They’ve broken the grave tiles for me.
The earth is bare, gaping like a mouth waiting to be fed sorrow. The family stands around it, their eyes fixed on me, not with pity, but with a quiet, foolish expectation. Because I am a woman. The chosen one. The one who must reach down into the past and open it.
My back aches. Sweat slides down the curve of my spine. My sons are with Iya Onitedi’s first daughter; far enough to be safe but close enough to be scarred.
They want me to do this. All of them. I see it on their faces. Some carry anger. Others wear something like guilt. But none of them step forward. They just wait.
The shovel scrapes against the wood. I pause, whisper a prayer into the silence, mostly for myself. My hands tremble as I lift my nose mask, bracing for a wave of rot, a swarm of flies, and the kind of smell that sticks to your memory like oil.
But none comes.
I open the casket.
And there she is.
Abeni.
Laid out as if she’d only just gone to sleep. The gold lace is still smooth on her body. No fluids. No decay. Her skin is intact. Her dress, unstained. And her face, calm.
Two years buried, yet she looks exactly as they said she did the morning they found her: dressed, painted, quiet.
I scream.
And the men rush toward me.
*
Baba Mabeweje died last week. And his death ushered in an era of chaos into my life.
I’ve come to realize that a young wife shouldn’t ask a husband his age. Such questions could breed annoyance in the man, and in me, it would stir something worse. A crawling revulsion whenever his weight pressed over me at night. So, I never asked. I never wanted to know.
Then, his people showed up. Baba Sadiyat, Iya Onitedi, and Brother Amoo. They sat in the parlour on the old, sagging sofa like mourners at the grave of a young man. But I had seen the white of Baba’s hair. I had seen the steady wilt of him. He was older than my father, who had traded me for one hundred thousand naira. But that was not what kept me awake. Not the trade. Not the age.
It was the way Baba died. There was something uncanny about it. Something strangely familiar about how I found his body that day.
“Araoluwa,” Baba Sadiyat called, his head gently shaking, his cap lopsided from haste. “It is well. God will comfort you and your children. He will keep you long, long.”
Foolish man. Baba never liked him—said he was always begging.
Iya Onitedi sat beside me, my twin boys curled into her arms. They were just six years old. She stroked their heads like she was smoothing out grief. “God will help you raise these boys. This is your house now. Baba left it for you. You gave him sons.”
That was what I meant to them. A mother of sons. The key to a legacy. Baba had other women. But he had only married two of us. The first, Abeni, gave him only pain. Every child she had carried slipped away. He believed he was cursed. Until me.
Brother Amoo started to talk, the only one among them who ever felt like a human. “Let the man rot in peace,” he said. “This is not why we are here. Araoluwa is the one in mourning. Tell her the rest.”
Iya Onitedi sighed and whispered some Yoruba words to my sons, sending them to the room they share, right next to the one where their father died, fully dressed in buba and shoes, lying on the bed as if waiting to be called somewhere. But it was night. He had nowhere to go.
Baba Sadiyat turned to me. “There is a thing we do in our family. Husbands and wives must be buried together. Do you know what that means?”
I shook my head. “I’m not going with him.”
Brother Amoo chuckled, soft and bitter. “Not you. They mean Abeni.”
At once, the air stilled. My chest tightened. My heart thundered. Abeni, Baba’s first wife. She had been only three years older than me. They found her two years ago, sniper bottle on the bed, dressed head to toe in iro and buba, her face powdered, and her lips painted. Just like Baba.
I knew where this was going. And I dreaded it.
“You, Araoluwa,” Iya Onitedi said, eyes calm and voice low, “will go and dig her up. We will bury her with Baba.”
Brother Amoo nodded. “In our family, when a man and woman are bound by marriage, they must be buried together, side by side, even if they die years apart. The one who dies first is buried alone. When the second dies, their grave must be reopened so they can rest together at last.
“Only a woman can open the first grave, whether a daughter, niece or a sister or, in your case, a surviving wife. If you were not here, a woman in our family would have been the one to join Baba and Abeni together.”
“Men aren’t allowed,” Iya Onitedi added as if she read my mind. “The dead won’t answer them. It’s said that if they aren’t joined properly, neither spirit will rest. And the living will carry the curse of their unrest.”
“And besides, Baba would have wanted you to do it,” Baba Sadiyat said.
I knew no matter how much I resisted; it wouldn’t change anything. Baba had told me before that it was mandatory, and he had always wished to be buried with me instead. It had been a foolish rule of the family. One I never understood. Who wanted to spend eternity beside a man older than her father? What kind of peace was that? That wasn’t resting. That was punishment.
Abeni never liked me. Not when she was alive. She said her miscarriages worsened when I came into the house. That her babies vanished from her faster than stones from a child’s pocket.
She was heavy, always sweating, eyes rimmed red like she’d been crying even in her sleep.
But Baba didn’t love her. You could see and hear it. He spoke to her like a dirty rag. Called her names. Dismissed her.
But she was not a quiet wife. She bit back. Hissed, barked, threw her words like pebbles. And still, they clung to each other like enemies locked in a long, tiring battle. Their bodies met like weapons, fierce and fast. She wanted a child the way a child wants its mother: desperately, blindly. She wanted proof she still mattered.
And then they wanted me to dig her up, to tie her to the man who had wounded her every day of her life.
No. Let the earth keep her where she was. Let her bones lie free, far from him.
I would not be the one to unbury her sorrow.
Heaven forbid. I’d rather die.
*
Brother Amoo arrived the next morning. I was sitting with my sons, stirring pap, the steam curling between us like matters that did not need to be discussed. He didn’t knock. Just walked in like he had rights over my peace.
“You have to do it,” he said, standing in the doorway as though the words were heavier than he could carry.
I didn’t look up. “I won’t.”
“You know it’s not a choice.”
“I’m a woman,” I said, still stirring. “Not a shovel. I won’t dig up the dead for the sake of some tired ritual. Baba wanted that? Then Baba was mad.”
He stepped closer. “If you don’t, nothing will come to you. The land, the house, it all stays out of your hands. He must be laid to rest properly, or he’s not truly gone. That’s the belief. My father and mother were buried the same way. My sister opened up my father’s grave so my mother could be buried with him.”
“And why can’t another woman in your family do it?” I asked, slowly and quiet. Baba’s side of the family had always been loud, but not like this. Not cruel.
He paused, turned to leave, then stopped at the door. “Because you are Baba’s surviving wife. What sense would it make to use another woman when you are here,” he asked. “You don’t even have a choice. And if you don’t agree, and someone else in the family does it, then you and your children should be ready for what comes.”
He stepped out, the wooden door closing behind him like a final word.
I watched him go, bitterness rising in my throat. Then I cursed him like a prayer meant to bruise.
That night, I dreamt of Abeni again.
She stood at the foot of my bed with her arms folded, watching. Not angry. Just there. Her lips were cracked, her eyes carrying a soft, tired kind of sorrow.
I’d seen her in dreams before. Once she danced in silence under the moon, her bubu gown flowing. In another dream, she was cooking in a pot that contained nothing.
Another time, she laughed, and the sound stayed with me for days.
Before she passed, there had been a night when I found her in the boys’ room.
She didn’t startle. Just looked at me dry-eyed.
I kept my voice gentle, though my heart was beating hard in my chest. “Did you come to see our sons, iya ile mi?”
“They are yours,” she said, turning away. “Not mine.”
Later, I found the boys asleep, curled toward each other. Between them, two small, wrapped gifts in a blue plastic bag. Then I remembered, the next day was their birthday.
*
The day after we open the grave, they gather again. This time, they do not say a word. They wait. We are seated again in the doomed sitting room. The air is heavy with sweat and silence. Iya Onitedi fans me with a folded newspaper, her movements are brisk, but her eyes avoid mine.
I am shaking. My legs quiver, though they do not move. Everyone is watching me, waiting, like I am stitched skin they’re afraid will burst open.
“Araoluwa, breathe,” says Baba Sadiyat, calm, too calm. “Today you’ll understand why most of us never liked Abeni.”
“She wasn’t decayed.” My voice slices through the room, hard and trembling. The fury behind it surprises even me.
Iya Onitedi lowers the fan. “You will not speak to us like that.” She straightens her back, insulted. “Yes, she wasn’t decayed. Because Abeni wasn’t ordinary. She was touched. You knew it. That’s why she died like that. Who wears beads and lipstick to go to her grave?”
“She wasn’t decayed,” I repeat, softer now, not out of calm but out of something deeper. Dread. Shock. The words feel like stones in my mouth. “She looked like she had just… fallen asleep.”
No one flinches.
“Araoluwa,” Baba Sadiyat says, “Baba buried her with a charm. It stops decay. He was afraid her spirit would rise against him if she rotted. Her grandmother died the same way and took her husband with her. Abeni never forgave him for marrying you. She never did.”
I stare at them. My mouth is open, but no words come.
“You made me open her casket,” I whisper, voice shaking. “You made me open a cursed grave, knowing she wasn’t rotting. You didn’t tell me about the charm. Or that she might still be alive. You set me up.”
“No, we didn’t know her body would still be like that,” Iya Onitedi says firmly. “We were just doing what’s right.”
I look at them all. Their faces are calm, almost blank, as if this is just another afternoon, another tale over bitter kola and gossip.
“Is Abeni truly dead?” I ask the real question. The one that won’t leave me alone.
“Yes,” Iya Onitedi says. “And Baba will be buried beside her. Then, maybe, her jealous spirit will rest.”
“Are you sure?” I ask again, my voice barely a breath.
“We are very sure,” Baba Sadiyat replies, his voice like a stone closing a grave.
*
Baba and Abeni are buried now. Side by side, as they once were in life. There’s a quiet finality to it. I feel no sorrow. Only a strange kind of lightness. At last, I can breathe my own breath. Think my own thoughts. Dream of a life that belongs to me and my children.
I sit in my room, sorting through the crumpled naira notes I earned last week from the fish stall. My fingers are slick with the faint scent of smoked tilapia, and the sound of the street buzzes faintly through the window slats.
Kola bursts in, his face stretched wide with excitement. “Mummy! Kayode is with Big Mummy. She says she wants to see you.”
I pause. “Big Mummy?” The name clings to the air in the room like incense smoke.
There’s only one person they ever called that.
I rush outside, my heart suddenly unsure of its rhythm. And there she is.
Abeni.
Standing in the same gold lace and heavy rouge they buried her in. Her lipstick is too red. Her eyes, too alive.
She smiles.
“Araoluwa, the brave one. You think I’m gone?”
And then she laughs. “I am back for our sons.”
My mouth opens but no words come. I raise a hand to push the boys behind me, but my knees give. The gold of her lace glints once more and the world folds into black.
THE END
