So Long Now It’s Starting to Look Like Eternity
Professor Adeyemi discovered the problem with his wife’s lover on a Tuesday afternoon while grading differential equations in his office at the University of Lagos. The lover was sending her poetry. Bad poetry. This was significant. The quality mattered. He knew this because Ngozi had left her laptop open on the dining table, the screen still glowing with its blue reproach, and he wasn’t above reading other people’s emails when those people were married to him, and the laptop sat there like an invitation to minor betrayal.
Olanna
The harm done to Olanna wasn’t only to her body but to her world. A world already fragile, small, shaped by the kind of innocence that only thirteen-year-olds carry with them like a precious lantern.
It’s Something to do with Yusrah
Ambali looked at his daughter’s body — at the diagonal mark on her left cheek, the open gash on her forehead, her broken collar bone, and the cotton wool in her nose. Then, he looked at his wife as the police officers struggled to lift her off the floor.
My Godson
She kept coming to group meetings, even as her stomach grew. Some weeks, it grew faster. Other times, it didn’t. She sat through the sessions, barely shifting in her chair. When she stood up, she held her stomach with both hands. After some time, people stopped looking in her direction. Then, she stopped coming.
Fly
Ozichi and her mother, Chika, were storytellers. After dinner, while her father drank his soul away at Mama Nki Bar, Ozichi and her mother would sit under the watch of the moon and take turns telling stories. This was the ritual every night, unless Chika had a long day at St Joseph’s Hospital, where she worked as a cleaner. On such nights, she would lie in bed, fatigued, her legs stretched out for Ozichi to massage.
God’s Children
This morning, after Mass, when everyone had left the church, I sat in the confessional, confessing my sins to myself and to God.
Buried Voices
The morning Asiya left, Khairat didn’t cry. She didn’t know what to do or say. She stood with her grandmother and watched her mother walk away, just like that.
The Tiktoker and the Bandit
When Inna heard that TikTok was created by the Chinese, she said she had known all along that that stupid thing was the stuff of strong tsafi. Such magic could only be expected from the spirits of sin, the end of the world, and that they had possessed her daughter. That was even before I met the bandit on TikTok, before anything happened.
Ask My Father
Alphonse glanced at the rotting corpse, then turned away. He didn’t once pinch his nostrils despite the stench. His left hand was imprisoned in a sling. Blood dripped from a wound under what remained of his nose. One of his eyes was swollen shut.
Generation Z
I was born in 2000. I began primary school in 2003, moved to secondary school in 2011, and entered university in 2018. And so, somewhere inside the chaotic, bewildered tumult of the 2000s, I stepped into my otherwise auspicious twentieth year. Which, I suppose, makes me a typical child of the twenty-first century. Generation Z: […]