I really could not think of a title.
She had rehearsed the same chorus over and over in her head for over two days now. Her secret had to come out now, she was going to start showing soon anyways. She was pregnant and they had to deal with it. They had to deal with the fact that she was going to have a baby out of wedlock. It was their fault to begin with by trying to hide the truth, the truth of her rape a few months before. The memory still made Atang tear up. She was raped and no one did anything about it; her family ignored the crime to protect their social status. Now this was impossible to ignore, literally. Atang looked up at the orange sky painted with a few clouds. The sun was setting and it never looked so beautiful, so humble. She wished she could fly up to it and be with the clouds, that would be better; but she had to do this now.
Atang stepped into the hut her parents were in after knocking and took a seat after she was ordered to. Her parents were sitting around a fire in an old hut and the smoke from the fire was making her nauseous. Normally when a girl was pregnant according to tradition, she had to talk to her mother first because it was the mother’s responsibility to care and discipline her daughters to initiate them into fine young women. When a situation like Atang’s happens then she has failed her duties and her husband; then the whole village would blame her for not doing her job. The father was going to be blamed for marrying off dirty children despite the fact that he claimed they were pure, which was the case. Anyway, Atang was not about to follow any protocol or tradition, she was going to spill out her truth. She was amazed how the two people she loved most in her life had turned their whole family into a cattle factory. A man with many daughters like her father, was considered rich because when each daughter got married the groom paid bogadi or bride price and it depended on the quality of the girl. If the girl was well educated like most of his daughters then the groom would pay many cows and present many gifts to win him over. Now that Atang was about to finish high school, she had learnt this to be a despicable tradition because it allowed auctioning off the daughter in some sense.
She took a seat and stared them in the eyes, which she was also not supposed to do. Looking your elder directly in the eyes was major disrespect and she knew it, she was just too angry.
“Mother, father, I am expecting a child,” she broke out quickly shutting her eyes to wait for the fireworks after that.
Her mother put her hands on her head as a normal expression of shock; her father stood from his seat and grabbed Atang forcing her to stand,
“Do you realise what you have done? You and this boy are slowly destroying our family and the little reputation it has.”
Atang’s mother begged him to let go of her and he did before he spoke again,
“This cannot be happening, your sister is just about to get married, we cannot afford this,” he resumed back to his seat,
“Woman, take your daughter to another room while I think of a solution to this nonsense.”
Atang's father was very angry; she and her mother went to another hut. She was expecting the reaction and it made her happy. There was nothing they could do to change or forget the past now.
Like I said before, I did note the areas where I felt a new paragraph would have been good. I definitely think that you should consider editing this a bit and sorting those paragraphs out.
