came out or when the number appeared on the little digital screen, they acted as if the whole business was a part of life, a part of getting older. Like graying hair or having grandchildren. “Girl, my sugar’s up,” she’d heard them cluck over salads drenched in dressing and bacon bits. Her mother, too, had been diabetic. It was the contributing factor to her sudden stroke, as Brenda later learned in the meeting with the doctor who performed her autopsy. When Brenda noticed the blood-glucose monitor and the white orthopedic shoes in the bathroom and asked her mother the meaning of it, she waved the question away with her hand as if swatting a fly. “Brenda, when you been through what I been through, a little sugar ain’t nothing to cry about,” she had said. With that comment, there was the opportunity to open a door to the past again, but looking at her frail mother, content only with her daytime soap stories and prune juice, Brenda left it closed. Years later, she would wonder what her mother meant, if it compared to anything she had to face.
    â€œIf you want to be around for your son, you will change,” the doctor said, looking at Brenda through horn-rimmed glasses. He was a kindly black man, many years her senior. “You have to understand that this can’t be taken lightly. Diabetes is no walk in the park. With your weight as it is and from what I’ve seen with the tests, you’re a prime candidate. I’ve seen it over and over. We all have obligations, but you’ve got to put yourself first on this one.”
    Brenda looked at the doctor. He wore an asymmetrical Afro that reminded her of photographs she’d seen of Frederick Douglass. However true it might have been, what he said sounded like a commercial for some pharmaceutical company or health association. The idea of caring for herself had been foreign other than the basics, and those had been choppy. Dental checkups (if she remembered or when a tooth was hurting). Mammogram and Pap smear examinations every year. Well, some years she had missed. The OB/GYN always seemed to be some pearl-necked cosmopolitan from Boston or San Francisco, chatting her up with casual conversation while she dug around her insides with birdlike hands. She didn’t want to lie across a slab and pretend to be nonchalant while the cold air raised crops of goose bumps all over her body and the fluorescent