CYNTHIA ISHIKA

What If
A story for Feminist Futures

The first time her husband raises his hand, it’s to scratch his neck. She doesn’t flinch. This is the detail that matters.

She’s twenty-eight, married three years, pregnant with their second child. They’re arguing about money, not because there isn’t enough, but because they’re deciding together how to spend it. His voice rises. Her voice rises. They are both loud, both wrong, both right.

His hand goes up.

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t calculate trajectory and force. Doesn’t feel her body prepare for impact, that full-system alarm she never learned. His hand scratches his neck. He’s frustrated, not dangerous. She knows the difference because difference exists.

“I’m going for a walk,” she says.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll finish dinner.”

She leaves. The door closes normally behind her. Not slammed. Not locked. Just closed.

Walking through Buruburu in the evening, she thinks about the baby inside her. Six months now, a boy they’ll name after her father. Her father who taught her how to change a tire, who shows up every Sunday with sukuma from his shamba, who held her firstborn daughter with hands that only know gentleness.

She thinks: My son will never see me afraid of his father.

Not because she survived anything. But because there was nothing to survive.

The cost of this: nothing. No PTSD. No therapy bills she can’t afford. No years lost to hypervigilance. No abortion at nineteen because she was terrified of disappointing a mother who weaponized Jesus and blamed demons for her husband’s fists.

The cost of this: nothing.

That’s the whole point.

At work, she’s the head of communications at a midsize NGO. She’s good at her job. She knows she’s good because she never had to spend twenty years unlearning that she’s worthless.

Her male colleague challenges her in a meeting. She challenges back. It’s professional, it’s heated, it’s normal. She doesn’t go home and cry. She doesn’t absorb his irritation as proof she’s fundamentally wrong. She just thinks: He was being ridiculous about the budget timeline. Then she thinks about what to cook for dinner.

This is the lightness. Not that life is easy, but that the weight she carries is hers, her actual challenges, her real mistakes, not the accumulated debris of every man who never learned what hands are for.

Her mother calls that evening. “How’s the baby?”

“Active. He’s going to be a footballer.” She’s sitting on the couch, feet up, her daughter Zara doing homework at the table.

“You sound tired,” her mother says. Not accusatory. Just: noticing.

“I am tired. Work was a lot today. And Zara has a science project due tomorrow that she’s just telling me about now.”

Her mother laughs. “That sounds about right. You want me to come help?”

“No, we’ll manage. But thank you, Mum.”

“Call me if you change your mind. I’m just watching Citizen anyway.”

They hang up. Her mother, who is sixty-two and has a master’s degree, goes to therapy every other Thursday not because she’s broken but because she believes in maintenance. Her mother, who never taught her that a woman’s purpose is to fix men or save families or light herself on fire to keep everyone else warm.

Zara looks up from her homework. “Mama, for my project I need to talk about women scientists. Can we call Cucu? She was a scientist.”

“Your grandmother was a teacher, baby.”

“She taught science. That’s a scientist.”

Her daughter’s logic is airtight. She calls her mother back.

Late that night, after Zara’s project is done (a poster board about Marie Curie and also Cucu, given equal billing), after her husband has rubbed her swollen feet without being asked, after she’s showered and oiled her skin and climbed into bed, she lies in the dark and thinks about all the women who didn’t get this.

She thinks about the ones who had to learn to love themselves at forty after decades of erasure. The ones who stayed because leaving meant choosing between violence and poverty. The ones who fought so hard they forgot softness existed. The ones whose daughters grew up watching love look like war.

She doesn’t know them. She lives in a different story.

But lying there, her son kicking against her ribs, her husband’s breathing steady beside her, her daughter asleep in the next room with a science project that celebrates her grandmother, lying there, she feels it. The weight of what she’s not carrying.

It makes her cry. Not from pain. From something else. From knowing that in another world, in the world that was, she would be barely surviving. She would be medicating and managing and making do. She would be teaching her daughter, without meaning to, that this is what women get: the crumbs, the leftovers, the love that comes with conditions.

But here, in this world, in her world, she gets to just live. Messy and tired and complicated and real. She gets to fight with her husband about money and not about existence. She gets to fail at work without it confirming some deep unworthiness. She gets to be a mother without disappearing into it. She gets to be tired without it being pathological.

She gets to be a whole person. That’s all. That’s everything.

Her husband’s hand finds hers in the dark. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m good.”

And she is. She really is. Because the feminist future isn’t about perfection. It’s about this: a woman crying at midnight not from trauma but from relief she doesn’t even fully understand.

Relief that when her husband’s hand moves, it only ever reaches for her.
Relief that when her mother calls, it’s to offer help, not to perform martyrdom.
Relief that her daughter thinks her grandmother is a scientist because why wouldn’t women be scientists?
Relief that she can be tired, and wrong, and loud, and imperfect, and still, always, enough.

This is what it costs to be unburdened: nothing.
This is what it costs to carry everything your mothers carried: everything.

She knows which world she wants her daughter to inherit.

She’s already living in it.

Cynthia Ishika is a Kenyan communications specialist who spends her days crafting campaigns for social change and her evenings writing fiction that refuses to look away. Her stories explore the weight of femicide, masculinity, and what it costs to be a woman in East Africa, drawn from the work she does and the life she lives. She writes poems on the side, usually when her two daughters are asleep.