When Habiba finds the tiny gecko wriggling in her stained bathtub, her first instinct is to amuse herself. She plugs the drain and fills the tub with water. The gecko grows restless as it battles the flood. Its limbs try to crawl up the smooth porcelain to no avail. Sometimes it attempts a crude jump, only to slide back down or fall back into the water with a little plop. It repeats the same fruitless manoeuvre again and again, moving along the lengths of the tub, seeking a way out, its black-spotted brown coat a dullness in the water. Habiba watches its endeavours, her face powdered with keenness. She laughs at the gecko’s helplessness.
When she was little, her mother would tell her that geckos were bad omens, bringers of misfortune and poverty. They should never be allowed to survive inside the house. “If ever you find one inside the house, kill it. Bonus point if you kill it without cutting off the tail from the rest of the body. So Islam says.”
But Habiba’s mother isn’t here and Habiba isn’t a little girl anymore.
*
The gecko dies. Habiba digs a shallow hole and buries the gecko. On a normal day, she would’ve tossed it into the gutter, or over the fence and into the empty field beside her house. She wonders if the unsettling feeling she has is the beginning of guilt, or some pity for the dead gecko.
*
Two weeks later, Habiba is seated before a therapist, twisting her fingers as she recounts the things she has been seeing after burying the gecko. The therapist, an Edo man wearing wide-rimmed glasses, drums on his table with fat fingers. Habiba is irritated by the sound but says nothing.
“So, you killed the gecko?”
“No. I only filled the bathtub with water.”
“And what was your intention?”
“I was just playing. I never intended to make it suffer.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“It doesn’t matter? I find geckos crawling inside my food, I blink and they aren’t there. I open my fridge, geckos are crawling all over. Yet, you say it doesn’t matter?”
“You feel guilt. That’s a good thing. Your mind is trying to punish you. But you can’t cling to that all your life. You must come out of that phase, if not, I can’t help you. Nobody can.”
Habiba looks at her fingers as if she can, if she looks closely, spot the guilt the therapist keeps laying emphasis on. The next time she looks up at him, there’s a gecko on his head. One climbs over the rim of his glasses. He opens his mouth and another gecko slides out and onto the table, wriggling like a wounded thing. Habiba shrieks, and almost falls off her chair. The chair scrapes backwards as she leaps up. She hurries out of the man’s office, fear in her eyes, hands trembling.
Habiba does not visit the therapist again.
*
Habiba hears a squeak-squeak sound coming from the bathroom as if something is sliding against the porcelain surface of the bathtub. She halts by the door, trepidation rooting her to the ground. The urge to pee has disappeared. It’s almost 1 a.m. The bathroom light has been faulty for a long time and she only relies on the little illumination from the window or her phone’s flashlight.
Habiba pushes open the door. It creaks like the loud, mangled cry of a dying animal. She steps in, training her flashlight toward the bathtub. She draws closer. A gecko wriggles in there. Habiba can swear that it’s exactly the one she killed three weeks ago.
Before her very eyes, the gecko begins to expand as if it’s been pumped like a balloon. It breaks into two, green slime staining the tub as a result of the fission.
Habiba stares wide-eyed, heart racing, hands shaking. Two becomes four and four becomes eight. The bathtub soon fills up and geckos spill onto the floor like wine out of a goblet. The flood expands. Reptiles wriggle, splotching the ground with green slime.
They reach Habiba. They run up her shaking legs as if climbing a ladder, mindless of the urine dribbling down. An ear-splitting cry briefly dislodges the night’s quiet. But nobody comes to her rescue because she lives alone in a secure GRA where everyone minds their business.
*
Habiba is submerged in an ocean of geckos. She is drowning. She can’t breathe. She opens her mouth for air but geckos wrestle into the new space. When she finally bobs up, she sucks in an atmosphere of geckos and their green slime. She rises and geckos fall off her like confetti.
Shivering, Habiba wraps herself in a blanket. She hiccups. A gecko plops onto the bathroom floor. She hurries out, leaving green footprints in her wake.
She stays in bed, curled up fetus-like, shivering, for the whole day. She calls her mother but she only breathes raggedly into the phone.
*
There’s a trail of thick slime from Habiba’s bed to the opposite wall.
“Habiba, where are you?” her mother calls, eyes searching the room.
A fat gecko shimmies up the wall, turns its head, and nods at the wrinkle-faced woman.
