By noon the boy arrived the mouth of the grove. His eyes were dizzy, his vision unstable as the trees in front of him, as though having been stirred by some strong wind, appeared to dart gently sideways. But there was no wind. All that there was, was a dense and desolate sea of wild trees hinting at a vast unknown. He was searching for East, for the home on the lower planes, for Ndida. The sun was directly overhead, its burning rays sweeping across the hills in a steady stream. He knew he was lost, but for him, at that moment, were more pressing concerns. His stomach growled once again. He felt his sheepskin sac once again. The last ration of guavas were yet unripe and undoubtedly as sour as the grapes he’d eaten two days ago, and from which he’d acquired a running stomach.

The event was still as fresh as a dove in his mind, and yet without inhibitions he dug into his sac for a guava, but just then, from amidst a particular set of stout trees emerged a low, almost subdued cackle. The boy, usually quick and alert to the workings of the wild, but this time overwhelmed and distracted, froze at his feet and watched as a clan of hyenas slowly began to make their way out of the forest, each one of them cackling and jeering. His right hand was still in his sac, a pair of guavas equally frozen at the tip of his fingers. He knew better than to look away. Better to face death in the face than to die no differently from the common prey. From all angles the hyenas began to encircle him, each one of them cackling louder than the next.

The boy still hadn’t moved. And as the hyenas neared an unexpected thought began to fill his mind. Before that moment, from his heels all the way up to the crown of his head, he felt the steady flow of dread build, and with it all the usual accompanying sensations. But now without warning, either in consent to the fatal blow that fate appeared to have dealt him, or perhaps merely out of exhaustion, the boy felt a sudden stillness wash over him. And in that stillness, he thought of his mother, but this time, rather than dwell on the events of the recent past, of her trial and eventual burning at the village square, he saw, in his mind’s eye, for the first time, an image of her he had no clear recollection of. It was as though, without any will of his, his mother had wandered the broken landscapes of his heart, and without warning, had stirred in him an unintended apparition. He still was determined not to move, and so kept his gaze fixed on the still jeering beasts when, equally sudden, the hyenas stopped in their tracks as what seemed like a dark cloud began to stretch across the sky, casting a blanket of shadow on the fields. Both boy and beast stood fixed on the spot. The hyenas, as if suspicious of a ploy by the boy to distract them, kept their gaze on him, each one of them cackling and threatening to attack but somehow refraining themselves as the shadows grew denser. It was towards the end of December, and so the boy knew better than to expect rainfall in the harmattan.

Soon the sun was no longer overhead, neither was it across the horizons but hidden somewhere behind the immense, foreboding blanket which, like broken ceilings was starting to draw even closer to the fields. One of the older hyenas was the first to look upwards. And with an unexpected, timid cry, it made to retrace its steps, but instead met the unassuming resistance of a younger beast behind it. Just then, as it made to return its gaze upwards, as if to confirm what it had initially seen, from amidst the clouds came descending, with unmatched force, a raven with its feet aimed directly at his face. Once the bird had landed, it planted its beak further into the hyena’s bleeding eyes, digging the sturdy ball of tissue into its socket before fleeing just in time to return for another blow.

The aerial assault had begun.

Raven after raven, each one of them charging like a bolt of lightning against the enemy. Following their captain they first launched feet wise into the faces of the larger predators. The smaller ones, those of whom had not yet fled the scene, were rather picked up and displaced, some of them dashed against the trunks of large trees, some of them thrown from heights against their bigger compatriots. Out there in the fields was a violent clash of shrieks and cackles. This was not war. Neither the boy nor the hyenas — not even the ravens knew this, for behind this aerial attack stood a lore both sacred and ancient. Adaptation. A science the boy would not come to learn until he arrived Ndida. But now he’d taken refuge atop the branches of a large oak tree from where he watched the onslaught. There was only one way East — through the forest. And so while the first constable, consisting of about a hundred ravens, launched their offensive against the disoriented hyenas, a second group of nearly a thousand plunged like a dark, swift cloud into the inner recesses of the jungle for a quick reconnaissance. As they moved, the terrestrial shook. Both prey and predator, all of them scampering, all of them united by fear of what seemed to them a force of nature in action. Back at the front the hyenas were as yet uncoordinated, but fueled by venomous rage latched out uncontrollably at the enemy and suffered each time. Again this was not war. There were no equals. By now half the hyenas had lost their eyes and were roaming about in anguished circles. The lesson was however still lost on the other half. They continued to claw at their enemy, until eventually, by sheer chance one of the ravens fell to the ground as three hyenas reflexively made to pounce on it, but just in time, the first constable reemerged from the forests to rescue their comrades. A third constable, consisting of five ravens, still hadn’t landed throughout the duration of this battle. They were Seers. Grand Ravens marked by their hollow eyes. The lore holds that in the brief window between the end of the harmattan and the start of the rainy season, they could see time flow in all directions, but could never interfere. Ndida was still a long way off and already, the sun had slowly begun to descend westwards. Recognizing this, the birds rallied round and, with little efforts dissipated the rest of the hyenas.

All the while the boy watched from atop the oak tree, partly afraid, partly confused at the ensuing scene. The crime for which his mother had been accused was this: she had no soul. Multiple witnesses had come against her. All of them citing this or that instance when, against tradition they’d seen her warg into a crow or lamb or butterfly. Mere speculations borne from fear. Her fortune had merely misaligned, and in a series of poor judgments, she’d found herself caught in a conspiracy.

By the time the hyenas had all been vanquished and the path through the forest made secure, the ravens came twirling in their numbers around the oak tree, so that the boy instinctively got their message. It was past four in the afternoon and soon dusk would begin to set over the hills. The boy climbed down the tree. Again the birds broke in three constables, the first group heading out ahead of him, the second gathered in a cloud above him; and the third, the Seers, positioned remotely from the other two. And so, trusting in the guidance of this unusual legion of avian warriors, the boy, with new found courage, matched eastwards.

Dedicated to Chidi…

After all these years, I still find myself returning, time and time again, to that night, and what the calabash woman said to me.

We sat together by the entrance of a wooden kiosk; a dense cloud was slowly stretching across the sky, and from time to time, they let up a network of patches through which moon beams spilled briefly into the city before being swallowed up again.

We spoke and watched the interplay of night and weather, and at some point, following a brief lull in our conversation, she began to speak to me of the human heart.

She said it was like a cover of dense cloud stretching in the moments before a storm, and that if we were lucky enough to look closely, we’d catch glimpses of a person’s pain squeezing its way through the patches of that cloud. But only if we were lucky enough to see it.

As we spoke, she reached in a corner for a calabash, placed it on a table and then set it spinning. The first few times she tried, the calabash spun shortly, and after a few seconds, lost its momentum and settled on its side.

“Don’t mind me, it’s what I do,” she said, smiling. “I spin calabashes for a living.”

I smiled and nodded. I thought of questioning her further on that, and was even about to, when she spun the calabash again, and this time, it went on spinning for a while longer than before, so that as I watched, it was hard for me to pick a specific point on its smooth surface, and the calabash, though spinning, appeared almost static, as if held in place by some undetermined force of inertia.

I continued to look at it, until at some point, a beam of moonlight trickled down, disappeared, and before me, in that calabash, I saw my past.

I saw a timeline of all the people I’d known and lost to time and a failure on my part to see the hints of their pain in those moments when they’d shown it to me. I saw friends and past lovers, their pain floating unrecognized in a small space between us. I saw these things, until eventually, as if arriving at a natural conclusion, I saw L.

And as I did, I wondered if in those times we were together, I’d missed the signs of her pain because they’d appeared in streaks too subtle for me to recognize. I thought of her eyes and how, in the moments when she stared too long into space, they’d have a dim glow about them that appeared to me like a pair of fireflies either coming alive at the early stages of birth, or careening close to their end.

I thought of these things, and I felt at once that perhaps that dim glow was a hint of her pain calling, struggling to reach me, but failing every time.

The night before she left me, I caught that glow again as we rode together in the backseat of an old taxi car.

When we got in, we saw that the lights were broken and that the car jerked back and forth as it made attempts at a start, but we’d waited too long for a taxi and so had to make do with what we’d found.

Finally the car kicked to a start and we began to move. Halfway through the ride, I made a joke about the missing rear-view mirror and she laughed. We both laughed, the driver joined in, and after some time, we all settled into a quiet. That’s when we drove underneath a stretch of streetlights and I saw, for a brief moment, that tiny glow, that beacon floating at the fringes of its end.

A year later, she called one evening and asked to meet somewhere. The tone of her voice told me it was urgent and that she was probably in some type of danger.

I got there. A busy area not too far removed from a bus stop we both knew. I called, texted. No response. I hung around for a while — ate a snack, read a magazine to pass the time — but eventually, as night came, I went back home.

In the years following that day, the calls continued. And each time, she’d describe a known place and ask me to hurry. Each time I’d show up, but she’d be nowhere around the agreed upon location.

That’s how I met the calabash woman that night. I’d received a call earlier with the same panicked tone and a request to meet at a popular joint. This time when I got there, L called. She said she could see me and even described how I was dressed.

And so I waited, until the storm began to threaten and I had to find a shed from where I could keep a look out for her. I looked around, until I found a good-enough corner in a small kiosk where the calabash woman sat calm and alone, as if contemplating on some deep, personal matter.

We got talking after a while. And when the storm began to recede and no longer threatened, and moonlight resumed its unhindered blend into the nocturnal flow of the city, we spoke about that, too. About how a receding storm was like a person baring the heart completely to let the pain spill out from it. And as we spoke then, L called again.

“I can see you,” she said, and she went on to describe how I was seated next to a woman by the entrance of a kiosk; a table, a small shed and a spinning calabash.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

She went silent for a while. I looked around for her.

“You won’t find me,” she said, then paused for a moment. I heard her breathe through the phone, and between each spaced pause, the traffic noise fell through, lingered, then disappeared.

She continued. “I’m trying,” she said, “but this is the best I can do.”

“What do you mean?”

And no sooner had I asked that question than I understood. I understood that wherever she was, a new kind of storm was building up inside her. I thought of clouds growing dense within, and moonlight struggling to peek through in the phone conversation we were having.

I tried to speak to her about it, that I understood, but she hung up and turned off her phone. I looked around again to see if I could find her somewhere, and I did. She was walking the sidewalk opposite the main road, her body swaying as always as she went on, her head tilted to the left at a slight angle.

I called out to her and tried to catch up, but between the traffic and the flow of people rushing along the sidewalk, I lost her.

When I returned to the shed to say goodbye to the calabash woman, she too was no longer there, but the calabash, appearing static, as if held down by some force of inertia, was still spinning.

In the years following that night, when a storm threatens and a dense cloud builds across the sky, I think of the human heart and of pain squeezing through like moon beams trickling, searching for a kindred spirit to bear witness.

I think too of the woman and her calabashes. I wonder where she might be and if she still spun them for a living. I think of these things, until inevitably, as if arriving at a natural conclusion, I think of L.

She calls from time to time. The same panicked tone. The same request to meet her somewhere familiar. And in all those times, I oblige. I dress up and go out to meet her, knowing well that I never will.

For me, it’s penance. My atonement. My way of telling her that I finally understand. That like her, it’s the best I can do.

The Chance Encounter was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The more I think about the construction man, the more convinced I am that deep down, at the far reaches of our cores, a type of pool sits unmoved, quiet, it’s form held in place by its own inertia.

It took a long time for me to see this. To understand that that pool is a primal longing buried deep inside us, sitting patiently, waiting to be stirred by an external force. And that when that happened, and the ripples emerged, they’d stop at nothing until they reached the source of that disturbance.

It was many years ago since I met him for the first time. And that night, as we spoke, he struck me as someone caught in a tragic story of redemption; a type of story in which a resolution was always a breath away, but was forever eluding the main character, so that at every moment, he was always arriving too late to catch the silver linings of his life.

He told me he’d worked at a large construction firm for twenty-five years. In all those years, he said, he’d never seen a single building collapse, until a year prior to our meeting. He said when it happened, tests were carried out, analyses done. The results showed that the collapse was caused by an estimation error in the tensile strength of the building’s pile foundation.

His job on the day of the collapse was to carry steel rods from a truck to the entrance of the building. He was only a few meters away when it happened. He said the shock of the collapse overrode his senses, so that he lost his balance at once and fell unconscious.

An ambulance carried him off. Tests were carried out, analyses done; and in the end, he was deemed unharmed and free to return to work.

Three weeks passed and one night he sat at the balcony of his apartment, smoking a cigarette and listening to the sound of the city. That night, as with other nights, he said the air was heavy with mist and the rattling of trains and the voices of noisy neighbours. He listened to the city that night, until at some point, the city fell silent.

And in that silence hung a memory.

He thought of that day at work. Of steel rods and the shadows of an error spreading through the building like a virus. The memory lingered in his mind until he felt his breath quickening, a dark cloud slowly growing around his thoughts and wrapping everything in a blanket of shadow.

He watched the building fall in his mind, piece by piece, and just as it hit the ground, he collapsed again.

When he awoke later that night, he felt something like the final traces of a memory lingering somewhere at the corner of his mind. It was like the voice of a bird trapped underground, chirping away with laboured efforts in the dark and silence.

As we spoke, he tilted his glass towards his face and looked inside it. I imagined him watching time and memories swim in a minuscule at the base. After a while, he shook the glass, swigged the remainder of his drink, and then continued his story.

He asked me if I’d ever worked in a construction firm before. I answered in the negative. He asked if I’d ever been in a noisy place; heavy machines pounding, traffic bustling. I answered in the affirmative.

“I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, staring blankly into space, “but I’ve always been able to find a kind of rhythm buried in the noise, whether it’s machines pounding or traffic bustling. Most times at work, I’d be nodding my head and moving my feet to the tune of Coldplay’s Adventures of a Lifetime coming from the diesel generator, or to Claude Debussy’s Reverie playing softly in the background of a stone crusher.”

The man took a pause. He was about to continue with his story when he stumbled over his words, went silent again, then continued speaking after a while.

“But since the collapse,” he said, “it’s been different. I no longer hear that music, not like before anyway. Whenever I think of the building and the rubble and sound of chaos digging into the ground, I’d hear the lingering melody of a song emerge from all the noise. I’d try hard to concentrate, but all I’d catch are its final notes already ebbing away.”

I asked what the name of the song was, but he shook his head and said he hadn’t a clue.

That’s why he quit his job. For him, there was no point working if he couldn’t have his music. He said he’d been traveling the country, making stops at different cities, listening to the sound of traffic and the rattling of trains and noisy neighbours, hoping that one day, he’d find his music again.

Eventually time passed, and around midnight, he stood up, shook my hand and left.

Some minutes after he was gone, I went outside the bar; a dense heat hung over the city and a lazy crowd floated the sidewalk — all of them shuffling, moving back and forth like paper balls at the feet of lonely children.

I wondered if there was some type of rhythm to that, too. If between the shuffling of feet and the dull conversations, a type of music lay buried, waiting to be discovered by a man whose many years of handy work had taught him to listen past the noise in search of some form of meaning.

But it was only recently that I came to realize that perhaps what he heard in his mind was not merely a song, but a yearning for something deeper, yet simple. Perhaps it was something he couldn’t find in all the traffic and the machines, because it was something he already had.

Perhaps it was a pool, which, having sat gently at his core, had been stirred and triggered, ripples pulsing, in search of a source that was already within itself. And it was not until I met another man that I realized this, but that’s a story for another time.

The Sound of a Longing was originally published in Lit Up on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My friend once told me about a girl he met on the bus.

Before he got to the point, though, he said: “you know those places we usually talk about?”

We were together at a pasta restaurant. I was looking through the kitchen’s slightly parted doors. And between the clinks and clanks and the comings and goings, I tried to listen to the chatter of busy cooks floating between the steam and aroma.

“Hey, did you hear what I said?”

I nodded, then said: “wait, what places do we usually talk about?”

“You’re an idiot,” he said.

“Fair enough,” I said, “but we talk about lots of places, you know? Just remind me which ones?”

“You know those small villages we only get to see from inside the bus? The places with the huts and hamlets?”

“Yeah, yeah…sure.”

“Well yesterday,” he continued, “I met this girl…”

“Go on…”

“We sat next to each other, got talking. We spoke about everything, from movies to music to books. You know that passage about Hatsumi’s death in Norwegian Wood? She knows it by heart.”

Doesn’t everyone? I wondered.

“Anyway, man,” he continued, “so we get to this stop by this small village, huts and everything. The girl points to one of the huts and says “that’s my home.” I thought she was bullshitting and all, but she got off, waved at me, then entered the hut.”

“You sure she wasn’t an NGO worker?”

“I’ll never know, man. But I think I like the version of the story where she actually lives in that village.”

He took a pause, then said:“it’s a bit sad though, you know?”

“How so?” I asked.

“The fact that we don’t expect a girl who lives in a small village to have read Norwegian Wood. Have you thought about that?”

I thought about it. In my mind I saw a girl go home to the familiar warmth of family. I thought of a girl in a small village whose heart played host to stories about people in far off countries, to music and books she loved, regardless of where they came from.

I once sat next to a man in a bus. We were travelling from Ekiti to Abuja. For the most part of the journey, we said nothing to each other — except for the regular request to adjust windows or tilt luggage certain ways.

But when we stopped at a joint for lunch, we got talking.

“It’s been months since I saw my family,” he said at some point.

We were at a small bukka that sold roasted yam, plantain and fish.

“Why?” I asked.

“Business.”

He was in the business of moving timber from the south to the rest of the country.

“I have a ten year old daughter,” he said, “when she was little, and I was away for too long, she’d have trouble remembering my face. In those times, my wife figured it’d be better if once in a while, she taught our daughter what her dad looked like. Can you believe that? A daughter having to learn what her dad looked like? But see, actually, it worked.”

He took a pause, took his time to chew through a piece of roasted plantain.

“It’s a bit sad though, you know?” He said.

“How so?”

“I mean the fact that a child has to learn her father’s face from pictures. Like I said, it worked — but there’s still something off about it.”

He paused, stared into space a while as regret built around the contours of his face.

“My dad used to have this mole on his right shoulder. I remember touching it as a kid and thinking insects lived inside it. I don’t have a mole on my shoulder or anything, but what if I did? My daughter can’t know that from pictures.”

After a while, we returned to the bus and continued our journey. We spoke a little more, but eventually settled into that shared, familiar silence.

About two hours later, we reached a stop in Kwali. He got up, “this is my stop,” he said, then shook my hand.

As I watched him leave, it occurred to me that in that bus, we were a gathering of people bound for homes that meant something different to each of us.

There he was, a man going home to a family with its own blend of smiles shared over familiar bowls of soup and a touch of its own problems. I thought of a daughter who missed her father and a chance at tracing the contours that lined his face.

I thought of those things because that was the best I could do.

Think, imagine, invent.

It’s overwhelming when you think of it. The fact that as far as homes go, we’d mostly feel weird in the places others feel most comfortable in. I imagined two people switching homes for a day, and the ensuing awkwardness that was expected to follow, to say the least. And in that, I realized home isn’t just huts or mansions.

I realized home is wherever we feel most welcome. And if one feels welcome in a small hut in a small village somewhere, why should that surprise anyone?

Sometimes when I’m walking down Birom street, and I see the myriad of houses with the streams of light spilling out of them, or listen to the blend of television and family drama seeping out windows, it occurs to me that all of these houses play homes to a myriad of people, offering them a warmth I can only imagine — and that I’ll never know what it feels like to share in that warmth.

What does it feel like to go home to a daughter of ten? What does it feel like to read Norwegian Wood in a hut somewhere? These are things I have no direct experience of. Not yet, perhaps.

And in the same stretch, I wonder what it feels like to walk this same Birom Street, to watch the streams of light spilling out of houses, to listen to the blend of television and family drama seeping out windows, and yet have no place to call home.

What does it feel like to have home sit at the recess of one’s mind as distant memories?

These are things I have no direct experience of. These are things I can only imagine, because that’s the best I can do.

Of Homes and Distant Places was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the second and final part of Adaptation. If you haven’t already, please spare some time to check out part one here, thanks. :)

She starts towards him as he walks, thinks of calling out to him, but decides against it.

And as her figure sways in a trail behind him, the occasional after-rain breeze floating the sidewalk, she wonders what she’d do if he turned and found her, but decides it doesn’t matter.

And after some time, they’re both seated in the library at a good distance opposite each other. As the evening edges by, she steals quiet glances at him, wondering whether or not to speak to him.

It continues like this for days, until she naturally warms her way into his line of sight. They become familiar with each other’s presence in the library, almost regarding it as a quiet, important component of their everyday.

And between their shared silence and half gazes, something squeezes its way and sparks a warmness between them. With time, that warmness eases gently into a mosaic forged on a type of distant familiarity.

Days after a brief heat period disappeared, a new harmattan season arrived on a December evening.

That day a faulty wiring caused a fire outbreak in the ceiling of the second floor. The fire spread through the ceiling to the cables within the walls. And as everyone made their way out the library, smoke drifting in heavy clouds, they heard the voice of a woman trapped in a room on the second floor.

The fire fighters showed up, put out the fire and retrieved her. Her eyes were red and wet from smoke; she sat in the backseat of the fire truck, coughing and spitting into a damp towel.

After a while, everyone began dispersing in small groups, with Ify, Austin and a library staff forming one.

They were walking underneath a stretch of palm trees. The path was tarred and bordered by a continuous line of concrete bricks punctuated around the edges by patches of half-withered grass.

The staff took a turn to the left just before they reached a curved path.

“Take care, be safe,” she said to them.

Austin and Ify nodded, thanked her, continued their walk in silence.

When they reached a split road, with one leading to the girls’ dormitory and the other to the boys’, Ify turned to Austin, “take care, be safe,” she said to him.

He said the same.

He watched her go, her turtle-neck top tucked tightly into her flayed cotton skirt, her hair collected in a tight upward position.

As her image dwindled into the distance, he watched the tip of her skirt sway to the rhythm of a slight breeze. At that moment, he thought of butterflies and windy afternoons. He thought of a thing whose beauty rested in its harmony, in its merging of parts to form a whole.

It’s two days after the fire.

Austin’s grating tomato and pepper on a small kitchen table. Arranged neatly on one corner are small plates containing sliced onions, garlic and nutmeg. Two pots sit side by side to the left. The larger one is fuming from boiling spaghetti, the other from beef.

He grates the tomato and pepper into a granular paste, then collects the spaghetti into a basket. As the gas from the stove begins to fill the room, he slides open the curtains and then turns up the volume of the radio when Fela Kuti’s lady begins to play.

He returns to the kitchen table, and by the time he’s done cooking, Mike Okri’s time na money is concluding on the radio.

He grabs a plate, turns three and half spoons of spaghetti in it and sprinkles a little stew on top.

A knock comes on the door. He opens, finds Ify by the corridor. Her hair is as before, tight and collected in an upward position.

“Hi, you…does this belong to you?” she hands him a hardcover text book. “I found it on your desk when I went back to get my stuff.”

Austin thanks her. “Would you like to come in?” he asks, “I made spaghetti.”

They’re both seated at a small table.

Ify takes a forkful of spaghetti, begins to twirl it until more strands are caught in a ball.

“This is nice,” she says.

Austin smiles, nods.

He goes to the window. It’s a typical harmattan morning — cold, dry, melancholic. From a small crate on the floor, he retrieves two bottles of Limca, hands one to Ify.

“Why do you have a garden in your room?” she asks, peering through its netted gauze.

“For butterflies,” Austin says.

“Butterflies?”

“I like to raise butterflies. They like to grow on the branches of plants.”

“Can I touch them?”

He undoes a series of knots at the edges until one face of the garden comes off. With his right hand, he begins to rummage through the base, until he recovers a handful of dead butterflies, then proceeds to lay each of them in the wooden container.

“They’re dying,” he says to her, “something’s killing them.”

It’s past midnight and he’s dreaming of butterflies.

He’s watching from his bed as a swarm of them emerge from the ceiling. They’re floating the room in a constant stream, colliding with each other, and as they do, some of them begin to drop to the floor as their wings fall off. After a while, they all drop to the floor. The air grows clear and the ground fills with dead butterflies.

Austin awakes and goes to the window. A strong wind rages, carrying snatches of tree branches bending and stretching in the cold breeze.

As the night begins to quiet down, he starts towards the bed, but stops halfway on hearing from afar, the dying embers of an owl’s call as it leaves the male dormitory. He returns to the window and continues to listen to the lingering blend of harmattan, bird and night.

And not too long, an owl arrives and settles on a cloth line in the female dormitory. And as the wind rises and falls, the owl slips calls too that fall and rise in interludes.

Ify awakes and goes over to the window. The owl flies away. And after a while, Austin hears the faint sounds of an owl approaching the male dormitory. He’s not sure if it’s the one he’d heard before, but remains by the window, listening to the bird as it conveys back and forth, hints of dreams and secret wishes, as they bleed and flow into the night.

Before she returns to bed, Ify opens her purse and recovers a matchbox. She opens it halfway, feels with the tip of her index finger, the soft contours of a butterfly’s belly, then shuts it and goes to bed.

“I was eleven when I first ran away from home,” Ify says to Austin.

They’re alone at the school theatre, their voices travelling in dull thuds about the semi-circle of the place.

“I remember it clearly,” she continues, “I packed a micky mouse back pack full of little things: pen and paper, hair combs, four packs of Nasco biscuits and short cake, things like that. I even stole money from my mother’s purse. I was leaving and never coming back, who cared if she’d be mad about a few missing bucks? So I jumped into a bus and just sat there. It felt quite strange, sitting there, watching the comings and goings of passengers, and not having any destination in mind. When the bus reached its final stop, I alighted and tried to get on a train. But you see, the ticket man was a real hard ass. ‘Why are you travelling alone?’ ‘Where are your parents?’ ‘Do you have a passport?’ There I was, eleven years old and completely ignorant of railway travel. My head was swimming from all the questions, and before I knew it, I was in tears.

“And as I turned to walk away, one man called my name from behind. Startled, I turned, but did not recognize him. He mentioned my father’s name, said they used to be classmates. ‘Come, are you hungry?’ he asked. I stared blankly for a while, but followed him to a nearby restaurant. After eating, we both got on a bus back home.”

She stares into space a while, then turns to Austin.

“So you see, my first attempt at running away was a total disaster.”

“I agree,” Austin says, “what did your mother do about the missing money?”

“To my surprise, she didn’t notice. At least she didn’t mention it. She wasn’t even mad I’d tried to run away. She wasn’t moved, and that made me angry. So I planned another escape, this time I made sure to avoid stupid train stations. Four months later, I left home for good. I took an out-of state-bus to Port Harcourt. And after sleeping in kiosks for some days, I followed a woman to an orphanage.”

She takes another pause. “So I guess in a sense, you could say I killed my mother.”

Austin takes off his glasses and dabs his eyes with the edge of a handkerchief.

“Are you crying?” Ify asks.

He snickers, shakes his head.

They go out the sidewalk. The sun is slowly sinking in the west, casting warm, sparse shadows of a group of melina trees. They walk in silence as a slow breeze rustles lazy leaves, their dry surfaces screeching against the asphalt.

Austin glances to his right at Ify. She’s wearing a short, sleeveless gown and tennis shoes. Her hair is packed in the usual position. Her slender arm appears to him devoid of hair.

They reach an orthogonal main road. And as they stand and watch, they can hear the hollow sounds of the wind squeezing through the traffic noise. It feels to Austin like that hollow wind is digging into him. A chill runs through him and he can feel that wind coursing, mingling in his bloodstream, changing directions here and there, until it finally settles in a small corner of his heart.

And so he’s standing there, hollow space in heart. What he does not know, is that he stands right now at the threshold between two possible outcomes. That that space in his heart is the chasm between a life of loneliness, and one where such things have no meaning.

And as the traffic clears, they both cross the main road to the sidewalk on the other end.

It’s past seven in the evening when they reach Austin’s room. And as they settle in its warmth, Ify, standing and resting her back against the wall, her arms folded in front of her, says: “Tell me, Austin, with everything I told you earlier about running away, do you think I’m broken?”

Austin stares at her, then into space a while, before attempting a response.

“I think everyone is broken in their own way,” he says to her.

“I think that’s total bullshit,” Ify says.

“But it’s true.”

Ify shakes her head. “Tell me, Austin, what do you know about pain?”

A knock comes on the door, they both ignore it. And after a while, the knocking stops and a white envelop slips underneath the door.

Austin picks it up, starts to unfold it, but stops halfway.

“The mail guys are fucking idiots,” he says, tracing the linings of the envelop stamp with his right thumb.

“What are you talking about?”

“This letter’s from my mother,” he says, “she sent it six months ago.”

“And?”

“She died two months ago,” Austin says, sitting on the floor.

Ify joins him, her right hand over his shoulders.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Austin.”

A long silence runs between them.

“Do you want to read it now?”

Austin shakes his head. Silence returns. Their breaths mingle in the warmth of the room. And in that warmth, their heartbeats unleash pulses that course through their time and space, moves back and forth between them, and for a moment there, in the deep recesses of their minds, it feels to them like they can be okay after all.

“Hey, I just had a bright idea,” Austin says.

“Okay?”

“Let’s go to one of those reggae bars downtown. How about that?”

Ify beams. “Ya man! We can listen to Bob Marley and smoke weed all night, man.”

They both laugh, head outside.

“We’re going to get lost,” Ify says, “you sure we’re in the right street?”

“Uh well…”

“Well?”

“It has to be around here somewhere. Aha! There!”

“That’s an arcade,” Ify says.

“Oh…how about a little mario?”

“I want to smoke weed, man,” Ify says.

“Stop doing that.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s follow those guys over there,” Austin says, “they look like stoners.”

“They could be kidnappers.”

“Or stoners,” Austin says.

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive qualities.”

“Okay.”

An hour later, they find a reggae bar downtown. As they approach the counter, the waiter says to Austin: “Does your girlfriend know she looks like Sade Adu?”

Ify smiles. The man serves them drinks on the house. A little while later, he offers them weed on the house. And sure enough, between the drinking and the smoking, Bob Marley’s is this love comes on. And as it plays, Ify picks her skirt by its tip; she and Austin, locking arm in arm, proceed to have the most awful dance of the night.

It’s the eve of Christmas.

They’re walking underneath the same stretch of palm trees. A silver moon is in the sky, its light trickling down the line of concrete bricks.

They stop as they reach the split road.

“Can we sit over there a little?” Ify says, pointing to a large mass of rock underneath a moringa tree.

“Look at us,” she says, “it’s the eve of Christmas and we have no place to go.”

“A day in the lives of two orphans,” Austin says.

A wasp comes buzzing in front of him, he claps at it, but misses. The wasp goes away, returns a little later; Ify claps and kills it.

“I stole one of your butterflies,” she says.

“I know,” returns Austin, “they were 40 before you visited.”

“It seems a little crazy, but when I held that butterfly for the first time, I felt deep in my heart like I understood it, like I knew exactly what it was feeling. I mean, I know it was dead, but it was like it was reaching out to me, telling me its story. Do you see what I mean?”

Austin shakes his head. “I’m not sure,” he says.

“My sister killed herself ten years ago. When I saw her, I felt sad, really sad, but deep down, I understood. Deep down I understood on a basic level her need for suicide. Not everyone has to go on suffering, you know? Some of us are okay beating against the tide every day, struggling, adjusting. But some of us decide it’s not worth it. You see what I mean now?”

Austin nods. “I think I do.”

“What if it’s the same with your butterflies?” Ify continues, “what if they figured living wasn’t worth the hassle?”

They go quiet for a while, she leans against his shoulders. “I think I love you,” she says.

“You think?”

“Well I’ve never loved anyone before, I can’t be sure yet.”

“Okay.”

“Can we go inside now?” Ify says.

They’re in Austin’s room. He dims the light and pulls her to himself, her chest to his chest. The friction sparks a warmth that begins to burn between them. Their hearts racing, their pulses interfere and reach the brink of cancelling out. He kisses her, she returns it. They unclothe each other and fall to the mattress. She’s wrapped in his arms until he too is wrapped in her arms, their sweat trickling down their skins unto the sheets. When he enters her, she shudders, and then he shudders too. Their bodies merged, they continue to convey back and forth, a blend of tremor and emotions, until the force ruptures from within them — and then they fall asleep.

It’s New Year’s Eve.

They arrive at the cemetery where Ify’s sister’s buried. Scattered here and there amid the graves are discontinuous patches of tall, dry grass. With a torchlight, they begin to search gravestones, until they find one marked:

Here lies Adaora, gentle and sweet. (1964–1979)

They allow silence go over them. And after some time, Ify turns to Austin.

“I heard you that night,” she says.

“What night?”

“The day of the last rain,” she says, “I was on the other side of the zinc partition.”

“You heard my conversation with the old woman?”

Ify nods. “Why are you afraid of losing yourself?”

“It’s hard to explain,” he begins, “but ever since I was a child, I’d been deeply attached to my mother. She taught me everything I know. I guess I’ve always felt that if she was gone, I’d be alone. I’d lose my sense of direction, until I wouldn’t be able to find my way back.”

They hold hands as a silence runs between them. And together, they listen to the sound of birds chirping from afar and the bustling noise of town dwellers awaiting the New Year.

“Do you love me?” Ify asks.

“I think I do.”

She smiles. “That’s okay, you know? I think that’s all we need. I think we can be okay.”

They walk to a stream running parallel to the cemetery. Stooping low, they begin gathering pebbles by the edge. When they gather one-hundred of them, they proceed to tossing them back into the stream one after the other.

What they don’t know is that back in Austin’s room, one butterfly is flapping its wings. It’s drifting quietly within the confines of the garden, waiting to be set free.

But here’s what they know: it’s 1989. They’re standing at the edge of time and stream. They’re lost in the world and in each other. They’ve both had their worlds broken, the debris drifting for a long time through time and space. And when they did not expect it, those debris settled into each other, slowly merging, until a new type of shape formed from them. And even now, they can see the cracks and linings engraved in that shape, but they know it’s okay.

And as they stand there, they hear from afar, church bells and town dwellers as they announce the arrival of a new year. Austin glances at his wrist watch.

It’s 12:00 am. It’s 1990.

Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

Adaptation [Part II] was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

His mother once said to him; do not get too close to the world. It’s a mirage; chase it too long and it takes you.

Her words sank into him.

When he was nine, he dreamt of his mother at table with an unknown boy. He watched from a distance as they ate in silence. Once in a while, they’d look out the window where he stood, but pay him no mind.

As the years went by, his dream recurred. And one day, when he was eleven, he saw the boy’s face. The boy was him.

It’s been ten years since his dream, but buried somewhere within him is a mortal fear. A fear that one day, if he were not cautious enough, he’d lose himself. He’d become like the boy in his dreams; alone, and watching from the outside.

His head is rested on the windowpane as the bus moves.

He’s watching small towns fade past the corner of his right eye, as long chains of sandstone ridges enter his vision. His eyes red and calm, he takes off his glasses and draws deep breaths of an air heavy with rain and memories.

From his left breast pocket, he retrieves a letter. He begins to unfold it, but stops halfway, leans sideways and returns to watching time slip past thick clouds and geology.

When the bus sways to a new lane, he unfolds the letter and his mother’s words begin to bleed into him.

My dear Austin,

How have you been? I’m so sorry I haven’t written to you in such a long time now. The cholera broke me for a while, but thank God I’m fine now. I hear the teachers might strike again. I hope they do, so you can rest a little — and so I can see you. I miss you, my sweet boy. Please let me know when you’re ready to visit, so I can prepare pounded yam and egusi soup for you, just as you like it.

I kiss you a thousand times.

P. S.: How are your butterflies? I hope they’re doing better now.

Another thousand kisses to you, my dear boy.

Love, mama.

October 15th; 1989.

Two weeks ago he travelled the same road in the opposite direction. He watched sandstones and small towns emerge and fade as the bus moved. He read the same letter then. His mother’s words traced a smile in his heart.

But when he got home that evening, she was dead. She’d died around past noon that day — about the same time he’d read her letter on his way home.

That night, he wept. He thought of the flow of time, and he wondered how he could ever know if he was headed in the right direction of it or not.

And now hours later the bus reaches its final stop. He alights and begins to stare at the bus’s windows. When he buried his mother, a part of him stayed with her. She was his link to the world, but now she too had become a mirage.

He’s still staring at the bus’s windows, childhood memories floating beneath his eyes. He wonders now if he’d become like the boy in his dreams; alone, and watching from the outside.

After a while he cleans his glasses and puts them back on, draws deep long breaths, then picks up his luggage, and walks away.

On December 31st; 1979, a young girl found her older sister’s body on the floor. Her hands were wrapped around her stomach and her body curved inwards. Her nails were broken and had strands of hair sticking out of them like deformed stick figures. A thick, pale liquid formed a small pool at the corner of her mouth, so that as the girl tilted her sister’s head, the liquid trickled down her face. And from her nose, a thick mass of mucus hung like stalactites. Her eyebrows were flared, the black of her eyes melted in the white of her eyes. The final ripples of her pain captured in the crests of her forehead’s folded skin.

On the floor was an empty bottle of rat poison.

On seeing this, the young girl lay on the floor beside her sister’s body.

The young girl was ten. Her name was Ify.

It’s been ten years now, and sometimes childhood memories still flicker across her mind. At an early age, she learned to purge the shadows cast by those dark childhood years.

She learned to write; to weave quiet words together, and with those words she forged a space for herself. In that space she told stories of people and death.

People for whom dying was not a sudden event, but a voluntary one.

It’s 10:30 in the morning.

She’s lingering by the doorsteps of her professor’s office. From time to time, she draws deep breaths of an air heavy with anxiety and polite conversation.

After a while, a young woman ushers her in.

The professor puts his newspaper down and lowers his glasses.

“Your work is too shallow,” he hands her a draft of her manuscript, “you don’t seem to appreciate the complexities of the main character. This is a real work of literature, not a ‘fantasy novel’.”

She nods, glances at the title page. It’s battered with red ink and a list of suggested readings.

“Scenes one to five are okay. But you would need to rewrite the whole of scenes six to fifty-three. Feel free to go through your draft for the rest of my corrections. That would be all.”

She starts towards the door, the man calls.

“Ify,” he says, “it’s your third draft now. You should take a break from adapting for now. Use the strike period as opportunity to think about the protagonist. Explore his feelings. How would you react if your own identity was stolen? Inside out is a complex work, so I have made a list of books you should read, they do a fine job of exploring the characters’ states of mind. I hope you find them useful.”

She nods, thanks him, leaves.

At an early age, Austin’s mother piqued his interest in science. She taught his mind to wander from stars and planets, to minerals and molecules. She taught him to read, and together, mother and son set out on several expeditions, discovering Newton and Kepler in local libraries.

As time went on, Austin’s mind wandered between pages, until one day, they settled on a picture book about butterflies. From that day he voyaged through gardens and bushes, watching butterflies mingle and drift in the breeze.

Watching them flap their wings gave him a strange type of sensation. A feeling he could not understand at the time.

And years later, when his mind drifts off to those windy afternoons, he gets that feeling again.

He still has no words for it, but the closest he gets, is that watching the wings come together from opposite ends, produced in him a yearning for a thing whose beauty rested in its harmony, in its merging of parts to form a whole.

And so it was only natural that he chose to study biology in university, with the intentions of becoming a Lepidopterist.

But now he’s holding dead butterflies.

Beside him is a medium-sized, makeshift garden. The base is loaded with loamy soil, on which grows a network of lilies. And sprinkled about the branches is an assortment of butterfly eggs and pupae.

It’d been so for weeks now. The butterflies would mature past the pupa stage, but die just before completing their cycle.

He picks them one after the other, examines them, lays them in a wooden container.

A knock comes on the door. He opens. The man at the door hands him a letter. Austin glances.

“But this was sent last week,” Austin says.

“Don’t blame me, I’m new,” the mailman says, “besides, you’re lucky, some people’s letters are over a month old.”

Austin shakes his head, shuts the door.

The letter’s from the school library. He’s to renew his card within seven days.

He’s halfway to the library when it begins to rain. He seeks shelter underneath one of the roofs of a chain of kiosks at the mini market.

The rain pours for a while, and time edges slowly into the evening. Austin’s mind wanders between butterflies and library cards. He wonders at that moment if he’s ever read an essay about monarch butterflies on National Geographic before. He tries to recall, but gives up. If he has, he thinks, it would have been easy to remember.

He’s leaning to his left against a zinc partition. His thoughts begin to settle, his mind slowing down in sync with the rain, when he hears rustling somewhere in the kiosk.

“Who’s there?” he asks.

The rustling ceases, and a woman’s voice cuts through the dark.

“It’s the last rain this year,” she says.

“How do you know?” Austin asks, straining to catch a sight of the woman.

She takes a pause. “I’m eighty seven years old,” she says finally, “that means I’ve seen eighty seven rainy seasons. Do you know anyone who’s eighty seven?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Me neither,” the woman continues, “it seems the older I get, the younger the people I know. When I was little, I knew a lot about old people. My mother told me lots of stories about them. Why they had grey hair, why their voices were calm but hoarse. She said the reason some old people in our village had hunched backs was because of the rain.”

“The rain?”

“Yes, the rain. She said long time ago, the rain got too heavy for the people of the village, so they got together to put an end to it. They stopped the rain, and for a while, things were good. But as time went on, the clouds got heavier and darker, without producing rain. With time, the clouds began to descend lower and lower, forcing people to bend their heads low as they walked. It went on for hundreds of years, and so generations of hunched people walked about the village, their backs curved outwards beneath the low dark clouds, never looking up. It seems silly now, but for a long time, I feared I’d grow old to become hunched, too.”

A quiet moment passes between them and mingles with the ebbing rain. The woman asks: “What do you fear the most?”

Austin thinks a while.

“Losing myself,” he says finally.

“Losing yourself?”

“I’m afraid that one day I’ll wake up and I wouldn’t be myself anymore. That somebody somewhere will take my place, and all I can do, is watch. I’d watch until I’d slowly slip away.”

Another pause runs between them, and Austin starts towards the exit.

“If you lose yourself,” the woman says, “become something else.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. You can be bird or sheep or woman. Everything is alike, because everything is nothing.”

Ify’s halfway to the library when it begins to rain. She seeks shelter underneath one of the roofs of a chain of kiosks at the mini market.

She’s leaning to her right; and as the rain pours, her mind wanders between the pages of her manuscript.

How would you react if your identity was stolen?

She thinks about that a while, then concludes it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for her.

As a gust of wind blows raindrops her way, she closes her eyes and allows her thoughts wander between the pages of her manuscript again. In her mind she sees a man walking a narrow road. He’s a silhouette of a man, and as he walks, the streetlights go off one after the other, until he gradually fades into the darkness.

The thought dissolves and her mind drifts off to that harmattan night, ten years ago. She’d fallen asleep beside her sister’s body. When she awoke, she found her mother wailing, her hands wrapped around her sister’s corpse.

She remembers feeling jealous at the time, a part of her wishing her mother’s arms were wrapped around her like they were around her sister.

When her mother noticed she was awake, her eyes flared, and from underneath her pain, rage crawled out of her.

“I always thought it’d be you,” she said to Ify in a a calm voice, “I wish it were you.”

And now as the rain begins to quiet down, the air begins to fill with shrieks, traffic noise and distant chatter. Ify rests her head on the zinc partition and can hear two people conversing. Their chatter floats randomly from rain, to hunch-backed old people.

As Ify listens, a silence falls between them. And after a while, she hears the woman ask:

“What do you fear the most?”

Another silence runs, then she hears the boy say: “Losing myself.”

Ify listens to the rest of their conversation, and as the boy leaves, she watches him, a silhouette of a boy, disappear into the main road. And as he crosses to the sidewalk on the opposite end, the streetlights come on.

Thanks for reading. Continue to Part II here

Adaptation [Part I] was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the smoke settled over the busy round-about roads, I made my way through the small crowd that had formed around the woman. She lay on the ground, her right foot shifted ninety degrees and missing one half of her pair of heels. Her toenails painted red, some of them curved inwards, some of them shifted certain angles to the right and left. Above her left knee her thigh bone was peeking through a tear in her dress, from which blood leaked and collected in a thick pool around her.

One man was calling an ambulance. As he did, another man pointed a torchlight at the woman’s belongings. Her purse was torn open, spilling cash, lipstick and a rosary on the tarred road and into the thick pool of blood on the ground.

When the light hit her face, I saw her eyes.

They were wide open and showed hints of a final spark frozen in the pale of her face, like a firefly caught in quicksand. Her lips were parted slightly, little streams of blood falling off in quiet fluxes down her cheeks and neck. On her face registered an expression halfway somewhere between surprise and fright.

As people made their way in and out the crowd, flashlights blaring and tires screeching, my mind searched itself. The dress. The face.

Earlier that night I was at the balcony of my apartment. I was smoking a cigarette as I listened to the busy flow of the city’s night life. Halfway through, a woman in a black dress and a grey babushka walked past me to the third room from mine. I heard laughter, music, chatter.

After a while, silence. The woman re-emerged.

Through the smoke and the fog that hung over the air that night, her image peered. She had her face in her palms and was sobbing as she walked.

As I watched her, I wondered what the story could have been. I spun one hypothesis after the other.

But as I stood before her corpse on the tarred road later that night, I realized something.

As the woman walked past me earlier that evening, sobbing and clutching her face, a part of me had stopped. Amidst the gossip and chatter and the loud music, I’d stopped to watch her walk by, cigarette in hand, smoke drifting in thin clouds.

Everything faded to the background. Everything melted, dissolved.

It was pain.

A part of me had stopped because a part of me recognized something familiar. A kindred spirit. Her pain cut through the noise and fog that night, sent a beacon into the dark.

Her pain said: this is me, look at me.

And I looked for a while, then lit another cigarette.

My friend once spoke to me of insomnia.

We were having drinks at Matilda’s on a Tuesday evening, Sade Adu’s Smooth operator seeping through hidden speakers in a dimly-lit bar. The skin beneath his eyes bloated and sagging.

He said the city poisoned his mind with gossip and loud conversations. Every night he’d barely fall asleep when he’d awake again and again to the sound of his mind in a chatter with itself. He said he loved the city, but that the city betrayed him.

And so most times he’d talk about moving to a new place in a new city. A small town hidden in a quiet suburb, he’d say. A place where rent and sleep came cheap.

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked.

He was staring into space. I nudged him by the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Any luck sleeping last night?” I asked again.

He shook his head. “I need to stop coming to this bar. You know?”

I knew.

“You remember the drunk guy from two days ago?” He asked.

“The Victorian knight?”

He nodded. “Throughout last night I could hear his voice echo in my head.”

That night I accompanied him to his apartment. He had dark sheets taped over his windows and his record player disconnected.

That night we spoke about cities. About the culture and people that shape them. He’d been born in this one, but had gradually become disenchanted by it.

“There’s something about this place that has killed something in me,” he said, “nothing feels real anymore. It feels like deep down, there’s a corpse sitting inside of me.”

After a while, I fell asleep.

The next day, he didn’t show up at the bar. I called, texted. Nothing. Days passed and I thought I’d check his apartment.

He’d overdosed on sleeping pills. His corpse reclined on the sofa. Drink in hand, Sade Adu’s long hard road seeping from a lonely speaker.

As I stood over his body, I realized something. This city hurt him. I thought about the times he spoke about sleep and cities. I realized that in those times, he was speaking about pain.

His pain said: this is me, listen to me.

And I listened for a while, then changed the subject.

Weeks after his funeral, I ran into an old friend. We shared old memories over beer and suya at a dimly-lit bar.

There was a fight that night. One man refused to pay his bills. He claimed he was a Victorian knight, and that the queen had him covered.

That night I stayed awake to the ghosts of loud conversations and inaudible chatter. To shuffling feet, voices of drunk Victorian knights and angry bartenders.

Days bled into weeks and I found the skin beneath my eyes bloated and sagging. Every day I met the usual blend of civil servants, preachers and prostitutes. And every night, something from those encounters snuck into my head and stole sleep from me.

I taped dark sheets over my windows and had my record player disconnected.

Something about this city snuck inside me and was slowly chipping away at my core. I knew it was time to leave. But something about this place kept me from leaving. A strange blend of nostalgia, and a feeling deep down, that no other city would accept me like this one.

As time went by, I spent less of it in public spaces. I steered clear of bars, libraries and bus stops. Leaving the city seemed to me a delicate affair. One does not just leave a place one has known too long without consequences. There’s a certain type of ritual to it. A slow, deliberate rite of passage one must follow.

A few days before I left, I thought I’d visit the bar one last time.

The place was as before: dimly-lit, soul music seeping away from hidden speakers, drunk civil servants making a big deal about the new cost of rice.

I ordered beer and suya.

Halfway through my food the bartender walked over, placed a bottle of ciroc on my table, then pointed to the far left corner where a woman was seated. She looked middle-aged, was spotting a cream-coloured tweed dress and a red hat. When our eyes met, she raised her glass halfway to her face, then took a sip.

I did the same.

After a while she came over to my table.

She was of average height, with a thin face that looked in contrast to the hat, like a small animal being sheltered by a tree branch.

Her lips too were small and had a blackness about them that stood in sharp contrast to her face.

We were seated in opposite directions. Her hands covered in black gloves and resting quietly on the table.

A calmness floated between us for a while before it occurred to me to say a proper thank you.

“I heard what happened to Mike,” she said.

“You knew him?”

She nodded. “We were lovers,” she said.

“Lovers? He never mentioned.”

“Of course he didn’t,” she said, “he was one of the damned.”

“Damned?”

“All my past lovers fall into two groups,” she said, “the absurd and the damned. The absurd always tend to be detached. It’s as though they realize the futility of our affair and so refuse to commit.”

She searched her purse for a lighter and cigarette; she found and put a benson between her lips.

“And the damned?” I asked.

“The damned commit too much. Always ready to do anything for the relationship. So it’s no surprise Mike didn’t mention our affair to you. It was our little secret.”

“I see.”

“When was the last time you slept?” she asked.

I thought about that a while.

“About a week ago,” I said.

“And for how long did you sleep?”

“Three hours,” I said.

“Impressive.”

“Why’s that impressive?”

She shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

We took the back door to a half-lit alley. The path was made even narrower by the parked motor cycles, refuse dumps and a small chain of mai suyas grilling beef and mutton on a make-shift charcoal stove.

In the middle of the road, one man was scrapping dead cats with a shovel and collecting them in a polythene bag. In their place, he put an egg.

We were close to the main road when we noticed someone running from behind us. As he ran past us, the man shoved the woman in the red hat to the corner of the road. Few seconds passed and a group of police men followed in pursuit.

Her left hand met one of the charcoal stoves, her glove and left sleeve catching a quick fire before the mai suya put it off.

She searched her purse, and on not finding what she was looking for, went back to the stove, put her left hand back in the fire until she recovered her lighter.

“Are you not hurt?”

She shook her head. “Let’s find a taxi,” she said.

We found one headed to her place. As the car swayed to a start, we passed underneath a streetlight from which light trickled in, casting quiet beams on the right half of her frame, before fading off as we drove by. At that moment, I wondered if the light was like a bird too scared to linger too long on a murky water. If pain and light were two parallel lines treading two lonely roads to an unknown place.

About halfway through the ride, she leaned sideways and rested her head on my shoulder.

We reached her apartment around past two in the morning. It was a one-room, self-contained apartment.

A large mattress sat on the floor by the right corner of the room. To the left was a large wardrobe, beside which stood a hat stand and a shoe rack. The room had a lingering smell of wine and burnt incense.

The woman sat on a plastic chair by the mirror and placed her face in her palms.

“You’re in pain,” I said.

She shook her head, got up and dimmed the lights.

“Pain is merely the friction between the world and our perception of it,” she said, then began to unbutton her dress.

She undressed down to her underwear, stockings, and hat. Her left hand charred and blackened, she started towards the bed, but stopped halfway to put her gloves back on.

I lay in bed, face turned upwards. She joined me, her legs spread in a squat, her lower half seated on my crouch.

With her right hand, she began twisting her left shoulder blade, until the full length of her left arm came off. She reached for the drawer by the side of the bed for a cigarette and lighter.

“This is me,” she said, “look at me.”

She put the cigarette between my lips and lit it. She unzipped my trousers, pulled my penis out and slid it inside her.

After a while, I came inside her.

That night I fell asleep.

As time went by, my mind drifted between fading dreams of a new city and one in which I’d slowly become disenchanted by.

I spent night after night in bed with the woman in the red hat. Each time, before sex, she’d detach the full length of her left arm, and each time, she’d let me come inside her.

Days bled into weeks and months. The monotony of the affair began to creep up on me. I longed again for a new life where sleep came easy, and free of coital consequences.

And each time we were together, I wondered where I was headed. I thought of her past lovers and her way of grouping them. I wondered where I stood. If for her, I was an absurd lover, or a damned one.

The Long Hard Road was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The other night, I was watching the tired flow of Karu Site’s night market.

I watched shop owners turn lights off, shut windows close. I watched as smoke rose from half-spent fire woods and drifted in lazy clouds along the narrow path between shops. I watched small groups of smokers as they hung around, burning faint sparks that peered in the dark like the eyes of tired nocturnal animals.

On one corner, one mai shayi, was at work at a small table shop. I watched as he switched tea between the two cups he held on his left and right hands. Every time he did this, he took one hand higher, and the other one he took lower, so that the tea formed longer streams with every switch. He repeated this about five times. When he was done, he gestured at the customer with his palms turned upwards, and then pointed at the table.

I walked up to him and ordered tea.

He repeated what I’d seen him do with the tea cups. When he pointed at the table, I looked; no drop of tea had spilled on it.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Practice,” he said.

“How long?” I asked.

“Thirty-five years.”

“Thirty-five years? Self-taught?”

He shook his head. He’d learnt from a friend, Hassan. They’d grown up together in a small village in Kano. Hassan was the son of a tea maker.

I asked when last he’d seen Hassan. The man stared into space a while. It’d been twenty years, he said, maybe more.

“Do you know what could have happened to him?” I asked.

He shook his head. He didn’t.

As I sipped tea, more customers arrived. As he served them, my mind drifted off to a small village in Kano. To an old friendship lost to time and distance.

As I watched the mai shayi, I saw a man carry with him the relics of a vague and distant past. I saw memories of childhood wrapped up, condensed and expressed in an elaborate art of tea making.

Sometimes I think of small gestures. I wonder if the little things we see people do sometimes carry an underlying history with them. I wonder if these small gestures might be the little ways we pay homage to old memories.

The mai shayi learnt from Hassan, and Hassan too learnt from his father, who learnt from someone else. I wonder how far back in time that line goes. I wonder if by watching the mai shayi perform his art that night, I was looking back in time at an infinite web of tea-makers and hand gestures spun over many nights, over many table shops.

It’s staggering to imagine how much of each other we can hold in ourselves. How a smile or a manner of walking can hold several past lives and generations of stories told and retold through time, until the entirety of it all becomes wrapped, condensed, and expressed in the small gestures we see.

Sometimes, when I’m walking down the road or in a bus, I’d take a moment to pause and watch. After that day with the mai shayi, I began to see a certain type of rhythm in every small gathering of people. I’d watch people laugh, argue and chatter, and I’d see a complex system of memories and past experiences mingle, collide, flow.

And in that flow, I’d see people trade little bits of themselves.

We carry the relics of our past with us. At first vivid as day, until slowly, time waters everything down, so that we’re left only with vague memories that constantly struggle to reach out from within us.

It’s a struggle in which we all are participants.

A struggle which bends and shapes our lives into an infinite loop of memories. And in each part of that loop, an infinite web of stories lay buried deep, waiting to be expressed. Stories of childhood friendship, love, heartbreaks, and the likes.

I wonder if that truly is how we all might be connected.

Sometimes I think of gravity, planets, space.

I think of a space where all of our stories constantly orbit themselves. Sometimes their trajectories intercept and a clash of ideas happens — chaos. Sometimes the opposite happens and a type of consonance occurs.

And I think of randomness. I think of gestures that, on one hand, metamorphose to a first date, and maybe leads to two people growing old together. And on the other hand, the same gesture leads to something different.

And when I think of planets and space and randomness, I think of meaning. I wonder if there’s any chance of finding meaning in this sea of randomness. What if meaning eludes us because we have no way to recognise it?

But I think hope is something worth having.

We’re constantly wandering this space of stories in the hope that one day, we find someone whose path merges with ours in a type of mutual gravity. And that when it happens, we’re lucky enough to fall to the centre of each other’s lives.

And when that happens, two people carve small spaces where they carry themselves in each other, orbiting as one through time and space, creating new stories. Stories that become wrapped up over time, and condensed and expressed in little gestures.

When next you find yourself in a bus or train or a park bench, take some time to pause and watch. Look at the individual bursts of laughter, the different manners of speaking or walking, look at the way the smoker holds her cigarette. You’d realise it’s all an elaborate art of storytelling. And buried in those stories is a chance at self-discovery.

Think about it. If our lives fit into an infinite web of small gestures, memories and past experiences, isn’t there a chance that we just might find bits of ourselves in someone else?

What if somewhere in our pasts our stories link with that of a total stranger?

Perhaps buried somewhere in the lives of two strangers might be the stories of an ancient, ancestral friendship between two budding mai shayis learning to master the art of tea making in a small village in Kano.

What if in the grand scheme of things, none of us really are strangers?

The universe is large and we play specks of dust in it. But expressed in every person is a summary of a whole. A synopsis to a larger story.

What if we are our ancestors and offspring? What if we are each other?

Thanks to Adedoja Fadeke Rhekiah

On the Nature of Little Gestures was originally published in The Junction on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We were younger then.

As the end of our university days drew closer, our hearts grew more uncertain of the future. Time seemed to edge us closer and closer to a world that didn’t want us, wasn’t ready for us, or perhaps even more frightening — a world that wanted, and was ready for us.

In all that uncertainty, our only coping mechanism, was a shared sense of despair. A strange assurance that somehow, we all were doomed together. And in that feeling of shared doom, we drowned our sense of time in a sea of alcohol, parties and sex.

But resting at the bottom of that sea, time moved.

As it did, we protested. As we drew closer and closer to when we all had to go our separate ways, with some paths never crossing again forever, we fought little insignificant battles against the flow of time. We were like pebbles attempting to roll up a long and steep slope.

And the more we protested, the harder we fell down that slope. And in that fall was a great collision of our lives.

In that collision, hearts broke, hearts mended. Long-time enemies found new ways to hate each other. New-found friends became lovers. Hearts broke, hearts mended.

I always held the vague suspicion that while we raced against the flow of time, some people somewhere, went with it. I imagined them calm, quiet, their reference frame a total contradiction of ours.

One day, as I rode the bus from school to the next town, I met Zero, not for the first time, but it might as well have been.

Zero had small, quiet fingers and a talent for weaving new things out of old, worn out materials. She made picture frames from used phone cases, book covers from ankara and faded jeans. When she moved her fingers, old things seemed new again.

Gradually I found myself adjusting to her frame of reference. The flow of time became for me something to go along with, rather than protest against. As time edged forward, we spent what little of it we could manage together.

We orbited each other, until slowly, something gave in, and we fell to the centre of each other’s lives.

In that fall, frames of reference merged; hearts spilled, and one day, we found ourselves speaking of time and feelings.

“I wonder sometimes why we didn’t meet earlier,” she said, looking ahead as we walked a narrow path by a quiet meadow.

“Me too,” I said, taking her hands and squeezing them.

“If we’d met in freshman year,” she said, “we’d have gone to those stupid dance shows together.”

I laughed.

“Those were truly awful,” I said.

She smiled.

“They were,” she said, “but we would have gone together, you know? We’d have been two stupid freshmen in a stupid dance show. But we’d have been there together.”

We stopped under a broken streetlight. I held my right hand to her face and traced the form of her left cheekbone.

“We could go to any stupid dance show now if you want,” I said, “we could even start ours right here.”

She smiled, resumed walking.

“You don’t understand,” she said, “things were a lot easier then. Sometimes I think it would have been better if we’d met earlier or never at all.”

“Why?” I asked, “what’s wrong with now?”

“Now things are different,” she said, fixing a strand of hair that was peeking through her headscarf.

We found a wooden bench by the side of an empty shop. We sat and watched the nocturnal flow of the school town.

“What’s different now?” I asked, straining my voice above the sound of moving traffic.

She smiled.

“Let’s forget about that now,” she said, placing her right hand on my knees and looking at me.

We changed subjects and began to speak of music, movies and food. After some time, we fell silent, the sound of shrieking birds punctuating the occasional noise of moving traffic. After a while, they too went silent. Or maybe I stopped listening, because in that moment, I leaned forward and kissed her.

On her lips I tasted hints of a future that felt like the past we’d invented for ourselves. A future imagined, and forever distant.

She pulled away, placed her face in her palms, and sobbed.

“I can’t let this happen,” she said, her face still in her palms.

“Let what happen?” I asked.

“I can’t let go of myself,” she said, “I’d lose myself if I did. You understand, don’t you?”

I shook my head and patted her back. She continued.

“If I gave myself to you, I’d have to give it whole,” she said, “and I wouldn’t have anything left to myself.”

A long pause ran between us. And in that silence, I remembered what she’d said earlier: things were a lot easier then.

I thought of her art. I wondered if weaving old things with the new was her attempt at merging timelines. If through her art, she was constantly reaching backwards in time and dragging the ghosts of the past into the present.

Whenever we were together, Zero spoke to me of the past. We’d walk the narrow path by the meadow and she’d talk about what it must have felt like to walk the same path the day before, sometimes hours before.

For her the past represented a more stable timeline. A timeline when everything was easier, when loving was easier.

As the harmattan season settled on us, I found my feelings slowing drifting in the cold, dry breeze. We were walking the sidewalk just off the girl’s lodge one day, her flayed skirt swaying in the breeze, and Zero looking ahead as usual, when I asked if she loved me.

“I could,” she said, “but what good would that do?”

We took a cab headed out of the school town. We were about entering the main road when a bus sped past a stop sign in the opposite direction, nearly hitting us. Zero held me tight until the cab driver settled. As our cab swayed to a start, a thought struck me: I was never going to compete with a more stable and imagined past. I was too late to my own life.

At this thought, a deep sense of melancholy hit me. My hands went cold, and we rode in silence.

As we approached our destination, she spoke.

“In the future, I’d like to be with someone I don’t love,” she said.

“Why?”

“That way, it’d be easier for me to manage things,” she said, “that way, I wouldn’t lose myself, because I wouldn’t give myself.”

Somehow, in my own desperate way, I took that as a sign that Zero loved me. Sometimes love can be a matter of superstition; everything proves it, nothing refutes it.

Days later, I went to see Zero at her lodge. She wasn’t there. Her room was cleared clean of her stuff. Her roommate said she’d travelled the previous night. She’d returned from the library that evening, packed her things in a bus, and rode off.

It’s been fifteen years now. Fifteen years since we were much younger and bound by a shared sense of despair of a future we couldn’t predict or understand.

Sometimes I think of that narrow path by the meadow. The many long nights I spent with Zero on wooden benches, speaking of things imagined and distant.

And when I think of her, I wonder if she’d gotten married and had kids. I imagine a man kiss her, and in that kiss, I wonder what he’d tasted. Had she fallen in love, or was she with him for self-preservation.

I wonder if she’d learnt to live in the present, or if she was eternally reaching back in time to the past. To a past that was for her, easier and more stable. And I wonder if in that past, she loved me.

The Borders of Emotion was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m looking through the glass door of a small café. I’m watching gentle droplets of rain descend on a small town in a small city. A small crowd is floating back and forth the sidewalk across the main road. Something about the scenery feels familiar, yet distant. Like new conversations that remind us of old movies.

A teenage girl is seated at the table in front of me. She’s sipping coffee and constantly checking her phone. The waitress walks up to her table, leans forward and is about to say something when the girl waves her off.

The waitress walks away and disappears behind a door by the counter. Some minutes later, she reemerges and walks up to my table.

She leans forward and smiles.

“Hi,” she starts, “what can I get you?”

“Tea would be nice,” I say.

She nods and heads off to the counter.

A dull pain sits at the bottom of my stomach.

It’s strange how sometimes the lines between physical and emotional pain blurs. How physical pain can sometimes be a conduit through which the past leaches into the present.

I close my eyes and edge my head slightly downwards. I can feel the pool of bite-sized memories flickering across my mind. They’re floating in a small space between recall and oblivion.

Sometimes, for an old man, memories can have a Darwinian tragedy about them; the harder I try to recall, the quicker they metamorphose to new forms of dark. It’s a type of defence mechanism they develop, they’d rather perish than be brought back in regret.

“Is everything okay?” the waitress asks, as she sets down a steaming cup of tea.

I nod.

“I’m okay, thank you,” I say. She smiles and walks away.

I’m watching the steam rise. As it does, I can feel the dull pain return, and with it comes the memories. I can feel them in small patches of cloud hovering and blending in the rising steam.

I edge my head downwards again and can feel the flow of time move backwards to 2017. To a time when I chased too hard after things that didn’t matter, while ignoring the things that did. To a time when I missed chances at happiness because they came in doses too small for a mind too young to recognise. To bottled up emotions and photographs not taken. To a time when love smiled, and I was too timid to smile back.

The waitress returns and sits next to me.

“You sure you’re okay?” She says.

A glass of beer sits in front of me. I’m watching the foam settle as the beer rises to the top. My friend is seated right next to me, and from the corner of my eye, I can sense the curious look on his face as he stares at me.

“Yes, if you stare at it long enough from that angle,” he says, “it’ll become whiskey.”

I smile.

“What’s going on, man? What are you thinking?” He asks.

I shrug.

“Nothing much, just…stuff, time,” I say.

“Time?”

I nod.

“Everything seems to be happening so fast, you know?”

He nods. I continue.

“I just feel like I’m watching my whole life go by me. Like I’m paying pilgrimage to my life but not keeping any souvenirs. I don’t have memories of anything. When was the last time I even cried, man?”

“What?”

“Yes, man. At least that’ll be a memory worth remembering in the future. The other day, after finals, my classmates took pictures,” I say.

“And you didn’t?” He asks.

I shake my head.

“I went straight home.”

“Bad paper?” He asks.

“No.”

He shakes his head. We drink our beer.

“And then there’s that waitress at Tina’s café,” I say.

“The one with the fringe hairstyle? You finally spoke to her?”

I shake my head and take a swig of beer.

“Okay listen up now,” he says, “time for a little thought experiment.”

“Okay.”

“You know how you like to listen to movie soundtracks before actually seeing the movie?”

I nod.

“Say what you want, but it’s the only spoiler-free way of knowing how good a movie might be,” I say.

“Right. Now try this sometime, maybe when next you’re at Tina’s. Imagine you’re eighty. You can feel a dull pain sitting at the bottom of your stomach. It’s a type of pain that comes frequently. And as it throbs at the depths, you can feel it rustle up small, quiet memories. They’re building up, slowly making their way to the surface. But when they reach the top, you realise they’re not all memories. Some of them are non-memories.”

“Non-memories?” I say.

He nods.

“Yes, non-memories,” he continues, “events that could have been, if only you’d taken the chance. They’re small, minor things, like what could have happened if only you’d smiled at that kid with the missing tooth. What could have happened if you’d asked the waitress out. And when you feel the regret building, when you start to panic from this experiment, you’d realise something. You’d realise its 2017 and you’re not eighty yet. You’d realise you still have your life ahead of you. You’re back in the present because you’ve been given a second chance at life. A chance for you to stop that pool of regret from building in the future.”

I’m looking out the glass door of a small café. I’m watching gentle droplets of rain descend on a small town in a small city.

My head is edged downwards as my thoughts paint pictures that straddle between the present and the future. Something about the scenery feels familiar, yet distant.

I can allow the currents of life carry me off to a time when I’m eighty, seated in a small café where a pool of regrets and non-memories sits at the bottom of my stomach. A time when I can only wonder about the things that could have been, if I’d taken the chance.

Or I can live in the present. I can start a new story that ends in a different way. An ending sweet and gentle and full of smiles and possibilities that spin off to new stories.

I pick my head up and the waitress is still seated next to me. There’s a hint of a small, gentle smile playing across her face.

“You sure you’re okay?” She says.

Listen

Time, Movie Soundtracks, and Second Chances was originally published in P.S. I Love You on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.