Akpata Magazine

Author: Akpata

  • Two Poems by Mercy Musa

    A Body Performing a Disappearing Act

    Like lace dipped in vinegar sorrow
    the nature of my narcissism is translucent,
    this body, almost transparent, almost fading to nothing
    this skin, almost disappearing, almost syncing to dust

    If only I could hold light in the palm of my hands,
    push bits of it under each layer of my skin
    maybe then will heaven see
    how much this body aches for visibility
    to be seen as it is, brown and in bloom

    Speak of a body and watch as this body disappears,
    blends with the dark and makes love with its shadow.
    speak of a body and watch as my mother’s hands slip right 
    through this body at every attempt to hug pain away,
    speak of a body and watch as this body vanishes under my lover’s eyes.

    Nightfall in Igarra

    The moon tonight is dimmed
    from sipping too much darkness,
    the clouds are blending towards
    nothing. I am trailing behind my mother
    into the night, with clay pots etched under our arms 
    & our feets pressing into sinking grounds.
    we are before a stream and before we dip out pots
    we first sing. first appease the bending trees and resting waves 
    with air suspended in our lungs, we sing
    we sing for the stream in Etuno, our local dialect.

    Mercy Musa is a Nigerian writer who writes from Lagos state . She is a lover of African literature and fantasy books. Her work has appeared in Green Black Tales magazine and The Muse Journal. 

  • Jaundiced – Hibah Shabkhez

    You and I, ma chère langue étrangère, we stand on the banks of the Loire, ruefully watching our poor twisted paper boats lurch downriver in the sunset-gilded waves. The sun simmers steadily upon the same crinkled place, but our broken sentences roll away with the water, last vestiges of this shipwrecked decade, of the bitter harvest sown when first I wrote you a lie. But you have grown, lingua mia, while I have fumed and lamented and remained mired; you have learnt what I could not learn: the true quality of mercy, the art of forgiving the unrepentant. It is you, the betrayed, you, into whose wounds I have spent a decade twisting the knife, who holds out a hand now, you who smiles first with acceptance and understanding. You would help me overcome even myself. I am the one who cringes, who seeks refuge in lonely bitterness with its reassuringly familiar gall and impuissance, because we betray those we love, over and over and over again, when the memory of pain is stronger than reason. If we are lucky, we betray them one less than the number of times they can bear to forgive us. If we are lucky.

    Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries hold as a particular fascination for her. 

  • Night song – Abdulrazaq Salihu 

    after Sylvia Plath

    The rusty blood of brown blades 
    Set your body to rest like bean seed 
    In dry soil — decay.
    My small palms lay  5 inches  too small
    To hold your shoulders and the soft-
    Cracked air the night flushes in.
    An ode starts beside my lungs, magnifying 
    The beginning of a requiem     A new body
    That stared  too much into Medusa’s eyes
    Has come to rest, stone strong.  Your silence,
    A silhouette of our suffering casts its beauty 
    Fluorescent bulb staring tiredly at the open 
    Glow of the room shuts into darkness.
    You’re no more my father than the broken 
    Lyric of sad poems inject glory into a river’s 
    Mouth to reflect gory memories.
    All hail your breathlessness, how unpleasant 
    It makes me feel. I push my large ear into the 
    [supposedly] contracting corner of your chest 
    And the sound of objects put to rest  fills my ear.
    Realization, matter how cruel, strikes my head
    With a baton the size of a maize stalk. My eyes
    Shut roughly like small belts on wide waists 
    The night shuts softly like quiet.
    The music     Starts slowly 
    In time for the loss.     The way  kullu nafsin 
    Attaches itself to the lip   Of za’ikatul maut. 

    Abdulrazaq Salihu  TPC I is a Poet and member of the hilltop creative arts foundation. He has works published/forthcoming in Bracken, Eunoia review, Poetry column, poetry archive, poetry quarterly, Jupiter review, masks lit mag, and others. He won the 2022 masks lit mag poetry award, the Nigerian prize for teen authors, splendors of Dawn poetry contest and a suite of other prizes. He tweets @Arazaqsalihu and on instagram: Abdulrazaq._salihu 

  • I Will Remember Your Name – Mayor Prosper Ihechi

    Because the seers follow you across lifetimes.

    I am dreaming, and in my dream, we are together again, Temisola- the girl I can no longer remember, you. There is no face. All that remains is a voice, scratchy, like a broken gramophone record, and a memory: a song, hazy, like it has been a long time since it has been played, regret. I still protect this. Like the other fragments of myself, hidden in this flotsam called my mind, it presents another piece to this puzzle- the riotous search for myself in the midst of fading memories. Someday perhaps they might become a whole, like this phase of the moon under which we played, and I might remember who I was, once.  I might remember you.

    Like every dream, I must wake up, in more ways than one, only now to the electric twinge in my spine- and to fear. The twinge was new, fear having since settled as an integral part of my consciousness, the quiet friend you had come to forget was there. It was the fear that saved you, the fear that made you you in this world that forbade hoping. It was the fear that held you back, that made sure you never had to feel this electric twinge in your spine. Because when you did, they would know. And when they knew, they would come.

    I do not remember how this world began. We were not taught to know, never meant to know. We only knew that it was, in the same way one knew of the imprint of his own name- your only possession in a world that gave you none. It was not our way to ask, to dream of asking, dreams being what they were- an aberration, a glitch in the Anti-Christ Equation they had created to unify human thought as an answer to world peace. They had succeeded, banishing the impulses that had driven men to violence but at a cost. We forgot. Nothing remained of our memories of Before, of ourselves before we changed. I had forgotten how to dream; forgotten what it meant to think for myself, to exist- a wild card, outside of the horde. Till now- and for that,  I had become a criminal in this world, as I was a witch in the Other World so long ago. And for that, I was always running.

    Silence. 

    There is nothing to hear in this stillness, nothing save the blood in your ears and your own thoughts, colliding. There is nowhere else to go. How did one love in a world like ours, where we could not even recall tenderness, where your only friend was fear? How did you love the fragments of a memory, a person you had come to fear was fiction? I did not know but I held on still. I had become a slave to these things, an addict to memory. In a world that had moved on, I could not look away or forget.

    Knocking. Wind. The sound of shouts outside.

    I do not answer. I am thinking, dreaming, memorizing this self again before their supreme act of violation. They would break into my mind again. I would forget. Nothing would remain- not these memories of mine, not the fragments of my journey across lifetimes. Nothing but you Temisola- this husk of self, this ghost latching on to my psyche like the messy trail of a spirit child. Nothing would remain save this memory: me, looking at you, from that world from which we came, and  a voice, yours. I would carry it to my grave.

    There will always be those who bind us to this world.

    Static

    DreamRec. April the 24th. 2048.

    Enter Log.

    #

    A long time ago, before our world began.

    There will always be those who bind us to this world. We call them seers.

    Temisola

    You remember. You always remember, don’t you? The inevitable expanse of other lives- memory, the disconcerting awareness of history repeating itself before your eyes. This- the moment when you died, when your people realized you were never truly theirs but yet could not let you go. I do not blame them. How could they? You were a spirit child, yes, and the other world was sealed within your mind like a brand upon cowhide. You were not like the others, yes, who were made to forget, who the seers had driven into forgetting their home world. But you were the only child. You were the only one who stayed beyond your mother’s painful birth, crying and kicking for being born again. You were the only one who couldn’t leave, who Chukwu–  Great One, Chief of all Creation, would not let you return home- to me.

    No, you were not like them. They had learned to stay. You were not like me. I never left.

    Long ago, a woman wanted children so she went to the sacred Boka tree. Night fell, when the spirits of little children came to play under light from the full moon and she called softly, to the little wind dancing in the trees that was the sound of children playing:

    Mother Tree

    Mother Tree

    Give me a child

    And then she waited.

    We were there. We were there and we laughed- at her petition, at that queer mix of strength and pain we found so amusing in humans. Was this our crime? Did Chukwu look down from Elu-Igwe, His mysterious home in the skies, to find two spirits mocking man, the crown of His creation? Was this our penance- you, damned to go through their cycle of rebirths, unable to return, me, to wander the spirit world alone, unable to reach you outside your dreams?

    I do not know. These things were past finding, even for a spirit. I only know that you laughed, and a moment later you were silent, listening to her song.

    How would it feel to live a human life? This was the question you would ask later, softly, as your eyes looked towards the borders of the human world. Of course I didn’t know- I had never been a man. But I had heard the stories, stories of what it meant to be mortal- of suffering, of sickness, of death. I told them to you, but when your eyes got brighter instead of dull, and your skin did not go pale with fear, I should have known it was only a matter of time before you left me to seek the mortal world.

    You left that very night, to that woman and her song, and even now I remember how the night took upon a shade: darker, like there was no moon in the sky, and a heaviness I could not name. Grief. Grief was a human thing, but I couldn’t stop myself, the same way I could not stop myself from running to the border between our worlds even when I knew you were already gone, searching perhaps, for a residue of you.

    Grief. Grief was a human thing, but we carried it across lifetimes.

    Asemoa

    I am a child of both worlds. All children are, only that time passes and we forget, human life being what it is- a leaf, tossed about by the currents of the Earth so that when we remember, we are already old and our eyes are already set on going home.

    When I was born, I cried for many days. All children do. We cried for the lost things, the memory, and the obligations that followed mortality. We cried for our fellows, who cried with us, waiting, on the other side of time, for the few who could return. I cried for my twin, Temisola, who I had left to pursue the wonders of the human world.

    Only a few knew this, why all children greeted this world with tears, and it was this few that would damn us in the years to come.

    Seers. Emissaries of mankind to the Great One Chukwu, Father of All Spirits. They were the ones who saw, who felt the ripple of the veils that kept apart their world and ours. They were the ones who knew, who left in their wake the leash that bound all spirits to the Earth: old age, and the trappings of mortality. Frightened mothers would run to them when a child refused to stay, when a child came again, known, by the marks of another life. One look by a seer and a spirit would spill our secrets, confessing where we hid our deepest treasures, our iyi-uwa, our link to the world beyond. We would forget. Nothing would remain of who we were or the world we left behind.

    Not me. I could not forget, not Temisola- whose name resonated within me the sound of ancient memories, not the spirit world, to which I was inextricably bound. Sometimes they crossed this world and theirs, and I would see my brothers- they were waiting for me, on the other side of time. They did not smile any more- I was a spirit touched with the human world now, I was an Ancestor. Someday I will die and my body will return to the Earth from which it came, the last, in a long series of rebirths. I would remain, spirit but changed, made sacred by the very world which held me bound, by the very weight of her memories. I will no longer be the same.

    I wonder now. Would she still remember me?

    I look at my mother and my mother knows. She looks at me with the tears she does not shed anymore. What did the seer tell her?

    “You are not meant for this world”, she says with a sorrowful shake of her head. I do not reply to her. There was nothing I could say. What did she know of the lines that bound all spirits, the ancient longings planted in our blood eons ago by Chukwu Himself? What did she know of her, my twin, bound to me since the dawn of our creation, drawn to me in spirit as I was drawn to her in flesh? Only death could separate us, and we were spirit. We could not die. Only death could bring me home.

    You mortals call it love. If only you knew. Love itself is spirit.

    Still, there were little mercies. I came to love this world, in my way. Life was an adventure under the fear of dying- you found life or death or nothing at every end of the bend. I remember the first time I cut myself, the look I gave the growing red puddle at my feet, puzzled. My mother screamed, and a hotness flared up my leg for which I had no name then. Pain. I Iay indoors, flitting between light and dark for weeks, my spirit brethren waiting, but I had never felt so alive.

    Another time, I came upon a snake wound tightly round itself. It was a hot day, and the snake was warming itself by the bushes near our home. It must have been very weak because it didn’t sense my presence, and when I gently touched its brilliant, ringed black coils, there was no sound, not a ripple to be heard. Something about its posture spoke to me–of the circle of rebirth, of sunset and sunrise, of the world moving round and round till it came to itself, and I might have continued there brooding to my death had my father not shoved me away just before the snake poised to strike. He was livid.

    “Are you trying to kill yourself?!” he had shouted. His face was a mask of anger and relief, and fear.

    I could not answer.  How did you tell your father you had actually forgotten that you could die?

    Mortality. Mortality hung over us like a knife on an edge, a grim cloud. A man was born to the knowledge of his death, and his entire life balanced on that spider web. There were no certainties. An old man longed for the afterlife. A child just died. You walked through paths that were unfamiliar, even though you knew they were there: good and evil and death. You lived for the moment, wherever it was. And so they loved, and died. They threw their parties, and they died. They lived wickedly, and died. And it was these moments they had, this belief in meaning, that made them who they were. Man. They knew what things were valued because they knew what things were lost.

    We are spirit, and we are wise, but this was something we had never learned. There are some things you could not learn without dying.

    I do not know when I finally decided to stay. I do not even know why. Maybe it was my mother and her pleas, this woman I had tormented for many years, who had met seer upon seer in vain. Maybe it was me, I had not had enough of the human world.

     It didn’t matter. I was letting go of the world I left behind and I felt that world slacken, the bond growing thinner with the times. I would not see my spirit brothers again for many years and by the time I did, I was already an old man, with a wife long gone, and my weary eyes waiting for the afterlife- or if Chukwu wished, another rebirth. It did not matter, not any more.

    #

    Perhaps, we never truly forget

    29th October, 2010.

    The Present.

    Somewhere, in between dreaming and waking, I see her again- Temisola. We are under the Boka tree and we are laughing, our voices wild and free, by the light of a full moon. We are not alone. There is a woman too, and this woman is singing. Her voice is beautiful and haunting, calling to me in its terrible depth. My mother, from a long time ago.

    A moment later and there is silence. I feel Temisola staring at me.

    “I did not forget you, Temisola”, I try to say but the words catch in my throat and I do not say them. I do not even try to meet her eyes.

    I woke up. There is no one here, just the steady sound of rain and the noisy ceiling fan. My wife is out, probably on an early morning shift, but the air still holds faint traces of her cologne, a smell I have come to associate with home. This should be comforting, but I do not even acknowledge it. 

    I have not dreamt of you for many years, Temisola. Why now? I ask this of the empty room.

    There is no answer, but the wind blows suddenly from an open window, filling the room with my wife’s cologne. Almost as if, to blow the thought away.

    I do not dream of her again, but I see her everywhere now- her eyes, in a colleague at work, her voice, in a storekeeper. Once my wife was talking and I just sat there, listening. I could have sworn that we have had this talk before, once, in a previous life.

    “You remind me of someone”, I said to her.

    “Who?”

    I smiled but did not say.

    The world had changed much since the world I left behind- walking through this world had become a journey through history. I was here, thirty years ago, when it was just a bush path, and it was there I suffered a particularly violent death. It had become a burden, these memories, this weight of other lives. I was living in the present, yet haunted by the past.

    Once, a lifetime ago, I could not bear it any more so I told  my mother.

    “I cannot forget, Mummy,” I said.

    “Forget what?” she asked.

    “My former life.”

    She had laughed it off. In that life, people had to begin to forget. In this life, they had all but forgotten.

    There is no one I can tell now. I am the last of my kind.

    I have learnt to hide them, these memories, and all the knowledge that came with it. Where once they saw the ogbanje, an abiku, now they saw a man burdened with the weight of years. An old soul, they call me.  If only they knew. If only they remembered.

    Still, there were always those who knew, at some level. They were drawn to you, and did not know why. Like my wife, Oma. I had met her at a friend’s party and had told her to marry me. She had laughed, and we spent the rest of the party talking to each other. She had left without leaving a contact, but I was unworried. She was my wife in a previous life. We met two weeks later in a library and a few months later, we were married. We have been married for eight years, and there is no one alive who could read me as well as she does. No one but this woman from my past, Temisola, who, for some reason, had chosen to haunt my present like a ghost–the only relic of my past that had any substance. But for what purpose? Vengeance? Love? Was this Your sign, Chukwu, asking me to return to the spirit world?

    What would I tell you, Temisola?

    I was a man now used to knowledge. Still, I could not answer this. I almost laughed. This was how Chukwu laughed at us.

    Deep in my thoughts, I do not hear a car speed by in the worst of the rain. I do not register the sound, mud splattering, until the gritty feeling on my face and clothes. I pause. I am livid.

    A woman alights from the car and in my shock, I do not hear her spirited apologies. She is very dark, and her looks are not one you would easily forget. I couldn’t. Hers was the constant of every memory, the one person I had searched for in others for a lifetime.

    “Temisola?”

    She pauses her explanations and looks me in the eye for the first time. Her face is blank, with one eyebrow raised in a question.

    She does not remember me.

    Mayor Prosper Ihechi writes stories for the voices in his head, and poetry for his soul. Through words, he reenacts the miracle of flight. 

  • Christening of Peculiar Things – Oliaku Wisdom Ikechukwu 

    Call the world how it unfolds,
    a feeble, starving petal growing in your blistered palms
    towards the sun, from the spaces between your fingers 
    where mine used to intertwine.
    Call my love how it reaches,
    this nimble, persistent thing floating in an ocean
    of hurt inside of me, inviting you in
    (or the thought of you inviting me in), 
    In walls of a heart holding chants and space
    until my mind becomes your temple, 
    you wickedly delectable thing.
    Call a rose what it is, greet its thorns
    and salute the pain it leaves (once she leaves)
    and you are folded into March, sliced into three, 
    one for her to think about in faint lethargy, 
    one for the world to commiserate,
    and the last for solitude to try to destroy.
    Call a shadow what it brings,
    all the silent wandering, from dark
    unto obscurity, always lingering like a nightmare, 
    like a bad kiss in June, my first kiss with you.
    call the stars what they hide
    a million wishes, all of its light to obscure the obscurer.

    Wisdom is an avid reader and a weaver of words, with his first stint with poetry coming at a 2015 spoken word performance. He is a multiple-time finalist in the Tush Magazines writing contest, a content strategist, and an SEO writer with years of experience. When not lost in verses or re-reading Christopher Okigbo’s The Passage, Wisdom can be found drowning in his Indie Folk playlist and getting inspired by Bon Iver.

  • Four Poems by Tomas Maldonado 

    Muzungu Kwanjula 

    Have you ever seen Kampala from an airplane
    on a warm summer afternoon? The reddish marks 
    of highways expand as far as the graves of the forgotten 
    women of Juarez. Their names known only to the angels 
    dancing in the greyish blue clouds. 
    But sometimes we have to laugh to forget the pain or 
    our tears will remind us that the only thing in the heavens is blue sky.
    They say it never rains in southern California but does it ever snow in central Uganda? Why am I a muzungu in Nansana but a wetback in America? I’ll never forget the first time you did okufukamira. The Prophet said if he could’ve ordered any creation to bow to another, he would’ve ordered a woman to bow down to her man. Such things never concerned me. I only care about enough air in my lungs to breathe out your name. 
    In Luganda, olulimi is polysemous. It refers to both  
    tongue and language. The only difference is the way 
    it moves around in my mouth when I ask you what 
    you thought would take years to happen. 

    Ekirooto on Muzigo & Mbuubi Road

    A tall man walks past you sweating. The charcoal 
    bag on his back feels heavy. Bluish green made of 
    thin plastic threads and itchy covering his entire body. 
    You notice what’s between his sandals. Ashy feet calloused 
    enough to walk barefoot if it weren’t for the rain gods of 
    his ancestors. You see a book in his eyes telling whole chapters 
    divided into sections of dreams too long for you to finish.
    He knows hunger but is thankful for strong legs. He drifts 
    here and there longing for another sunset to lay upon his head. 
    There’s a funny way the wind strokes the palm trees back and 
    forth. Its breeze smells of hot cooking oil and burnt chapati. Maybe if 
    his mother dies the day after tomorrow he has enough for transport to 
    the funeral. They are a people in their villages but foreigners in their cities. 
    A piece of charcoal falls. You want to turn back, pick it up, give it to 
    him but you know if you do, he’ll tell you it’s not his, like most of his problems. 

    The Fanoos of Al-Azhar 

    There’s an ancient fanoos hanging in the hallways of Jami al-Azhar. 
    She shined her brightest during the days of the Mamluks: pearl 
    white, held by copper wires, Ayat-ul-Kursi circling her beautiful stomach. 
    The Ottomans changed her candle every Ramadan even as the French and 
    British carried on until the coup of King Farouk. She watched in sadness 
    when Sadat was placed under her. His shrouded body wrapped tightly in 
    chaos and hatred. And even when she was dropped and shattered by one of 
    the janitors during the inauguration of Mubarak, a craftsman fixed her good 
    enough that you couldn’t see one crack. But now time has taken its toll. 
    The glue that holds her melts with each new candle. She has fallen twice this 
    year. She’s stained with brown dust and fungus. I watch the janitors take
    her down from the wires. I can’t help but notice drops of candle wax leaking 
    from her, falling, the way teardrops do when you know it’s time to say goodbye. 

    Al-Qarafah: City of the Dead

    Reddish-glows govern beige mausoleums as white sun dives into Cairo skyline…I can see the stolen electrical lines feed life into cracks of forever darkness…it’s the stuff of Najib Mahfouz’s wet dreams, a novel in the making, maybe a novella, if you run out of typing paper or wake up from your sleep. I roll the window down, rub my eyes, and look to my left. A tragedy unfolds… 

    A pig, amongst many, 
    snuffles and snorts along 
    the dusty street avoiding 
    the Egyptian girl swinging 
    a long date palm switch across
    their backsides. She yells at them
    Yallah! Yallah! her silver cross be
    -jeweled with topaz swings side-to-side, 
    a toddler follows behind, he needs a diaper change, 
    a few feet away a family watches the news in the crypt 
    of Umm Anuk. The Egyptian girl slips in a puddle, the pig laughs, the others follow. His eyes long for freedom, to believe freely, to write, to express himself, to love who ever will love him, to live. One day, he thinks. One day.  
    Amazing what one observes from a taxicab headed to Ahmed Helmy.  

    Author’s Bio

    Tomas Maldonado is a Mexican American creative nonfiction writer and poet who teaches English for Academic Purposes and English Composition at South Central College in South Central Minnesota. He uniquely blends creative writing in his TESL courses while mentoring his multilingual students as they journal their writing experiences via poetry and creative nonfiction. Tomas writes personal essays, interviews, and book reviews for Erato magazine and has had his creative nonfiction, poetry and short stories published in Chrysalis, Rio Grande Review, SEDAA, Latin@ Literatures and The Corresponder. When he’s not taking long walks through Kampala, he’s making snow angels in Mankato. 

  • ‘The Past Future War’ & ‘Mane’ – Mark Kennedy Nsereko

    (Use desktop mode to get the best visual experience of Mark’s poems)

    The Past Future War 

                   the oldies think they’re gold                                    the futures eager to occupy spaces
             the seedlings think they’re rubies                                  the pasts unwilling to leave positions
    the former crowns the latter the future,                                  the latter insists on being in charge,
           yet never call themselves the past.                                  as the formers remain inexperienced.
                       

    the past decides for the futures,                      the oldies think they’re justified
                          decisions require experience.                       the seedlings are just entitled
                            the oldies think they’re gold                       the oldies think they know best,
                         the seedlings are but, newbies                       the seedlings deserve less.
                    

    the justified wear their medals of toil      Why have the entitled,
                         the entitled tire rather too quickly      if not to bequeath your titles?
                      the justified preach hard work pays,     the oldies think they’re gold.
                                 the entitled are not believers.     the seedlings think they’re rubies.
                                       

      the oldies are certain they’re intelligent,
                                                                     the intelligent assert subordination,
                                          like at a latter age comes sage.
                                                                  sexual morality and cave ways.
                                       The seedlings rejoice in their ignorance,
                                                                     the ignoramus want life on their own terms,
                                        they’ll know better when they come of age.
                                                                   gold belongs in the ground.

    Mane 

                                                         I was taught my hair 
                                          is a disease, grass to cut short; dispose of
                                   those weeds. Routinely scoured bald for school, while
                       the Indian kids played with their hair ribbons. Teachers zealously 
                hunted us with scissors, to make paths on our scalps. They grinned ear to
              ear as they mutilated our bodies. We were taught our hair was shame. They
           called our hair unkempt, for they couldn’t fathom that a mane sprouts not to be
         kempt. To them my hair was shabby, for they saw it through the colonialist’ gaze
     whose mandate they elevate. Employers demand qualified men cut their dreadlocks to 
     get hired, weighing competence by the length of the strands. Do clients seek our tresses
      or our prowess? They say men                                                    who plait hair are bayaye.
        Count the country’s                                                                        biggest crooks filling
         public offices with hairless heads.                      Forever too quick to dictate what a
            respectable man                                                                              should dress like.   
             Today, I grow my                                                                            mane carelessly,   
                 shear when I                                                                            want, not when   
                   they tell me.                                                                          those who find    
                       me feminine                                                                       call me she/     
                            girly, to                                                                     emasculate        
                                 me. I am                                                            flattered   
                                       for woman is a synonym for beauty. What my     
                                           mane does                                 is accentuate  
                                               me. I bask in their stares as I whip my    
                                                      hair; contempt or reverence.  
                                                          A crown of pride I wear.  
                                             

    Mark Kennedy Nsereko is a Ugandan writer. His work reimagines beauty, draws darkness, and reveals bits of what keeps him up all night. His writings have featured in the poetry anthology I Promise This Song Is Not About Politics and Brittle Paper.

  • The Gift that arrived at Night | Nande T.S Kamati

    Not so long ago, in a time when salt was as precious as gold, there once was a family whose story whispered through the winds of time. They lived in Shamba, a land of secrets and wonders, where every stone seemed to harbour tales of ancient glory.

    This family resided in a quaint village known as Ngula, a name bestowed upon it by the ancient founders, translating to “Tomorrow” in the ancient tongue of its founders. Their abode, a humble dwelling, occupied a space just a bit smaller than half a football field.

    Within the confines of their home resided eight cherished souls: Mr. Shetu, his four sons, his beloved wife, Ms Tuli, and the venerable matriarch of the family, Mr. Shetu’s ninety-year-old mother. To all the children, she was simply known as Grandma. For a full decade, this intimate group of eight had been the heart and soul of their household.

    But fate, like a tricky puzzle piece, wove a new thread into the fabric of their lives one sunny morning. As they toiled in the golden fields harvesting pearl millet, a sudden, sharp pain pierced Ms Tuli’s lower abdomen. She gingerly settled beneath the comforting shade of a nearby Marula tree and began massaging her belly in an attempt to soothe the distressing ache.

    “Quickly!” Ms Tuli urgently called out to her sons, her voice laced with discomfort. “Hurry to Mr Hishiko and let him know I require his donkey cart. Inform him that I’m not too far away. I must reach my mother’s house before the day darkens. I’ll have the help I need there. Go now, make haste,” she directed her eldest son.

    “I’ll come along, my dear. I might be old, but I can still lend a hand,” Grandma offered as she gently massaged Ms Tuli’s swollen feet. She had chosen to accompany her daughter-in-law on this journey since her son, Mr. Shetu, the third of his lineage to embark on the king’s salt-mining expedition, was far away at the salt plains.

    Of course, Hafeni, the youngest of the four sons, pleaded to accompany them. “Pleeeeease, mama, take me with you,” he begged, his eyes wide with anticipation.

    “Okay, fine. You can come along,” his mother agreed, though her response was accompanied by a somewhat exasperated sigh.

    For the past few months, Hafeni had keenly observed his mother’s tummy gradually getting bigger with each passing day. He didn’t need anyone to explain it to him. His mother was expecting a new little brother or sister. After ten long years, he would no longer hold the title of being the youngest child in the family.

    The prospect of having a new baby sibling brought a mix of emotions. On one hand, he looked forward to the exciting adventures and activities he’d now be able to enjoy, just like his older brothers. On the other hand, the new baby will get all the attention.

    With the assistance of Mr Hishiko and his trusty old donkey cart, Hafeni, his mother, and Grandma reached their destination just before the sun dipped below the horizon. As the cart rolled to a stop, Hafeni’s maternal uncle and his mother’s mother, whom the little boy affectionately called Grandmama, rushed out of the house to greet them. With gentle care, the men helped Ms Tuli off the donkey cart and swiftly carried her into a hut that Grandmama had prepared in anticipation of her arrival.

    Hafeni, although eager to stay with his mother, knew he couldn’t accompany her this time. Instead, his aunt, who happened to be his mother’s youngest sister, led him to the cooking area where a warm dinner awaited him, surrounded by the comforting presence of extended family.

    As the family gathered around the crackling fire, Hafeni found himself bombarded with questions from his curious cousins about the adventures he’d had accompanying his father to the salt plains.

    But despite their enthusiasm, Hafeni struggled to focus. His thoughts were consumed by worries about his mother, and his anxiety was palpable. He kept stealing glances in the direction his mother had gone earlier, his concern etched across his face.

    Although fatigue eventually weighed down his eyelids, Hafeni was determined not to succumb to sleep until he saw his mother safe and sound. He lay down beside the comforting warmth of the fire, gazing up at the night sky.

    Suddenly, a shooting star streaked across the heavens, as if in reassurance that everything would turn out fine. After a while, his eyelids grew heavy, and he finally drifted into slumber. His caring aunt gently scooped him up and carried him to bed.

    As the morning sun graced the new day, Grandmama went to fetch Hafeni from the hut he slept in to take him to his mother. She found the boy already awake. Before Grandmama could greet Hafeni, the boy dashed past her and ran to his mother’s hut. Hafeni’s face beamed with joy when he saw his dear mommy. She looked exhausted, but still radiated beauty and warmth. She stretched out her hand, and Hafeni eagerly took it, with a beaming smile mirroring his mother’s sweet expression.

    “Come,” she whispered, her voice filled with love, “Come and meet your little sister.” The happiness in the air was so palpable that it seemed to make the morning itself shine a little brighter.

    The new-born baby lay beside her mother, so tiny that Hafeni hesitated to hold her, afraid he might hurt her. Ms Tuli gently picked up the baby and brought her closer to him, her eyes gleaming with pride.

    “Look, Hafeni,” she said with a warm smile, “This is your baby sister.”

    Hafeni’s eyes widened in astonishment as he gazed at the baby’s tiny head. He couldn’t help but notice, “Mama, the baby has white hair like Grandma and Grandmama.” Tenderly, he ran his little fingers across his baby sister’s delicate hair.

    “Yes, she does,” his mother replied with a gentle nod. “She’s one special little girl. Her hair is like that of ancient star travellers, the divine messengers that come from the highest place,” Ms Tuli said, her eyes filled with pride as she spoke.

    Hafeni’s heart swelled with wonder at the mention of the Highest Place, a name his ancestors had given to the kingdom far beyond the stars. It was the kingdom of the good King who ruled over all creation from the mountain at the edge of life.

    Since Mr. Shetu was not there to give his little girl a name as is tradition, the two grandmothers decided to name her Nuusiku. It means “the one that arrived at night.”

    Nuusiku was truly unique. It was as if the light of a million stars shone through her hair, which was whiter than the grey hair on both her grandmothers’ heads. The little baby looked unusual in more ways than one; her hair was not the only remarkable thing she was born with.

    Grandma reached for a cloth woven from the inner bark of the baobab tree, the very tree from which Hafeni’s ancestors believed the first woman fetched milk to feed her children. They called it the “tree of mothers.” Slowly, Grandma unwrapped the cloth, revealing a lock of white hair adorned with twelve knots. These knots gleamed like the bright midday sun. She brought the lock of hair closer to the boy.

    “Look here,” Grandma said, “Your sister came to us already filled with power. This lock of hair rested on her forehead and fell off shortly after she was born. This is how the divine messenger travels from beyond the stars to our world. They arrive with this lock of hair draped over their faces. The ancestors called it the ‘horn of power,’ but today we know it as the ‘garland of twelve suns.’”

    “It is said that when a clan is truly fortunate, one of its daughters will be blessed with a baby who is a divine messenger. Nuusiku is the second messenger of the good King to be born into my clan. I am truly blessed to have lived long enough to see both of them,” Grandmama said with immense pride.

    “But who is the other messenger?” the curious boy asked.

    Grandmama chuckled warmly, “My grandmother, your great-great-grandmother. She, too, had white hair like that of the divine messengers of the good King, who rules from the mountain at the edge of life.”

    Hafeni pondered all that his mother and grandmother had shared with him. There was still one burning question in his mind. “If she’s the good King’s messenger and she was sent to us, what message did she bring?”

    “We will only know that in about seven days’ time when her umbilical cord falls off. On that day, a wise San man or woman from the tribe of the Ancients will come to our house. They will shave off Nuusiku’s white hair, and the hair along with the garland of twelve suns will be burned in an ostrich’s egg,” Grandma explained.

    “Yes, once the hair and the garland of twelve suns are completely burned to ash, the wise San elder will smash the egg on the ground. A message will be revealed on one of the pieces of the broken egg, clear as daylight to the wise elder to see. Only they will be able to understand the writings and explain it to us. It will be a message for the whole kingdom to hear,” Grandmama explained.

    Hafeni felt his excitement bubble up. He couldn’t wait for the seven days to pass so that he could hear the message his sister brought them. “When I grow up as big as Papa, I’m going to be a divine messenger too. Just wait and see. I’ll have white hair and a message for the people to hear,” the boy declared, full of confidence.

    Ms Tuli, Grandmama, and Grandma burst into laughter so hearty that tears ran down their faces.

    After three days of rest, Ms Tuli, Grandma, Hafeni, and the baby returned home, just a day after Mr. Shetu’s arrival from the salt plains. All the older boys rushed out of the house to greet their mother, led by their father, who held a massive spear.

    Before his wife, mother, and baby, Mr. Shetu thrust the spear into the ground and began to dance. He stomped the earth with his feet in joyful celebration. Grandma joined in with ululations of pride as she looked on. Nuusiku was then gently handed over to her father. Mr. Shetu cradled his daughter’s breath-taking face in his hands as he slowly walked to their hut, a smile radiating from his face.

    When everybody had sat down, Mr. Shetu started telling his family a story. “Long ago,” he began, “this beautiful kingdom of ours was gripped by the worst drought our people had ever experienced. Not a single drop of water was to be found anywhere in the kingdom.

    The strongest of men risked dying of thirst by travelling to the kingdoms of our ancestors to get water. But by the time the men would return, the calabashes of water would be as empty as when they embarked on the journey. 

    As everyone settled in their seats, Mr. Shetu began to tell a story. “Many, many years ago,” he started, “our beloved kingdom was gripped by a terrible drought, the worst our people had ever known. There was not a single drop of water to be found anywhere. The strongest of men risked dying of thirst by travelling to the kingdoms of our ancestors in search water. But alas, when they returned, their calabashes were as dry as the day they set out.

    Every day, the women of the village gathered, dancing to the rhythmic beat of the drum, their voices rising high as they called upon the rain. The rain still chose not to come. 

    A young bachelor and a young maiden rode a black cow into the sunset to fetch the rain as the oracles of the Ancients advised. The fiery sunset consumed both the cow and the maiden. Yet, even after such a sacrifice, the rain still chose not to come. 

    The animals began to die, and the seeds planted in hope began to rot in the ground. Tears flowed freely from the eyes of the young and old alike, their hearts heavy with despair. In the end, the whole land was devoid of hope.

    Finally, the wisdom of the elderly men and women led them to remember the merciful hands of their Maker. They remembered He who is said to have formed their skin from the mud of a riverbank and their bones from the marrow of a bulrush.

    With hopeful hearts, they raised their voices to the sky, seeking the benevolent Kalunga, the good King who ruled from the mountain at the edge of life. Through endless days and starry nights, their fervent cries filled the sky as they called upon His name.

    Finally, on the eve of the seventh day of their relentless pleas, something utterly extraordinary occurred. A colossal, flame-covered rock descended from the sky, landing with a resounding boom right in the heart of the forest, at the very centre of the kingdom. The earth quaked, sending ripples of fear through the land. Yet despite their apprehension, the people emerged from their villages to witness the awe-inspiring event. 

    ‘Did you see that?’ they asked one another.

    ‘Did you see the fire fall from the sky?’ somebody was said to have asked.

    ‘Surely the sun has fallen out of the sky,’ another person ventured to guess.

    Arming themselves with spears as protection against any wild beast they might encounter, the people trekked all night to the forest at the centre of the kingdom. 

    Right in the middle of the forest, they found a huge rock, unlike any they had ever seen before. Water was gushing out of the earth beneath the rock, creating a bubbling spring. To their amazement, they heard the faint cries of a baby emanating from the top of this wondrous rock. 

    Though the rock felt slightly warm to the touch, a resilient and elderly San woman, a member of the tribe of the Ancients, fearlessly climbed on top of it. And there on top of the rock, lay a baby boy, squirming and wriggling. A lock of hair with twelve knots hung delicately from his hairline.

    The San woman tenderly lifted this lock of hair off of the baby’s face, revealing the most exquisite infant she had ever laid eyes upon. The hair on his head is said to have been as white as the milk of a cow, and the twelve knots gleamed like a radiant garland of suns, as if it were the middle of the day.

    The baby boy continued to cry and wiggle as the San woman, filled with awe and reverence, carefully wrapped him and his horn of power in a blanket made from the bark of the tree of mothers. 

    The San woman raised the baby boy high into the air, presenting him to the gathered crowd. “Look! Look!” exclaimed the joyous elder. “A divine messenger has been sent upon a star to bring us the gift of water!” Her voice rang out with pride and wonder.

    The women began to ululate with delight, while the men celebrated by pounding their spears into the ground. Even the forest’s wild inhabitants, the jackals, ostriches, and elephants, joined in the jubilation. Their howls, honks, and trumpets echoed through the land, proclaiming the arrival of this miraculous gift.

    Days later, the garland of twelve suns and the baby’s milky-white hair were ceremoniously burned in a large calabash. The message from the King who rules from the mountain at the edge of life was unveiled:

    “I have heard the cries of My people. 

    They remembered Me, 

    And therefore, I have chosen this very day to save them.”

    “Did that really happen?” inquired the second youngest of Mr Shetu and Ms Tuli’s sons.

    “Well, of course it happened. That’s how the spring at the centre of the kingdom came to be. Its waters have never failed once, and the kingdom has never seen drought since the star came down with the divine messenger,” Grandma confidently affirmed.

    As Hafeni listened to his father’s story, he realised how special his little sister was. Convinced that his sister had arrived upon the shooting star he had seen on the night of her birth, Hafeni moved closer to his father’s chair and asked, “Now, Papa, you too have to give her a name. What are you going to name her?”

    His father paused for a moment and then replied, “Magano. That is what I am naming her.”

    “That means ‘gift!’” exclaimed the eldest of the boys.

    “Yes,” Mr. Shetu confirmed with a smile.

    “In four days, we will get to hear your message,” Hafeni thought. He then tenderly planted a kiss on his little sister’s cheek and whispered her full name into her ear, “Magano Nuusiku, the gift that arrived at night.”

    Author Biography

    Nande Thomas Sakaria Kamati is a 30-year-old Electrical Engineer. Nande’s true passion lies in writing captivating children’s fantasy stories set in Alkebulan (Africa) as it once was. Drawing inspiration from his Bantu, Khoisan and Christian heritage, he seeks to transport young readers to enchanting realms filled with adventure. In April 2024, his children’s story “Hambie:  A Purr-fectly Mysterious Tale” was published in the Writers Space Literary Magazine. It appeared on page 12, 13 & 14 of the magazine and received the honour of being selected as the editor’s choice. This marked his debut as a published author. You can find his story in the April 2024 edition of the magazine, accessible via this link: Writers Space Literary Magazine 

  • Grieving Without Borders – Nwajesu Ekpenisi

    Grief is like the ocean. It comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.
    —Vicki Harrison.

    The humid Saturday morning’s chilling breeze slapped me beneath the cashew tree where I stood waiting for a motorcycle, and my skin prickled with goosebumps. My eyes drank in the sight of the leaves rustling on the tree and the red fruits draping over its branches.

    Like a sentinel, the tree lined the main road leading into the driveway of a nearby hospital. I massaged my arms, dispelling the tingling sensation that caressed my skin like a lover’s steamy kiss. But I knew what it meant. This sensation that had become all too familiar—this feeling that often preceded an experience, so poignant, I know will linger with me for a while.

    Behind me, the slapping of slippers against the tarmac driveway grew louder. I whirled around to see two women halt at a palm tree close to the hospital gate. One of them suddenly began to scream. The goosebumps returned, this time, pervasive, accompanied with a sting in my eyes. I blinked, and kneaded my arms again.

    Sighting an approaching motorcyclist, I flagged him down; and as soon as we started to bargain, an ambulance zapped past us. My skin erupted in more goosebumps. The woman’s bawl intensified. In sync, the motorcyclist and I were lost in the gaze of the screaming woman.

    There was something eccentric about the way the woman wept and screamed. Clad in a black sleeveless button-down shirt on black trousers, she stood beside the other woman, who I assumed was her sister, who was similarly garbed in black. The woman’s sister took a few step forward, phone pressed to her right ear, and sat on a hedge next to the palm tree. She was mumbling with a breaking voice, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

    Unlike her sister who wasn’t screaming but had eyes flooding with tears, the weeping, screaming woman’s face showed no evident sign of one who had been crying—or was crying. For one who was as fair as she was, it was puzzling to see that her face betrayed no hint of her distress—her face was ‘unreddened’, her nose ‘unrunny’, her eyes ‘unsunken’, with no tears cascading down.

    Yet, she bewailed repeatedly in her native dialect—“My lovely mother is dead o! Death, why did you take my mother?”—and her voice was laden with a dolefulness that melted my heart as I hopped on the motorcycle.

    A man was ambling by, whose appearance I didn’t quite capture. He gawked at this woman, a look that passed for a glower. Or so I perceived. The disdain in that look was palpable, one that showed how contemptuous he was of the manner the woman screamed and wept.

    When he sighed, and our eyes met, I saw the detestation on his face. I imagined this man repeating in his heart the question the motorcyclist hurled at me as we veered into the main road, the same question someone had asked my friend, Evans, at his father’s funeral, where we sat under a canopy.

    “How can anyone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears in their eyes? How can people know that they are truly pained by the loss when their body language shows no intimation of sadness?”

    At Evans’ father’s funeral, after the corpse had been laid to rest and candles lit upon the grave, as it was their custom, we sat together, laughing, as we recalled beautiful moments we had shared with his late father—those days he would regale us with stories of the Nigeria-Biafra war—and how we would miss his jokes.

    While at it, our sorrow momentarily fading, replaced by warm glows, a young lady, one of his cousins, walked up to us. She glared at us for a while and then said, “Evans, you don’t look like someone who is grieving. How can someone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears or sadness in their eyes?”

    “But I’m mourning,” Evans said.

    “Like this?” His cousin cocked a brow. “Since your father died, your body language has been saying otherwise. Are you truly pained by this loss?” She hissed and beat a hasty retreat as soon as she lobbed the question at him.

    First, I shook my head at how benighted—of grief—she was, or anyone could be. “Why did she say that?” I asked Evans. “What does she mean by ‘your body language has been showing otherwise’?”

    Evans shrugged. “This is the second time she is saying this.”

    “Really?” I sighed. “What gave her the impression that you are not mourning like everyone else in the family? You must have done something for her to think that way.”

    “I guess it is because I have been hiding my pain.”

    “What do you mean by hiding your pain?”

    “At school, when I received the call that Papa had died, I was very calm. I maintained that calmness, that composure, when I visited the village and was taken to the morgue to see his corpse. I have been calm till this day. But my cousin thinks that I haven’t been grieving because I didn’t react the way she expected, you know, crying like other members of the family. She thought I was just being a strong man or being impish, but, to be honest, I have been holding back from exploding.”

    “She should have known that this is how you grieve,” I said.

    “I don’t think she has an idea,” he added, eyes glued to the DJ at the other end, who cued up a
    song. The air came alive.

    Sadly, in my hometown, rigid expectations are imposed on people on how they should express their sorrow, and how a person’s grief should be measured. We are told that a man overcome with sadness is the one who tearfully expresses his pain for others to understand the depth of his grief.

    We are told that grief is something that is visibly written on the face and must be evident in one’s voice. We are told that the ones who hide their emotions behind a mask of stoicism, who put on brave faces, despite being deeply affected, are simply pretending or just being impish or have a skeleton concealed under their cloaks.

    We are also told how to grieve here; it is read out to us like a code of conduct in funerals and family meetings after the death of a loved one: The men are to cry to show they are pained, but not too much—because masculinity demands them to be stoic and strong, and not be too loose.

    If a man shows too much emotion, he is labeled as “one who weeps like a woman”. Then, to the women, it is expected they show too much emotion. Their cries must burst forth like stormy sea. Their screams must be loud enough to deafen ears. If these are not done, their grieving is incomplete.

    “How do you grieve?” he asked, our eyes locking.

    The question clinched a chuckle out of me. “You don’t want to know.”

    “I’m interested,” he smiled. “Tell me.”

    The question made me recall things that I had bottled up inside me. The first time I knew what grief is, the first time it shook me to the core, and left me profoundly shattered for days, I was seven. We had just lost our Landlady. The news of her death, when she was brought back in a coffin two weeks after she left home sick, wrung my innards like strings knotted together.

    I didn’t wait to see her corpse in order to confirm that she was dead, I could tell from the weeping faces of her daughters and grandchildren, the groaning of her sons, the silence of her husband, and the solemn mumbles of other tenants and neighbours.

    As soon as the funeral hearse hauling her corpse barreled into the compound and everyone rushed to welcome it with broken hearts, I ran inside with my broken heart, huddled beside our bed, and bawled my eyes out. I cried because such a good woman had finally left us. I cried because she was a mother after my mother. She was ‘love’. She was ‘kindness’ cloaked in human flesh. I let the pain stewing inside me to win. I was helpless. I let it sear my eyes, until my tears poured like a libation. I let it drain my strength until I slept off.

    Later in my dream, in my subconsciousness, while the funeral dirges played in the compound, I was with her in a garden of beautiful dandelions, gaping at her in a glowing robe.

    “I’m not strong in the face of grief,” I replied after a long silence. The DJ spun a new track.

    “I’m a weakling.”

    Being a weakling is not the same as cowardice. To be a weakling doesn’t mean you fear what you appear weak against; rather, you acknowledge your limitations, you recognize that resistance sometimes is futile, you understand that your efforts would be in vain, and that even trying wouldn’t change the outcome.

    Evans let out a croaky laugh.

    “But I know that no one is strong in the face of grief, no matter how we choose to hide or express it,” I added.

    Grief comes with a raw and scraping vulnerability—a ‘vulnerability’ so strong it claws your heart apart, so strong that it feeds on your strength until you are left bare. It’s in the failure that comes after an exam, the pain of losing a lover to a total stranger, a betrayal from a friend. It is in the act of loving the wrong partner, in unrequited love. It is in the face of rejections, even when you know you are good at something, yet you are still turned down. It is the pain we don’t speak about, the pain that burgeons underneath our skin after a loved one’s death—the worst kind of pain.

    “We are never strong in the face of grief,” Evans concurred. “No matter how we exude strength.” I nodded.

    The next time I lost a loved one after my father and before my grandmother, who I loved so much—which prompted me to beg God for pardon, for healing from these losses—was in 2014.

    Charles was his name. A dear Christian brother from my local church. We were both transitioning out of teenage phase, but he was older than me. When I got to know him, he was the sweetest soul one could have as a friend. I loved him deeply, just as he loved me. He taught me the raw beauty of selflessness, of putting others before oneself. Unfortunately, at the peak of our blossoming friendship, he was diagnosed with a kidney disease.

    The morning I learned of his death, I didn’t leave the house for two days. I prayed fervently for his resurrection, the way we were taught to pray in church when we desired something. I desired to have my friend back. I went without eating. But as I prayed, I felt the futility of it all. It was his time to rest. At the end of the second day, I burst into tears. I bit my skin, my lips, until I tasted blood.

    “But this how I grieve,” I started. Evans braced up to listen. While the late gospel artiste, Mrs. Nwachukwu Osinachi’s song, ‘Ikem’, blared from the speakers stationed close to the DJ’s canopy. “My grieving knows no border.”

    When grief pummels me—especially the sudden, unexpected, searing kind—this is how I utterly unravel: First, I go numb. I feel disconnected from the world. But I try not to crack a tear in public, in the presence of people, be they loved ones or strangers. My eyes may glaze over with tears or even flood with them, but I will not let them all out until I am locked up in my room, where I can drown the floor with them, where I can embrace my sorrow, where the walls can witness my irrepressible insanity.

    I withdraw from everything, from everyone; I isolate myself from the world, from its noisiness. I get lost in thoughts, shrugging incessantly, staring into space for too long. Moving with a languid pace as if I’m a leaf blown by the wind, I talk to myself too often, to make sense of my emotions, of reality. I saunter out of my room only at night, when the world sleeps, my pregnant eyes goggling at the night sky, beseeching God to see my crushed and bereaved heart, to teach me the precise language to still the gale rippling inside me, to illuminate the darkness inundating my soul. I trawl for beautiful memories I know will never come forth.

    And even when I will myself to sleep in order to escape the depressing reality, I end up in a forest brimmed with ‘frigid’ memories, the melancholic memories I have always wanted to escape from. They come for me like armies besieging a city, like a termite’s relentless gnawing, and I’m jerked awake with wracking sobs.

    When I’m exhausted, I let my body succumb to its weariness—for it is what grief is: an unending weariness, a stubborn scar, a memento of lost love, a gaping hole that can never be filled, a suffocating cloak, a tangled forest where the barbed branches of sorrow and the shadow of loss enshroud the route to healing. Time and memories do not heal this wound; they can only mask the pain and fester it.

    “I wish I were like you,” Evans said.

    “You don’t have to wish to be like me,” I said. “We are wired differently.”

    I, too, did wish I was like him, that I’m like him—one who is like a rock in turbulent times, unflappable in the face of adversity, one who wears the mask of stoicism and exudes startling strength in the sea of sorrow; but then, the truth be told, those who don’t express their grief are often the ones whose sorrow has drained their joy. They may appear strong, but they are actually the most vulnerable. I’m not saying people grieve better than others; we all grieve differently because we are wired differently.

    If expressing your grief through screaming will bring you solace, go ahead; scream it all out. If you prefer to go stoic, go on, process your emotions in silence. Everyone must be allowed to express their grief, their sorrow, the best way they can authentically do so—without restraint, reserve, ridicule, remorse.

    Author’s Bio

    Nwajesu Ekpenisi is an Ika writer from Delta State in Nigeria. He placed third in the 2023 Alika Ogorchukwu International Poetry Competition and has forthcoming publications with Brigids Gate Press and other publishers. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter): @E_Nwajesu.

  • Petrichor

    Petrichor. 

    That’s the word he used—the one he called the scent you said you perceived outside. The scent of rain, soil–the one curling into your nose right now.

    “I can swear,” you began. “Swear?” you remember, he said, interrupting you as always. His head had tilted slightly to the right. 

    You remember how the light bounced off the tiny golden hoop earring in his left ear, how his taupe-coloured eyes twinkled, how his cold fingers traced wet lines on your cheekbones.

    You watched sweat trail down the side of the Cold Stone ice cream paper cup—the one beside the packet of testosterone pills he purchased at the pharmacy before you arrived. Despite leaving the house thirty minutes earlier, you were ten minutes late, thanks to Lagos’s never-ending gridlock. He didn’t mention your lateness, but you saw his eye glance at his watch when you walked in. He could annoy you in a million ways, like how you were a bit pissed that he ordered before you came in.

    But what he wasn’t–what he never was–was tardy. You once joked that if the rapture were a thing, if indeed the blast of a trumpet by the archangel of the homophobic god whose name was also ‘love’ could make people become human magnets- an irony you are yet to understand. He would be amongst the first to be caught up in the clouds, one of the first to arrive at the pearly gates.

    “If the angels are half as pretty as you are, Omalicha Nwa, you bet I would,” he replied.

    You remember how he bit his lip and did that annoying hip swing while locking you in place with his mesmerising gaze. At that moment, you knew he could trade eternity for you. You could wager that, for you, he would catch a grenade, hijack a plane, take a bullet in the brain, or whatever Bruno Mars said in Grenade. And you knew that you could do the same for him.

    But you let the yinmu and “better washing” slide out of your lips. You even accompanied it with an eye roll; playful deflection was your love language. You had yet to master the ability to reciprocate love. Perhaps affection wouldn’t have been strange to you if you had grown up in a household where “I love you” was used as often as “I pray you remain rapturable.”

    You remember the earliest days of your relationship when such action would have attracted a frown and a reprimand. But you both had outgrown that part of your lives. In the last eighteen months you had both shed those old skins of judgments and grown into new ones.

    So, that day, in the matchbox flat on Bode Thomas, Surulere, you smiled so hard your cheeks hurt when he flapped his hand like a big bird as he drifted towards you. There and then, you could tell that the flutters in your belly belonged to a thousand giant monarch butterflies. 

    You wished you had flapped your arms and ran towards him, too. You wish you had succumbed to the prompts of your heart and pretended to be a goofy goose. Instead, you side-stepped him just before he got to you. You wanted him to chase you. 

    If you knew then that time was already ticking, you would have let him hold you for all the minutes you allowed him to chase you around the frayed pink couch. You would not have done small shakara.

    At the Coldstone outlet four days ago, you wanted to tell him to use a spoon like every normal person. The perfectionist in you wanted everything to be perfect. You would have added, “for once, Somto” to get his attention, but the dimple that formed on his right cheek when he smiled distracted you from the faux pas, as always. It was easy for him to sway your emotions and change your mind without effort. And sometimes you wondered if it had anything to do with you loving him more than he loved you. You wish you knew the answer to this or to anything at all. You cannot remember if you knew someone who once said their partner annoys them as much as they amuse them. 

    Or maybe you heard it in one of the Agony Aunty segments of Jola and Feyikemi’s  I Said What I Said podcast. You don’t know which.

    Right now, your head feels like those refuse heaps stacked beside gutters in shop fronts on Thursday sanitation days; your head feels like a mix of mess. 

    To be candid, on some days, you didn’t even bother about his ice cream habits or any of his quirks in public. Why should you? You once dated a girl who drank beer straight from the bottle. An old-time girlfriend preferred slurping her palm wine from the calabash; you’ve had your fair share of weird drinkers and wack lovers. You have kissed a hundred frogs before your prince came along. But Somto was the only person you knew who ate ice cream directly from the cup. Spoons and spades be damned, he would say.

    You don’t know why the memories are tumbling in; why every moment you shared is coming back to you, but right now, you remember the dust, nylon, and paper swirling outside the glass. You remember the ‘E’ missing from the ‘Cold Stone’ inscribed on the glass.

    “Swear about what, my sweet love?” he asked. Your faces were so close you could see the pebble-like smoothness of the mole on his lip. So close in that public space that throbbed with strangers’ laughter, chatter, and patter of feet. So close that you were covered in the haze of caramel, frozen yoghurt, Oreos—and that scent you are wearing now. The cologne he left in your house. The empty bottle that best describes how you feel.

    “That you’re the only one that knows this word in this place,” you answered him. Your index finger–the one with the black chipped nail paint and the matching tattoo of a half heart–traced a halo in the space above your head. You didn’t care then that it was a preposterous claim. 

    In a room with men in nice suits and women in colourful chic office dresses. You didn’t mind that you were in Lagos’s Silicon Valley: Yaba, where your love story began. It didn’t matter how preposterous it was that you thought Somto was the only one who knew the word for the scent of rain. That both of you were in love or even sharing that same space was considered unthinkable by many. Even in 2024.

    Ayobami Adebayo’s “Stay with Me” was what brought you together. So much for a love story. Movies were your thing, so when you picked up the book on that green plastic table crusted with leftover Egusi and porridge beans in the crowded cafeteria. You did what every non-reader would do: you glanced at it casually, like someone inspecting a specimen; you flipped through the pages; ran a finger over the spine and made a comment when you saw the title. The newness of the book and boredom were what attracted you initially; you didn’t see the title till you flipped the book over.

    “So, she didn’t have any title for her book other than Sam Smith’s song?”

    “And who said ‘Stay With Me’ was exclusive to Sam Smith? The voice that answered you made you jerk your head upwards. Something about the voice made you look twice at the person. Beneath the hoodie and behind the dark Ray Bans, you could tell that whoever they were, they were not like everyone. They would never be like everyone. That’s how you met. It didn’t surprise you when he told you of his pills and potion on your first date two days later.

    “Potion?” you curled an eyebrow at him. “I’ve known that I was different since I was a child. He shrugged, and you witnessed him biting into ice cream. You watched him eating ice cream from a bowl for the first time. You had your deal breakers, and such a quirk as his was one of them, but as you watched him, you drew a faint line over it. That would be the first of many compromises.

    “You know if you didn’t tell me that you were…” You drew spirals in the air because the word was still too heavy to pronounce. You were still in a daze, wrapped in a cloud of surprise and infatuation. You were not a stranger to queer relationships. You have always found the minds and bodies of women more appealing than men’s. At first, you thought it was a form of rebellion against your spooky evangelist parents. Eventually, you realised that it was what it was—you were a girl who loved girls more.

    “A trans man… A guy, man?” he replied in his raspy voice, a result of smoking two packets of Benson Switch daily. Your body tensed, and the Oreo in your mouth tasted like chalk. Your eyebrows must have shot into your hair when you reacted. He waved your fears away with a flick of his head. That was when you fell in love completely with him. A few days later, while your belongings were still folded in your big Echolac box pushed against the wall of your room, you kissed for the first time. 

    Stay with Me was the first book you completed without being forced or cajoled. Nikki May’s Wahala was the next. You became a reader after that day. He became a podcast listener afterwards. You both agreed that it was a fair trade.

    ***

    Pain shoots up your palm as the gravel in the black soil bunched in your hands pushes against your skin. But that pain is nothing compared to the one in your chest. It is a drop of water to the ocean, a speck of dust to the sand in the Sahara Desert. If you had known that the ice cream date was your last day together, you would have stayed there forever. Fused to that uncomfortable, gaudy wooden chair, stuck on it like an old bubble gum.

    Your eyes are pressed shut. So tight it feels as though the bones of your eye sockets are touching. A sound that can pass for a muffled groan and stifled moan ricochets in your head and chest. You want to let the light in, but to let in the light, you will also be letting in the dark. If you do, you will see the tombstone and the lies—‘beloved daughter’ etched in neat block letters.

    If you open your eyes, you will see the footprints of the ones who never accepted him on the freshly dug soil. The ones he shared nothing with but a last name. The ones who had hurriedly dumped ‘the family’s embarrassment’ into a final resting place. Their excuse—according to the blog—according to religious rites.

    Somto was no daughter even before he began taking the testosterone pills. Neither was he loved. You had screamed this when you first saw the concrete tombstone. You pounded your rage into the dark earth. As though you wanted to dig your way to him.

    Until you heard the cough. It belonged to the guard who had let you in. It and the smell of his sweat-stained body in the worn faded overalls. Together they pulled you back from that brink. Even if you wanted to go on, you couldn’t. The way the guard glared at you made you realise he didn’t believe your story about being a relative who arrived late for the internment. You knew he would have called to confirm if he had Somto’s parents’ contact..

    The way he snatched the one thousand naira note from you when you came in showed that he was tired of the throng of visitors for the day, but he would not turn down your gift. Or any other. 

    When you turned to face him, you had to swallow your grief.

    If Somto were here, he would tell you that the guard was more of a receiver than a giver. Straight people! He would say. That’s how he sometimes saw the world: Straight. Queer. Good. Bad. But you understood because sometimes trauma can affect one’s worldview. The people he always called bad never disappointed. The good ones, too. He knew so much about the human condition that you had begun to think it was a gift because only gifts are that perfect.

    How come the gift failed? Why didn’t he know that the stranger on Tinder was a killer?

    It was a question you had asked yourself a hundred times. Even if you knew that there would be no answer. Not even a lie masked as one.

    Behind your lids, a shadow settles, and a blanket of cold air settles on your skin. The former, you would have been scared to be alone in this place with crumbling tombstones, gleaming granite, and Gone-Too-Soon’s. This place with gnarled tree trunks and wilting flowers.

    This vast expanse of land with its ominous mounds and the smell of decay. But you don’t feel anything. You’re not different from the residents of this place—people who once lived, people who no longer feel.

    So, you press your eyelids tighter as the gravel burrows deeper into your palm. As your knees sink deeper into the soil. The iron fist tightens around your heart and throat. Your chest heaves as you drag in the glue formed in your lungs. You have asked yourself if the tightness in your chest would have been lighter. You want to know if you would have felt better. If the memories of the day you mentioned those words to him did not constantly dart around like bats chased from a tree.

    “Let’s see other people … if that will make you happy,” you had said, even if you knew you couldn’t see anyone else. You wouldn’t. You would rather be a hermit, a worm under a rock, than be with another. But you said it. And meant it. Because love for you has always been what Oprah once said: it is being your best when the other is being their worst. And that was the best thing you could think of after he confessed to the affair. The best was what you always wanted for him.

    You would see the news feature on your phone if you open your eyes. ‘Transman Stabbed to Death.’ 

    Over two decades of his wondrous existence is summarised in four words; his eventful life is limited to one sentence. Even though you had spent hours replying to every vile comment online, telling people to fuck off and directing the keyboard warriors to their choice places in hell. You still can’t believe that it has happened. You want the unreturned phone calls to be another of his pranks. Your ears are pricked for the beep announcing an incoming text; notifying you that he is back; that this was all a bad dream. But you only hear the dull thud of rainwater on the soil. And that smell: Petrichor.

    OBADITAN OLUWAKOREDE (OBA.T.K) is an independent writer whose childhood memories consist of sitting beside his father’s beaten box, devouring almost every book in the African Writers Series.  In those nascent moments, he discovered the power of stories to grip and groom. But it wasn’t until his twenties, after meeting his mentor, that he discovered how to wield and weave stories. His writing is vivid and vibrant, exploring stories never told or amplifying the ones quietly told. He lives in Space, but he can be found in Lagos, Nigeria. He can be reached on 08026893106 and on Twitter(X) @KingofKontent.