Akpata Magazine

Tag: contemporary nigerian fiction

  • Thoughts about Tension – Blessing Obiahu

    Tension should not be the umbrella word for that jolt that reverberates through your bones and skin when you brush a live wire on a day IKEDC forgets to flick the switch off in your zone because it does more than reverberate; it constricts, twists, flings, kills if there’s no one around with a plank to whack you free of the copper. 

    Countless other tensions—unseen but ever-present—coil around our necks like floats as we struggle to float. The worry lines stretching on Mum’s brows, each furrow a map to a different concern; scraping together school fees, putting food on the table, beating Iju Road’s daily traffic, balancing this tilted scale.

    For Brother Mark, it’s the pressure he feels to succeed in a fiercely competitive job market; forcing him to change the 0 in his 1990 YOB to 8 and swear affidavits outside the High Court in Ikeja. Sister Franca doesn’t talk about hers, but I know it. She feels it in the questioning eyes that gaze at every educated but unmarried Nigerian young lady.

    These tensions, unlike the electric shock—if  you survive—that fades with time, become a chronic state of being, like the refrigerator hum that persists even when the power goes out. It’s something I know kall too well, but, perhaps, not well enough. It’s like feeling both overdressed and underdressed at the same time.

    Sometimes, it surfaces as a nagging voice that questions if this path—this career—that I have envisioned, along with the thousand other lawyers that are called to the Nigerian bar each year, is what I truly want. The problem is, this tension—this nagging voice—stays tucked away in a quiet corner of my mind until moments that truly matter.

    Moments like when I’m about to stand before a sea of black-and-white-wearing gents and have my five minutes of fame. Or shame. But my mind fixates on the latter. Suddenly, I start to think of who is smiling at me, who isn’t, and why. Then, the thoughts drift to whether they are staring at my figure and judging whether it fills out my tight black skirt, wondering why my figure is the number 5 rather than the number 8. I’m cursing myself for choosing to wear the skirt today of all days, instead of the loose, pleated one that earns me a warm “Sister Amaka” from Sanisa whenever I walk into the faculty.

    I manage to regain a semblance of control and wrestle my attention back to the present. The next thought that pops up is which one of the stern-faced men in black suits—the panel—will throw a question at me—a question that will throw me off the balance I’m managing to cling to, out the window, with the burglary proof flying out with me.

    The absurdity of wondering why I’m the second person called when my surname starts with O makes a bitter laugh rise in my throat. My shaky legs carry me to the front of the hall, a silent plea escaping my lips for my worn-out soles to hold strong, to not give, to not have the last laugh. Not right now. At least. 

    Every thought except the one I should be focusing on—my internship defence, which I spent all night rehearsing in front of the mirror, the wall, and even the mirror with my bedspread draped over it—floods my mind. But here I am, my mouth already blurting out where I interned and the fact that the experience was “more observational than participatory.” I see some heads nodding in agreement, but their faces remain a blur. Still, this tiny acknowledgement fuels a surge of confidence, and my feet feel a little more grounded on the linoleum.

    But a new anxiety creeps in: the fear of my tongue twisting and betraying me with a grammatical blunder. This time, not before a handful of classmates, but the entire faculty, junior colleagues included. Relief washes over me as the words start flowing effortlessly, like a waterfall. I even manage to sprinkle in a few jokes, and, to my surprise, they laugh. 

    As I conclude, I’m met with thunderous applause. I bow, attempting a discreet exit. But the Dean calls me back and asks a few more questions like, “Who was your assistant in the crowd that prompted you at some point when you forgot a word to use?”, and everyone is laughing because no one comes forward when he says he has a prize for the person. I start to wonder why he has a prize for the person, but not me. Then he asks everyone to give me another round of applause and I return to my seat, amid cheers. 

    The weight is finally off my chest, the nagging voice silenced. But in its place is something more sinister: a  rewind-and-replay voice that compartmentalises every bit of my performance, though this one runs in the background like those data-draining apps on my phone.

    I sit back and watch the others go out one by one, oozing every bit of tension I and the predecessor must have manifested, and I’m smiling, grateful for how quickly the cup passed from me to them. Then, I realise it’s the word I’ve been searching for:  the cup. The phrase, rather. It’s a bigger umbrella term  than tension. Tension is the wine bottle umbrella I carry around in my tote bag, but ‘the cup’ is the bigger umbrella; the type those POS operators you meet at every five-minute walking distance sit under, come rain or shine.

    Blessing Obiahu is a literary enthusiast and law student at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Her work has been featured in the 2021 Nigerian Students’ Poetry Prize anthology, Black but Famous (now Kaassa), Loana Press, Challenging the Writers, and forthcoming in Anarchist Fictions Journal. She is also the founder of D’LitReview, a literary website, and works as an SEO content writer.

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • Famished – Ikechukwu Henry

    Life’s bitterness persists, an unrelenting stream of woes akin to a newborn’s initial grasp on a mother’s breast – feeble and uncomprehending. The weight of its despair becomes truly apparent only when you venture into the once bustling Ụmụdi market, tasked with getting the cooking ingredients carefully whispered into your ears by your mother. “Buy a  packet of Maggi seasoning, three bulbs of onions, a bounty of catfish, and the modest elegance of periwinkles,” her words lingered, albeit with a painful residue as her hands relinquished their grasp. 

    In your community, the specters of destitution and famine have taken residence, perched like a vulture upon a camwood tree. The community now embraces these grim companions with a reluctant cordiality. The once-vibrant Ụmụdi market, a hub of bustling commerce, has faded into a shadow of its former self. It evades description, for fear that articulating its decline would magnify its lamentable state.

    You navigate the labyrinthine market, sidestepping puddles left by last night’s rain, the same rain that had serenaded your sleep beneath the haven of your bed covers. The pre-dawn hush was heavy, laden with the scent of moistened earth, as the moon retreated, its light borrowed from the sun.

    “Mind where you dey go! If my wares fall, you’ll pay,” a vendor chides, rousing you from your reverie. 

    “Sorry, sorry.” Apologies fly from your lips as you survey the nearly deserted market.

    Your journey leads you to the onion lane, a sight you’ve grown accustomed to, yet this time only two sellers grace your vision—your customer excluded. Undeterred, you approach a Hausa vendor, perched upon a large mat adorned with an assortment of onions.

    “How much for this?” you gesture toward a cluster of four modest bulbs of onion, their dimensions scarcely surpassing those of limes. The vendor arches an eyebrow, his gaze darting across his array of onions as if the one you’ve indicated eludes his sight. A memory surfaces—your younger brother, Chidiebere, often played this same game when tasked with fetching specific ingredients for your mother’s culinary creations. His eyes would dance above the exact spot she pointed at, a charade that brought amusement to you and vexation to her. He would linger there for so long and your mom had to check whether he was subtracting the meat she intended to use to cook. 

    “Ebere, What’s holding you?” she would ask, her hands posed akimbo.

    “Mum, I can’t see the onions you said I should bring,” he would whine and your mom had to muffle her chuckle, staring at the onions that lay right between them.

    “Look at it here before I beat the hell out of you.” she would point but Ebere’s eyes would be wriggling above where your mother’s hand darted until she squatted his head to the exact spot the onions lay. 

    Much like Chidiebere, the vendor forces your hand: you squat, pointing once more to the elusive bulbs, mirroring your brother’s antics.

    “Ah, that one is five hundred nairas,” he finally concedes.

    You reel back, as if his words physically push you. Five hundred what, for these diminutive onions? “Isn’t it two hundred naira?” you attempt to negotiate, only to be met with a toothy grin, tarnished by the hue of tobacco-stained teeth—a mirror of the woman at the funeral, her annoyance concealing her smile.

    Money slips through hands like water through a sieve, a realization you’ve witnessed before. At the  burial, you elbowed your way to the front of the line for refreshments, your urgency akin to others jostling for their share. Fingers brushed against food, others’ as well as yours, and the sensation of salvation mingled with the fervor. When your turn arrived, the distributor bypassed you for a scrawny boy clutching his portion as if it were a lifeline. The boy’s hungry eyes and lips devoured the rice, drenched in red oil, his feeble frame a testament to the cruel sting of scarcity.

    You waited but she kept testing your patience as she served others without acknowledging you anymore.  “Aunty I dey wait na,” you reminded. 

    She bared her teeth. “ No be people I dey serve? You too big for this thing oh.” You clenched your fist, your ego crushed. So you left the burial ceremony without informing your mother of your departure. Muttering how biased she was. 

    “If you no want buy, abeg leave my shop. Na money we dey find for this country,” the hausa man reminds you, swatting off flies. You shake your head, fishing out one thousand naira notes from your pocket and handle it to him. He grabs it and lifts it higher as if it’s a telescope, a fake note.

    “I hope to say this money no be canta?” he says and tosses it into his bag.

    “Oga, you go give me jara oh. Five hundred naira no be beans.” you jokingly say as he hauls one more into it and stretches the tied onions to you. You take your change and trudge off. You hope the money your mother gave you would sustain all the things she needs for her cooking. Life no balance sha, you think.

    *****

    Hours earlier, before your mother dispatched you to the market.

    You were returning from the football field, when a piercing scream reverberated from your home. Instinct urged you to intervene, but familiarity bred a kind of apathy towards the tumultuous symphony within your household. Your father’s once-commanding voice berated, “You must be mad, Chinelo!”

    Does a drunkard discern the boundary between reality and his intoxicated musings? “Why haven’t you cooked since four hours ago?”

    Approaching the window, you observed your father’s wrath descending upon your mother, her arms protecting her face from the storm of his blows. His arms, vessels of inebriated strength, struck her with an unholy fury. It was a scene familiar to you, as regular as the rhythm of your heartbeat.

    In the corner, your younger brother sobbed, a witness to the macabre theatre of domestic discord. Your father, Amaobi, wielded his anger like a weapon, unleashing its venom on the most inconsequential provocations. His words stumbled out, hindered by the stammer that had long held him captive.

    He glared menacingly at her as she whimpered on the floor and then, he stormed off to his room, the echo of his rage trailing in his wake. He had always been a tempest on the precipice of eruption, his ire triggered by trifles. You watched your mother pick herself up from the floor and shuffle to the kitchen, her limbs carrying her weight with an air of resignation. Your brother followed, tears painting his face. But why? You had asked no one in particular severally. Had they spent a happy time together? In a gladsome ecstasy? 

    Why was she musing all this beating alone, spending her days sobbing in a pathetic depression? You pondered the reasons behind the torment your mother silently endured. What brought them to this point? Were there once moments of joy, now buried beneath the weight of resentment? Why did she bear the brunt of his aggression, spending her days imprisoned in this cycle of melancholy?

    Hours later, after your father had departed to engage in his vices, your mother received a call that elicited an ear-piercing scream. The phone call was met with a response that seemed to exude elation, an emotion incongruent with the news she had received. Her body language exuded an almost giddy anticipation as she wiped tears from her eyes, as though she had been praying for this very moment. 

    “Ọ bụ gịnị? What it’s?”

    Your mother sprawled on the floor. “A hit-and-run car ran over your father. He’s dead. ” Her eyes beamed with sunlit happiness, momentary giggling gliding off her lips as she dusted her dress and went inside. You realized in those eyes of hers shone a hunger for normality, for regalement, for comfort and succour. Her body longed for freedom from this den called marriage.

    Unbeknownst to you, her hunger for freedom must not be limited to emotional emancipation alone. Aside from that, there was hunger for survival.