It is always exciting to bring you a themed edition, mainly because it is such a joy to sit back and see the robust interpretations that the imaginations of our writers cook up. We asked for Niger Delta–focused science fiction stories, and I dare say the writers we bring to you in this issue absolutely ate that assignment!
We sought futuristic stories that could fall within cyberpunk, climate fiction, African futurism, solarpunk, biopunk, eco–sci-fi, political sci-fi, alternate history, time travel, space exploration, AI, and robotics. The Niger Delta exists in southern Nigeria, but for this issue, we received submissions from across Africa.
We got some pretty interesting stories, many of which engage meaningfully with the region. I can tell you for free that the writers seem to agree that the Niger Delta’s future may be bleak, and that restoration and environmental justice will only be achieved, and sustained, by the brave.
In Waterbringer, Amina must endure loss and a painful journey to secure much-needed water for her people in a contaminated land, in exchange for a most precious item. However, a glitch in the enemy’s machine pushes her into taking some daring steps. A Time Like This shows us that we can never fully erase the past in our giant technological strides into the future, unless technology is made to serve humanity and nature. And sometimes, only the brave and fearless can make this happen for the benefit of all.
Did you think ancestors and deities would be dead and forgotten in the future? GbeneBeka: The Gospel According to Wiayor shows us what courage can look like when technology seeks to control the supernatural. In The Smuggler of the Wet Gene, we meet Orire—a genetic scientist by day and smuggler by night—struggling to save lives with biocodes suspended in liquid genes, while simultaneously evading cyborg cops.
The Last Fisherman of Oporoza is not just brave; he is someone who knows he is suspended, stuck in a loop that returns to the beginning once night falls. Can he succeed in altering the loop, or will failure become a permanent part of this mind-altering cycle? I’ll leave you to find out as you read.
Enjoy!
P.S. The only loop you are allowed to get stuck in is one where you are sharing and resharing this Niger Delta Issue of Omenana. Lol.
It is still dark when I push my canoe into the creek, my hands finding their way along the slick wood like they have done for twenty-seven years. The tide breathes against the shore, slow and steady, pulling at the edges of the world. The air is heavy, close to the skin, and the mangroves are already whispering in the language they use when they think no one is listening.
The day is August 17th. Again.
I do not need a calendar to tell me. My bones know it. My dreams know it. The cormorant perched on the broken jetty knows it, too. It tilts its head and watches me like it knows we are both actors in a play whose ending cannot be changed.
The first time it happened, I thought it was madness. A trick of fatigue. Fishermen are used to repetition: the same nets, the same songs, the same stretch of brown-green water. But that day, the day before the oil came, kept folding itself over me like a wet cloth. I would live it, sleep, and wake up before dawn to find it had returned.
The others forgot. Each dawn washed them empty, but the tide kept me instead. I remember the night it began. I was alone on the water when I felt the change, the creek heavy and still. Then the current shifted, slow at first, then wrong. The others were on land, under roofs that could not hear the sea’s cry. But I was out there, close enough to feel the tremor beneath the surface. After that, whenever the world folds back, I stay awake inside it.
The sun always rises slow and swollen, like it resents the work ahead. By midmorning, the gulls will circle near the mouth of the creek. By evening, I will smell the sour, metallic breath of disaster drifting from the offshore rig. By night, the sea will turn black. And in the morning, August 17th will begin again.
I have tried many things. Once, I paddled in the opposite direction, away from the nets, away from the others, straight into the labyrinth of mangroves until my canoe scraped roots like knuckles. I stayed there until the tide turned, but when I slept in that green darkness, the morning still spat me back to the beginning.
I tried telling my wife. The first time, she laughed and told me to stop drinking before bed. The second time, she frowned. By the fifth time August 17 dawned again, she would not look at me. And on the seventh reset, she was gone; no longer present in the loop. The house and my heart remembered her voice, but the day did not. She was not gone by death or travel, not taken by tide or time, just quietly absent, the way a detail vanishes when a story is told again. I began to suspect then that whatever holds this day in place only needs me to remain aware; the rest, including her absence, adjusts around me.
*
Now it is only me, the water, and the endless day.
Today, I decide to fish the same as always. The loop has taught me there is no escaping the tide’s will. But as I paddle toward the horizon, I notice something new: a glint in the water, far from where the oil rigs crouch. It is small, precise, too bright to be a wave. I steer toward it, heart knocking against my chest like a fist on a locked door.
It is a sphere, no larger than a mango, floating just beneath the surface. When I reach for it, the air around me hums, and the water stills. My reflection bends and shivers, and for the first time in this endless loop, I feel the day hesitate.
I pull the sphere from the water, and it is colder than anything I have touched in this heat. Smooth, without a seam, yet it vibrates faintly, like the inside is full of trapped wings. When I lift it to my ear, I hear a sound that is not a sound, more like a pressure in my skull, a shape pressing against the edges of thought.
The first sounds I hear are not in any words I understand. Still, they settle in my mind as if they have been waiting there all along: Temporal Containment Unit. Oporoza Node 12.
I blink, looking around at the endless brown water, the sky flattened under the sun. Node? Containment? These are not creek words. These are not words for fishermen.
For a moment, I think about throwing it back. But my hands do not listen. I cradle it on my lap and paddle toward the open sea, feeling the thing grow warmer, as though it approves.
Halfway to the horizon, the light changes. Not the slow gold of evening, but a sharp, surgical shift. Shadows bend in the wrong direction. The air smells of metal instead of salt. And ahead, where the rig should be squatting on the water like a giant steel spider, there is only emptiness.
I stop paddling. My breath sounds too loud. The sphere pulses. And then I see them.
Boats. Many of them, sleek and silent, floating in a loose ring. They are not made of wood, and they do not move with the tide. Their surfaces ripple like water though they are solid. Figures stand inside them, human, but not. Their faces are obscured by plates of mirrored glass.
One of them steps forward, onto nothing, as if the air is holding them up. Their voice is inside my head, not in my ears.
“You were not meant to interact with the containment field,” they say. “The loop preserves environmental stability until extraction protocols can be met. You have disrupted alignment.”
I want to ask what any of that means. Instead, I hear myself say, “Why August seventeen?” My voice sounds thin, unworthy in the thick air.
The figure tilts its head, the way the cormorant does. “Because this is the last viable point before irreversible contamination. We anchor the sequence here to study the event without losing the subject.”
I do not like the way it says “the subject.”
I glance at the water, where my reflection should be. But the water holds no image now, only a faint shimmer, as though my place in the world is loosening.
“You could stop the spill,” I tell it. My voice grows harder. “You could warn the people. Why do you not?”
The figure’s answer is slow, deliberate, as if it wants me to feel every word. “We are not here to change the outcome. We are here to learn from it.”
The sphere in my lap grows so hot I have to drop it. It does not sink. It hovers on the surface, spinning. The world around me begins to fold, the sea curling upward like paper in a flame, the sky turning the deep copper of an old coin.
The figure steps back, and the others turn away. I know the loop is about to begin again. I know they will not help. But something inside me, something stubborn as the tide, tells me that knowledge is a weapon, even in a trap.
When the world snaps back to darkness, I am standing by my canoe on the shore. The tide is breathing against the sand. The mangroves are whispering. And the day is August 17th.
Again.
I stop fishing.
That morning, or the thousand mornings before it, I cannot tell anymore, I do not push my canoe far into the creek. I stand on the shore, watching the water breathe in and out, thinking of the figure’s words. If they will not change the outcome, then maybe I can.
The first thing I try is warning the others. I walk through the village before the sun climbs over the mangroves, stopping at every house, telling them the spill is coming. Some laugh, others wave me away. A few grow uneasy, but no one packs a bag. By evening, they are on the shore, hauling in nets or mending them, the way they always do. And by nightfall, the sour metallic wind creeps in from the sea.
When the loop restarts, I go further. I smash the engines of the small boats that take the workers out to the rig. I hide their tools. I cut ropes, sink drums of fuel. But the work crews still go, paddling long hours in borrowed canoes, stubborn as the tide. The rig still breathes its poison. The sea still turns black.
Another loop, and another, and another. I try setting fire to the rig before it can bleed into the water. But the flames die too quickly, smothered by the wind. The next day, August 17th again, I am back on the shore, hands unburned, smelling only diesel and salt.
I stop speaking to anyone. There is nothing to say.
And yet, I keep changing things, small things. Each time I do, the day resists a little less. I teach my neighbour’s son how to set a net deeper, away from the oily sheen that will come. I take a longer route through the mangroves so I can leave palm fronds over the paths, a marker only I understand. I carve messages into the wood of my canoe, hoping they will be waiting for me in some loop where the spill does not happen.
*
One morning, I find a woman standing at the shore where my canoe is tied. She is not from the village. Her clothes shimmer like fish scales, and her eyes are too sharp to belong to this place. She holds the sphere I once pulled from the water.
“You are changing the data,” she says.
I tell her I do not care about their data. I tell her I want my wife back, my people safe, my river clean. I tell her I want to live a day that is not August 17th.
She looks at me for a long time, the kind of look that feels like someone measuring the weight of your bones. “You have already succeeded,” she says. “In one branch, far from here, Oporoza never drowned in oil. But that branch is not yours.”
I step toward her, heart racing. “Then, send me there.”
She shakes her head. “You are anchored to this node. To move you would collapse the study. But know this, the changes you make will remain here, inside the loop, even if you never see their end.”
She sets the sphere on the sand and walks into the water without a ripple.
I pick it up. For the first time, it does not hum or burn. It is just a cold, smooth stone.
That night, the oil comes. The fish float belly-up. The water stinks of death.
And in the morning, August 17th begins again.
But this time, the neighbour’s boy is already walking toward the deeper nets I taught him to set. And for the first time in the loop, the cormorant leaves its perch and follows my canoe out into the open water.
I do not know if it matters. But it is enough to keep paddling.
The air feels different before dawn, though I know the day is the same. The tide still breathes against the shore, slow and steady. The mangroves still whisper secrets into the wind. But there is something softer in the water’s voice, as if it is listening to me now.
I push the canoe into the creek. The paddle’s rhythm is the same as it has always been, but I no longer rush. Every sound feels heavier, the drip of water from the blade, the hiss of a fish breaking the surface, the rustle of wings as the cormorant glides low over the bow.
At the first bend, the neighbour’s boy is there, crouched over his deeper net. He grins at me when he sees the catch glinting in the dawn. I want to tell him to hold on to this moment, to remember that there is a world beyond oil and smoke. But I only nod, and he nods back.
Past the bend, I notice more small changes. A woman has begun planting new mangroves where the bank is thin. Two boys are building a raft from oil drums, not for work on the rig, but for fishing farther out. The old man who used to drink palm wine at this hour is mending a canoe instead.
It is all still August 17th. The rig is still out there, waiting to bleed into the sea by nightfall. The loop is still tight around us. But inside its grip, the people are moving in ways they never did before.
I paddle farther, toward the open water. The sun is rising, a swollen gold, and the heat is already folding itself around me. I see the shimmer of the sphere in my mind, though it is gone now. I hear the woman’s voice: The changes you make will remain here, inside the loop.
I do not know if there is a version of me somewhere else who has escaped this day, who has lived to see a clean horizon. But I know this version will keep paddling.
By afternoon, the gulls circle over the mouth of the creek. By evening, the sour metallic breath of disaster drifts from the sea.
I do not look toward the rig. I keep my eyes on the water, on the cormorant flying just ahead of me, its wings slicing the air.
When the black tide comes, I will face it as I always do. But for now, in this narrow stretch of the river, the water is still clear, and the fish are still biting.
I let the paddle rest in my hands. The current carries me forward, and I breathe in the salt, the sun, the slow promise of a moment that cannot last, but is mine all the same.
Tomilola Adejumo is an emerging writer from Lagos, Nigeria, with a published work featured in Punocracy, African Writer Magazine and The Shallow Tales Review. Her upcoming publications include pieces in The Kalahari Review, Afritondo and Efiko Magazine. Tomi shares engaging stories, ranging from thought-provoking, nostalgic, funny, to haunting, on her Substack page, “Thoughts Archive.” She is on Twitter at ‘earth2Tomi.’
¹I did not mean to summon her. I was not even sure I believed in her anymore. Or in anything for that matter. I just needed someone, or something, to hear my plea. After all, they say, “na woman wey never see problem na im dey hold breast run.”
So that day, I went to the old iroko, the last one standing in our village. I knelt in the oily mud and prayed like my grandmother used to. A prayer from grief, not faith.
² “Mama, abeg na, look our face. We don nearly die finish.” ³ I thought my prayer would vanish into the swamp air like all things do here, but that night, the sky answered. GbeneBeka returned.
⁴ My name is Wiayor, and this is the story of what happened when our goddess remembered us and what happened when we tried to, um… well, own her.
⁵ I was born around the time when our lands began to fail us. Our rivers turned thick with oil, and the mangrove swamps had become skeletons draped in black sludge. Even after the drills were silent and the company abandoned its camps, the land still bled crude. The air smelled of decay mixed with petrol. Crops withered. Fish floated belly-up in poisoned creeks. My people, once proud fishermen and farmers, coughed on the fumes of our poisoned sky.
⁶ Many had already left, scattering like frightened birds to any place that offered clean water (or just water) and untainted soil (or just soil). I stayed, because Goi was all I’d known. It was home. My home. Each day, I walked the perimeter of the village, from the remains of the old schoolhouse to the stagnant pond. I carried offerings of palm wine and kolanut to the shattered shrine of our Mother, deep in the bush. Few others bothered. Most had lost faith entirely.
⁷ And this was all thanks to “modernizing our thinking.” Critical reasoning workshops, if one could call them that, replaced storytelling hours. The chiefs held a public burning of “superstitious” objects: charms, prayer clothes, even a carved effigy of our Mother, GbeneBeka, herself. They said it was the dawn of a rational age.
⁸ I went along with it, but at night, I would sneak to the old iroko to pray. The path was always empty, as most of us had already forgotten how to hope. Worse, we had even learned to mock the gods. But I remembered the stories my grandmother, “mama”, told me. Stories of GbeneBeka, the great “Mama from the Above”, who had first led our people to these fertile lands. Mama said that in ancient times, GbeneBeka gifted us abundant harvests and watched over us, but we had since forgotten her and her ways. Some nights, by the dying fire, she would whisper, “One day, someone will cry loud enough, and our mother will hear.”
⁹ As a boy, I’d imagined a beautiful giant descending on a ladder of clouds. This image was engraved deep inside of me like symbols on carvings… Anyway, as I was saying, I prayed that night.
Chapter 2
¹As I knelt, a sudden breeze swept through the heat, cool and with the scent of rain. A smell we had almost forgotten. The breeze rippled the rotten water. I looked up, wiping my eyes. Above the tree, clouds gathered.
² A distant rumble of thunder made the ground tremble. I rose to my feet. A single drop of rain. Then another. Soon it was pouring. I laughed in surprise, spreading my arms as water washed over me, cleansing the oil from my skin. The ground under the iroko drank eagerly.
³ For the first time in years, the earth no longer smelled of poison but of wet soil and renewal. Through the curtain of rain, a light glowed. At first, I thought lightning had struck and set the great iroko ablaze, but the light was soft. I watched, mouth agape, as she appeared.
⁴ GbeneBeka. She came down with the rain, stepping lightly onto the highest branch of the iroko. She was taller than any mortal. Her skin was marked with patterns like the veins of leaves. Her eyes shone gold-white in the darkness. Her hair fell in black coils that sparkled with lightning.
⁵ She wore a single cloth of pale sky-blue, and in her hand was a staff of living wood, green with unfolding leaves. For a long moment, she stood upon the branch, gazing out at the land. Rain cascaded around her, but she remained dry.
At last, Mother looked my way.
⁶ “Na who call me?” Her voice was like a flute’s note. It spoke directly to my soul.
“Na me, Wiayor, your pikin,” I stammered. “So, na you dey disturb me wit prayer every day?”
⁷ Lightning flashed. I feared she might strike me down, but her face held only sorrow. She stepped from the branch to the ground, and it seemed to me as though the earth welcomed her. She placed her hand on my head. The weight was lighter than I had expected.
“My pikin,” she said.
I fell to my knees.
⁸ “E don too tey wey I come dis place.” The rain slowed. Frogs croaked, crickets chirped. GbeneBeka tilted her head toward the returning life.
Still trembling, I said, “Mama… we don loss finish. Our land don drink poison like kaikai. See as everytin don die. And nobody even remember you again sef…” I went on.
⁹ She answered by drawing me into an incredibly loving embrace.
“Calm down, Wiayor.” She said. “You do well as you remember me. You na good person. You try well-well.”
“So, you go helep us? You go save our land?”. She looked toward the lanterns of the village.
¹⁰ “Even after wetin dem do your papa? Ah, you be my pikin true true!”
Indeed, there had been gossip that my father, always seen with a worn wooden pipe clenched between his teeth, was a troublesome activist who had dared to challenge both the chiefs and GulfCurrent Nigeria.
That he disappeared, not by gods, but men. They said he called them out — the Company, for the poison they poured into the creeks, for their lies, for how they flaunted their green promises in Europe, while here they flared gas night and day and let children drink firewater. He once told my mother that Ogoni was a test of conscience for the world. That if they could desecrate us and still be called civilized, then civilization meant nothing. He joined others who dreamed that we could speak for ourselves, choose for ourselves, govern ourselves. That dream cost him everything.
But the loudest story is that he was used; that someone, somewhere, fed him visions of change. Told him he was chosen. Maybe he was. Maybe that’s why they crushed him.
My mother died not long after. Some claimed it was because of grief; others said it was our bad water.
“I go do wetin I fit do,” GbeneBeka said. “Take my hand. Carry me go see everytin wey don spoil.”
Chapter 3
1 And so, hand in hand with a goddess, I returned to the village at midnight. She must have noticed that I took her through a rather long route. I led her down a narrow path, through groves of stunted palms and between silent clinics. Where her feet touched the ground, grass sprouted, little green blades pushing up through the oily muck. I watched in astonishment as it seemed like even my footprints filled with seedlings after we passed. At the first occupied dwelling, a house where an old couple still lived, I knocked frantically.
2 “Make una come out o!” I called excitedly. “Make una come see!”
When the door opened, the glow of a lantern fell upon the tall figure beside me. The old man inside gasped, dropping to his knees at once. His wife peered over his shoulder, then let out a cry of joy. One by one, people emerged from their homes. Some had been woken by the storm, others by the unfamiliar sounds of frogs and night birds. They gathered in the muddy village square, mouths agape at the glowing woman standing beside me. Ah, I remember the faces, faces that had known only despair now filled with wonder and hope.
3 Mothers held their children close. Fishermen bowed their heads. And wives. Wives struggled to find their husbands’ hands as they saw the powerful and irresistibly beautiful being. A few villagers began to sing old, half-remembered praise songs their grandparents had taught them about GbeneBeka, welcoming the goddess. GbeneBeka stood quietly among us. She spoke in Khana, our Ogoni tongue, so that all could understand. It was only then I realized she had spoken “rotten” English (Pidgin) to me, because my Pidgin, not my Khana, was the language I carried best.
4 “My children,” she said, “I have returned as you have called. I see the suffering of this land.”
5 She knelt and pressed her palms to the earth in the center of the square. I heard a vibration underfoot as if the ground itself responded.
6 “No more shall this land be barren”. Enter happiness. Disbelief in faces was replaced by gratitude. Some prostrated in the grass; others reached out to touch the new-grown plants to be sure that they were real. A young boy laughed in delight, stomping his bare feet on the soft ground. Laughter! When had we last heard such a sound here?
But amid the celebration, a coarse voice cut through.
“What is the meaning of this?”
7 It was Chief Baridi, stepping forward with his cane, flanked by two of his personal guards. He was an older man, his face carved by years of bullying others. It was hard to believe that once, he had been a firebrand for the people, but in the later days of oil he’d grown wealthy on the scraps tossed by the company.
The Chief’s eyes were now focused on GbeneBeka. No one had ever seen them in that manner. But within seconds, his eyes changed from reverence to calculation. Before I could answer him, one of the guards barked, “It’s witchcraft! A trick!”
8 A few villagers murmured in confusion. Chief Baridi held up a hand, forcing a smile. “No, not a trick,” he said, looking GbeneBeka up and down. Rain still drizzled, water beading on the chief’s fine embroidered shirt.
“If I recall the old stories, this would be our… benefactor. The Mother of our line.”
His tone was polite, almost reverent. GbeneBeka regarded him quietly.
9 “I am GbeneBeka,” she affirmed. “The land was crying out in pain. I have come to answer.”
“Truly, a remarkable night,” the chief said, bowing his head slightly.
“We are honoured by your presence, great one. Forgive my hesitation. These are strange times. We have grown unaccustomed to spirits walking among us.”
10 A nervous chuckle rippled from Chief Baridi’s guards. I stepped closer to GbeneBeka, suddenly protective. I didn’t like how the chief’s eyes lingered on her, as if assessing the value of a rare artifact.
“The times may be strange,” I said, keeping my voice respectful, “yet our need is real. GbeneBeka has already shown proof of her grace.” I gestured at the grass and blossoms underfoot.
“Our land can be healed.”
“Yes,” a farmwoman in the crowd shouted, “I can smell life in the soil again!”
Chief Baridi nodded slowly. “Indeed. A blessing beyond measure.”
He tapped his cane on the new grass, as if to assure himself it wasn’t illusion.
“We must give thanks in the proper way.” Turning to GbeneBeka, he offered a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
11 “Great Mother, allow us to host you well well, to express our gratitude. We should have a feast to honour your return.”
Murmurs of agreement rose. It sounded like a good idea. But something troubled me. I remembered how the chief had hosted similarly grand feasts whenever a company executive visited, occasions that always ended with deals cut behind closed doors. I glanced at GbeneBeka. She was studying Baridi, perhaps reading his face.
“I come not for feasts, but to heal,” she said gently. “There is much work to be done for this land to be whole again.”
“Of course, of course,” the chief hurried to reply. “Yet your children wish to honour you. Please, will you not rest and dine with us tomorrow? We have a community hall still standing; we can gather there at dusk. You may speak to us of what must be done, and we’ll slaughter dogs in your name.”
GbeneBeka flinched. I doubt anyone else noticed, but I did. I lightly touched her arm, with the hope that she’d understand that to mean that they had forgotten her taboos. A lot of the villagers did not trust Baridi, but I knew they were excited and would follow their leader’s suggestion. Perhaps it would be alright, a feast could be harmless, a chance to cement her welcome. After all, what could the chief possibly do to a goddess? GbeneBeka inclined her head.
“If it pleases the community, I will come at dusk tomorrow to your gathering,” she said at last. A cheer went up. The chief flashed a grin that looked political. That night, we settled GbeneBeka in the finest hut we had. My late uncle’s place, which was roomier than most. Many villagers brought mats, clean cloth, food. GbeneBeka accepted only a simple wrap to change into (her sky-blue cloth, though miraculously clean despite the mud, made her too conspicuous, she said with a soft laugh).
She sipped politely at the palm wine offered. Until the sky paled with dawn, I stayed near her, answering her gentle questions about all that had befallen our land in her absence. I told her of the oil boom that came, how at first we rejoiced, thinking fortune had finally smiled on us. I described the pipelines that snaked through our fields, the gas flares that turned our nights into false daylight, the spills that poisoned our water. She listened with deep sorrow, nodding or sighing as if hearing of wayward children. But I know now that she already knew. I didn’t need to recount the protests and the violence. She knew more than me.
Dawn arrived gentle and clear. All day, GbeneBeka moved through the village and beyond, bringing small miracles wherever she went. A bedridden elder, Baba Madara, rose from his mat, breathing easy. Barren cassava fields sprouted green shoots at her touch. Word spread quickly, and by midday people from near and far had gathered to see the wonder with their own eyes. I stayed by her side, shoulders swelling with pride and hope. Me, ordinary me. My prayer had been answered beyond my dreams; it seemed a new dawn for our land. Yet as the crowds grew, I felt a knot of unease. Many folks came with pure gratitude, but others thrust forward with selfish pleas, begging GbeneBeka to cure every ill, to bless their ventures, to make them rich.
She gently reminded all that she came to heal the land and not to conjure gold or grant favours. Some understood and bowed thankfully. But I caught many frowns, from those dissatisfied that her gifts would not fill their pockets overnight. Then I spotted Chief Baridi at the edge of the crowd, fussing over some newcomers in crisp shirts who had arrived in shiny cars.
Even from afar, I recognized them. My shoulders sank. Company men. Or maybe Government men. Though their rigs had left, some still prowled for opportunities in our region. And here they were, drawn by the scent of miracles. Among them I saw Mr. Cole, the foreign manager who was known as the “condolences manager”. The chief was gesturing excitedly, talking to them with a suspicious grin, and they kept glancing toward GbeneBeka as if measuring her worth. It made me very angry. This was a sacred blessing for our people. What right had those profiteers to be here at all?
As evening fell, nearly two hundred people crowded around and inside our community hall for the feast. Chief Baridi ushered GbeneBeka to a seat of honour at the head table, a wooden chair draped in our finest cloth. The hall was aglow with torchlights and buzzing with anticipation. Tables overflowed with food provided by the company: roasted meat, yams, plantains…
GbeneBeka had to duck under the low doorway, and when she entered, the assembly fell quiet, with every eye upon her glowing form. The people had already begun eating before GbeneBeka spoke.
“My children,” she said. Suddenly, they remembered who was before them again. “Today I have seen your pain and your hope. I have come to heal this land, but I cannot do it alone. I will need your help. Your patience, your faith, and your understanding that what I offer is life and renewal, not gold or weapons or power over others. Use the gifts I bring with wisdom and humility.”
There was a murmur of agreement. People came forward with laughter and songs, pressing food and palm wine on one another. She barely tasted the offerings, but smiled kindly, accepting the spirit in which they were given. A drum and flute struck up a joyful tune, and for a short while I was pleased to see my people united in hope.
Chapter 4
Just before the speeches began, I went to wash my hands after the food, then I caught two company men whispering behind a parked car, their backs turned. One carried a bundle of something wrapped in cloth.
“I still can’t believe the plan worked,” one said, laughing loudly. “How they found just the right vessel. The pious believer.”
The other replied, “The chiefs dem don talk sey Wiayor still dey pray. Sey im holy die!”
I halted. Their words weakened my knees.
I pressed myself against the wall. But each word sank deep. Had they watched me all this time? Maybe they even fed the ember of belief they now mocked. Ahh! Was my faith, my grief, all part of some twisted script?
I backed away. I had to tell GbeneBeka.
But as I stepped into the hall, I froze again. Custom sealed my lips; You don’t interrupt elders, especially not when the goddess you called down is being courted like some market bride. I opened my mouth, but nothing came. I stood there, caught between urgency and the reverence that had been conditioned into me. And in that pause, Cole began to speak.
“Pardon me, Great Mother,” Cole, the condolences manager, said smoothly, switching to English.
“What an absolute privilege to witness this… uh, environmental miracle. I represent certain parties interested in the well-being of this region, and I believe we could help share your gifts with the world. Imagine if we collaborated. Your powers could bring prosperity everywhere! There would be great benefits for Ogoni people, of course.”
I winced. My father had taught me better; Ogoni was enough. The land and the people were one — you did not split them with bureaucratic terms. To do so was to speak like an outsider, even when you meant well.
Before GbeneBeka could respond, Chief Baridi eagerly added in our language, “Yes, Mama! With your help, our land can be rich again. The oil may be gone, but perhaps there are other blessings you could bestow: water, fertile soil, new resources… We would ensure it is managed properly. Our people deserve compensation after all these years, do they not?”
His smile was thin, his eyes switching between the goddess and Cole. A heavy silence fell. GbeneBeka slowly rose from her seat. When she spoke, her tone was rather cold.
“I did not return to make any person rich,” she said. “And I will not help anyone exploit this land further. What remains in the earth must stay in the earth if the land is to heal. I came to give life, not wealth. If you seek only profit, I will leave this place.”
The chief’s eyes reddened at being chastised before everyone. Cole’s polite mask slipped, revealing a scowl.
Then suddenly, Cole spoke louder than we’d ever heard him speak.
“There are ways to harness energy like yours,” he said. “Clean, renewable, bio-spiritual resources. The technology is evolving. With the right containment protocols, your gifts could be channelled safely. We could bottle your blessings, so to speak.”
Chief Baridi burst out laughing.
“Yes, Mama de Mama. We would treat it with respect, of course. But it will be our own miracle supply. Rain on demand, soil that never fails, healing water. Your presence could make our land brand new.”
For a second, all was quiet, but many faces were flabbergasted. GbeneBeka tilted her head slowly. Her face revealed nothing.
Chapter 5
Then suddenly there was a blinding flash and an ear-splitting bang as a grenade detonated in the center of the hall. I flung my arm over my face, staggering as chaos erupted. Villagers screamed and stumbled in panic. Taking advantage of the confusion, the company’s henchmen and the chief’s guards rushed forward. They hurled a thick net studded with either charms or some technology over GbeneBeka, entangling her.
“Aha! Hold am well well!” an old chief shouted.
“GbeneBeka Holdings,” Cole mocked.
She cried out in pain and surprise as the net sapped her strength, its cords tightening around her like the coils of a snake.
“No!” I shouted.
Through smoke and the madness, I saw the men struggling to hold the net. Without thinking, I reached for the small pocketknife I always carried at my waist — a keepsake from my father — and hacked at the net with all my might. It hurt my palms, but I ignored the pain. A guard charged at me. I kicked him away as I looked around to see if anyone else would volunteer some help.
I picked up a stone and flung it.Cole’s skull gave way like an overripe melon: sweet, sudden, and deserved. He staggered back with his hands reaching for nothing. He collapsed, blood blooming at the base of his skull.
“Wiayor!” GbeneBeka gasped, pinned to the floor as they pressed her down. Then, just as the pocketknife tore one of the cords, GbeneBeka screamed. Every light in the hall died at once. The ground shook and the hall split apart. People and tables tumbled as a gaping hole opened beneath us. I felt myself falling amid splintered planks and screams. Water, cold and fierce, rushed up from the depths of the earth.
In the blink of an eye, a flood of dark water burst through the gap, sweeping across the collapsing hall. I was caught in its current and pulled under, tumbling in darkness. I felt GbeneBeka’s arm clamp around me, holding me tight as the flood swallowed us.
Moments later, my head came out to the surface. Coughing, I found myself being carried swiftly downstream by the swollen river. Night had fully fallen. GbeneBeka was beside me in the rushing water. Her eyes were glowing in the dark. The current bore us away from the village with relentless speed. We managed to drag ourselves onto the far riverbank, hidden by reeds. I collapsed to my knees on the wet earth, chest heaving. Across the water, faint shouts and flashlight beams showed our pursuers scouring the opposite shore, but they had lost our trail. We were safe, but it didn’t feel like safety.
As I knelt there, I felt terrible about what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out after catching my first breath. “Great Mother, I am so sorry. I brought you into this… and they… they tried to…” My Khana failed under the weight of guilt and sorrow.
GbeneBeka placed a hand on my shoulder. Warmth flowed from her palm into me, steadying my breaths.
“No be your fault, Wiayor,” she said softly. “You na better person. Lion no dey born goat. Dis betrayal na for their head.”
I looked up. In the moonlight, she looked hurt, but her resolve seemed unbroken.
“This has happened before,” she murmured. “Greed! Ah….and dem warn me o! Di elders been warn me. But I tink sey…”
She did not finish the thought.
Chapter 6
1 Then for the first time, I saw unmistakable anger on her face.
2 “Na me dem wan take use do fuel,” she said. “Me? Ahh, I don suffer.”
3 She stood slowly, facing the direction of the village, now hidden behind the trees. Before I could speak, she raised her arms to the sky and said:
“Pikin wey say im mama no go sleep, im sef no go sleep.”
4 There was a strange stillness. The night suddenly turned to day, like a switch. But there was no sun. The earth beneath us rumbled. Across the river, we watched as the village shone. The soil cracked, and black water swelled. Roots and tree branches twisted. Then came the cries. Shouts. Buildings buckled. Flood met flames from hell. The earth swallowed all that had scorned her, and who stood by in silence.
5 But GbeneBeka, she began to dim.
Her hair lost its light. The mantle of clouds above her dispersed. Her eyes, once gold-white, became brown, then smaller, then simply… human.
I rushed to her side.
6 “Wetin happen, Mama? Wetin dey do you?”
“I gave all,” she said. “The land is awake now. It is clean.”
7 I caught her before she collapsed. She felt… lighter and looked different. Her skin was warm, her breathing shallow.
Chapter 7
1 That was the end of her divinity. But the beginning of us. We found a clearing where birds sang. We built a shelter with our hands.
2 The rains came, we welcomed them. She planted seeds. I fished in a stream that ran clear.
3 Some nights, she weeps. Some nights, we laugh.
4 And some days, we walk the land together, collecting shells. Two keepers of a soil still healing.
5 We have no name for this place. Perhaps one day they’ll call it Eden.
6 But we call it home.
Seun Lari-Williams is a Nigerian writer and poet currently based in Antwerp, pursuing a PhD. He is the author of the poetry collections “Garri for Breakfast” (2016) and “A Little Violence” (2022), with his debut collection being longlisted for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature.
The year is 2225. In the former Niger Delta, now called Down-Creek, much has changed over the past two centuries. Technology has advanced so rapidly that cars not only drive themselves but hover like low-flying aircraft. The entire architecture of Down-Creek is aquatic: buildings float, bricks are lab-designed to withstand the impacts of climate change, and the infrastructure adapts to the rhythms of water.
This transformation wasn’t born of innovation alone, it was survival. After decades of oil contamination and toxic leaks, the city was forced to adapt swiftly. The crisis was catastrophic as eighty percent of the vegetation was eradicated, and thousands of people lost their lives. The water remained saturated with chemicals the government to this day struggles to clear.
Scientific strategies helped slow the death toll. Cyborgs were deployed to assist in hospitals and police stations, especially in high-infection zones where human survival was near-impossible. A nationwide curfew was enforced with a lockdown from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily.
To manage population pressure on fragile infrastructure, the government imposed strict birth limits: only two children per family. Any additional children were seized by the state, raised by the system, and reintroduced at age 21 to a sterilized zone in what was formerly the south-eastern Anambra State now referred to by its scientific designation, PSG-100. It was the only area the government had successfully decontaminated, and it was fully operated by cyborgs.
This fuelled public suspicion and deepened mistrust toward President Obele’s administration. Yet, despite growing unease, she continued to win elections, manipulating public perception with calculated precision. After all, it was her government that had saved the Delta from total collapse, restoring fragments of vegetation and stabilizing the region. Whether people liked it or not, none of it would have been possible without the innovations her administration adopted.
Artificial intelligence had become the only viable path forward, but the speed of its expansion terrified many. It felt as though cyborgs were replacing humans, aided by the very government sworn to protect them.
Children raised by cyborgs lacked essential traits like empathy, intuition and cultural memory. The rise of cyborg labour displaced human workers, igniting waves of unrest. Orire was among those who protested, but President Obele responded with force, cyborg police trucks, mass arrests, and exile for repeat offenders.
Orire learned the hard way. After her own jail time, she realized that the most effective way to fight was not through confrontation but through infiltration. She would learn the system, master its language, and use it against itself.
Tonight, she works as usual. She moved like myth, gliding between boats and beneath the thick mats of algae that cloaked the water. Her black, lab-tailored swimsuit was coded to regulate body temperature in the ice-cold currents. This was her hometown, and she knew it like the back of her hand.
Fluent in both Itshekiri and Nembe, Orire had been home-schooled since the age of five and by twelve, she had already learned to code, a skill that now proved invaluable to her smuggling business. Her mother, a scientist employed by Biotech for forty years, had exposed her to the intricacies of genetic research. Orire had volunteered at the lab for five years while studying at university, absorbing everything she could.
Though the entire Delta is aquatic but none of its water was safe to consume. Clean water was so rare that it had become a commodity occasionally traded like currency.
Orire inherited her interest in scientific research from her mother, and her smuggling instincts from her father. Her favourite time to work was two hours before midnight, few patrols roamed the Delta by that time, and she had mastered the art of evasion. Whether by encrypted digital capsule or by submerging herself in algae-infested waters, she always found a way to disappear.
By day, she gathered algae for chemical processing. By night, she traded in contraband, bio-codes suspended in liquid-genes that rewrite forgotten ancestry, and restore what contamination had erased in many children.
Tonight’s assignment was different. Three clients were expecting her after 1 a.m. but she was not comfortable meeting anyone at the deep hush of night. Too many things could go wrong. The fine for traveling during restricted hours was as steep as 8 million naira or six sachets of water and working in the dark came with its own dangers. One could never be sure if it was a trap or if it was a criminal after her capsule and contraband.
So tonight, she brought Taye and Fefe. Better safe than sorry.
She halted abruptly, raising her hand to signal her companions to stop and listen. For a moment, she thought she’d seen a shadow but as she looked closer, she realized it was only a tree, a mangrove. Its gnarled limbs swaying gently in the water, she exhaled and motioned for them to move on.
But before they could take another step, a blue-ray light flashed across the water.
“Police!” Taye hissed, diving beneath a cluster of dead leaves drifting on the surface.
A patrol boat hovered nearby, its searchlight sweeping the water. Orire’s thoughts raced. If they were caught, it meant a hefty fine, two years in prison, or three years burned from the country.
“Hello, citizens. Anyone here?” came a voice from the blue light, mechanical and rising. A cyborg officer.
Orire didn’t waste any time. She signalled to Fefe to follow Taye and, pulling out her capsule, she dived into the water too. Straining her eyes to see inside the murky water, she punched coordinates into a scanner and tracked it to focus on the patrol boat’s sensor array. The capsule flickered purple — a successful digital shield.
The cyborg circled them for ten tense minutes. Orire remained submerged, motionless, lungs aching. The cyborg did one last circle and then drew away.
Orire surfaced. Her heart felt like fire and the first breath she drew provided welcome relief. She slapped the water to alert the others that the coast was clear.
“Goodness, I thought they’d never leave,” Fefe gasped as she surfaced. “We need to move quickly. It won’t take long before they realize the sensor has been disabled.”
“That way,” Taye said, pointing with his finger
“Let’s go,” Orire urged, her voice low and urgent. She surged forward, swimming like a fish. Her companions followed, and within five minutes they reached an orange-painted hybrid floating house.
Orire scanned the surroundings, ensuring they hadn’t been followed. Then, three knocks, two, and three again. The door swung open. Eight knocks instead of a bell was their code.
A woman in her thirties stood in the doorway, silent.
“My world, your world, equal to one world,” Orire said, exhaling and raising her hand.
“With one heart,” the woman replied, her face softening into a smile. “Welcome. I wasn’t sure you’d make it. There are so many patrols tonight.”
Orire nodded briskly. “That’s why we need to work fast. We have to reach the second client before reinforcements arrive.”
She pulled out the capsule, now displaying encrypted text, and opened her phone to check the messages.
“Delia is the client. Seventeen years old,” she said, scanning the data.
The woman nodded and led them to the teenager’s room.
Delia lay fast asleep. Her skin glowed faintly, and her eyes were sunken, a sign of something deeper. Fefe and Orire exchanged a glance. Fefe, with ten years of nursing experience, had seen this before, metabolic dermatitis triggered by prolonged exposure to algae and dehydration.
Still, Orire activated the capsule’s medical scan to be sure. It flickered, then pulsed with light as diagnostic rays swept across Delia’s arm, numbers cascading across the screen.
“Why didn’t you take her to the clinic?” Taye asked, his face wearing a frown. “The medical-aid burned us for two months for using the card to buy water,” the woman said with a sigh. “You know water is expensive.”
Orire’s expression shifted. Her mind flicked to the daily reality they all endured, an area shrouded in water, yet none of it safe to drink.
“But there are thirst-suppressing pills,” Fefe pointed out.
The woman’s expression shifted sharply. She turned to Fefe, with eyes blazing. “Does it look like they’re working?” she snapped. “What do you take me for? Why would I spend our medical aid on expensive water if the government’s pills actually worked?” Her anger hung in the air.
“Don’t worry,” Orire interjected gently, gesturing for Fefe to let it go. “She’ll be fine after tonight. I’ll administer an anti-pathogen serum, along with a slow-release wet gene tablet and hydrate her.” She added, pulling out a small bottle. “It’s purified in the lab, it is safe to drink, but only a quarter cup daily while her body adjusts.”
The woman clapped her hands in gratitude, tears gleaming in her eyes. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t need to,” Fefe said softly. “It is the little we can do. We have to stick together, it’s the only way we will survive these unprecedented times.”
“Just make sure she doesn’t speak of this to anyone,” Taye added, his tone firm. “Anyone practicing biomedical work must be registered. If word gets out, the police will arrest us.”
The woman nodded repeatedly. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure.”
“Alright, we need to leave now,” Orire said, tucking the capsule into her bag. She adjusted her swimsuit, increasing its thermal setting.
They slipped into the water together, the air shimmering faintly above them.
“The next house is five blocks away,” Fefe said, checking her S575 bio-water resistant watch. “We need to be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Wait,” she added, squinting at the screen. “The watch shows high levels of cyanobacteria in the water. We’ll need to take the east route.”
She opened the navigator, recalculating their path.
Art By Sunny Efemena
“What? But the east route is longer,” Orire protested, her brows furrowed.
“It’s either we reroute or risk high exposure,” Fefe replied. “The suit can hold off bacteria, but it’s not fool proof.” She added
Orire sighed and pressed her palm to her forehead, a gesture she always made when deep in thought. She shrugged. “We could try the upper route,” she said, eyeing the tangled pathways that snaked through the water city like capillaries.
Fefe was the first to object. “There? You’re joking. I’ve already been arrested three times. If they catch me again, it’s exile.”
“We don’t have much of a choice,” Taye interjected. “We can’t swim thirty minutes without being picked up by cameras or crossing paths with a patrol boat. If you prefer, we could postpone.”
Fefe shook her head quickly. “No. The client is scheduled for court tomorrow. He’s been loyal for six years. Besides, we’re already halfway.”
“Then the high route it is,” Taye said, swimming toward the solid ground.
They followed, keeping their heads low to avoid detection. They ran fast, but not fast enough. As they reached 7th Avenue, a sensory light triggered a siren and snapped a photo, alerting nearby patrols.
Within seconds, a floating police car emerged and hovered above them.
“Citizens, this is a lockdown. You’ve passed your restricted hour,” a cyborg voice announced. “You are under arrest.”
Orire, Taye, and Fefe didn’t wait. They bolted, turning sharp corners and racing toward the water, their only refuge. The house stood just ahead, half-concealed by trees. Instead of approaching the front door, Orire gestured to Taye, who tossed a handful of his kobo coins at a window tucked behind the foliage.
The police car passed without noticing them hiding behind trees
A head appeared in the window, and a man quickly opened it to let them in.
“This way,” the man said, without a formal greeting.
Orire and Fefe hurried into the lounge while Taye stayed behind to keep watch. A child sat awake, reading from a digital book, her eyes flickering in the dim light.
“Why isn’t she asleep?” Orire asked, glancing at her wristwatch.
“She was, until an hour ago. The patrol lights woke her. I couldn’t sleep either. I’m anxious about tomorrow,” the man said, his voice tight with frustration. “If she doesn’t appear on the registry as a citizen, the court might hand her over to social services. They’ll take her away.”
“We’re here,” Orire reassured them as she settled on the sofa. “We’ll set it right.”
She looked toward the dining room light. “Ile-AI Brightness increase by ten percent, please.” She said glancing at the lights inside the lounge. The light slightly increased
The man sat down, visibly shaken. “Miss, my daughter’s life is at stake, are you sure you can pull this off? I can’t lose her.”
“You don’t need to worry about the registry anymore,” Orire said, her voice steady. Her mind drifted to her father’s words: “Learn the system, Ori, and sing it by heart. Then there will be nothing to fear. The system has holes, but you won’t see them unless you understand its language.”
She smiled. “By tomorrow, she’ll no longer be a ghost. But remember, the law only allows two children per family. So, Hendrieta, the eldest, will now be registered as your brother’s child.”
The man’s face darkened. “But I don’t have a brother. And the state knows that.”
“I’ll create a bogus one,” Orire replied. “If there’s one thing about inscription, you can put information in as easily as you can take the information out.”
She tapped into the country’s mortuary system. “There were four deaths registered in October last year. I’ve just added a name and listed him as deceased. Now, the birth registry: Alero Ossayi. Address, year of birth, blood type O positive, fingerprints, all done.”
She stood up. “Make sure Hendrieta remembers the name: Efe Ossayi. Your late brother.”
Just in time Taye signalled from his sentry position at the window, a soft Hammerkop bird call.
Orire moved toward the window, ready to jump, but something caught her eye, a cluster of water lilies, cattails, and lotus flowers blooming a few meters away. It always amazed her how nature found a way to bounce back.
She turned her head and saw the man watching her, as if he’d read her thoughts.
“They’re lab-grown,” he said, tossing her a bottle of purified water. Orire, who had momentarily forgotten about the payment, caught it with a nod of gratitude.
She nodded and raised the bottle to the man, in a quiet gesture of appreciation.
“Quick, Orire. We can’t waste a moment,” Taye urged. “The police are on the prowl. Three boats have already passed the house. We need to hurry back before we’re caught.”
Orire didn’t respond. She dove from the windowsill straight into the water.
“Three boats?” the man muttered, gripping the window frame as he leaned out. Below, Orire and her team were already swimming. “It’s usually one boat patrolling five sections. Why so many tonight?”
“We used the high route to get here,” Orire rasped. “You know how cyborgs operate, one movement and they swarm. We’re practically imprisoned in this place.” She added before sinking deep beneath the surface
If they were to avoid detection, staying submerged was their only option. Orire opened her capsule, using it for both light and navigation. Twenty minutes underwater was uncomfortable, even with a lab tailored swimsuit.
Taye was the first to reach his house, slipping through the pet door since the main entrance was locked. Fefe scrambled to her own door, dropping her key card twice in panic.
Orire wasn’t so lucky. She arrived just as a police boat passed her house.
Thinking fast, she scanned for the nearest Delta-Care Clinic, a 24-hour facility. She quickly crammed the first patient number she saw into her capsule, then let the device sink into the water in case the police decided to search her.
She pressed her watch as she raised her arms. Her swimsuit fibres shifted, morphing into peach-coloured pyjamas with a sleeping kitty printed on the front.
“Citizen, this is a restricted hour. Why are you out?” the cyborg officer asked, stopping the boat a few meters from her. A scanner touched his forehead and lit up as it scanned Orire.
“I was sick,” she said, turning to face him. “I’m coming from the clinic.”
The officer nodded and checked his wrist-pad for confirmation.
“Patient unique number?” He asked
“Dtk32074ps,” she said, holding her breath steady.
The officer paused, then nodded. “Ah, Bridget Rice. Good evening.”
He started the boat and drifted away.
Orire didn’t respond. She hurried inside and shut the door behind her. The capsule could wait until morning.
“Call Petunia,” she instructed, pressing her wristwatch.
“I’ll see you tomorrow for that lunch you promised,” she said, hoping the client understood the code.
“Oh, for Banga soup?” came the voice. “I heard tomorrow will be very cold. What happened?”
“There was so much blue,” Orire replied. “We’ll have to eat the soup in the morning if it’ll be cold by lunchtime.”
“Well, that’s fine. What time? You know crayfish spoils easily.”
“Eight to turn. I won’t be having cereal,” she added, then hung up.
“Co-pilot ilè, play my music,” she said, stepping into the shower. Blue water streamed out chemical-infused, good only for washing.
She paused before bed, gazing at the painting of old Port Zebei. The date in the corner read 22 July 2025.
“Those were different times,” she murmured.
Orire slept only a few hours. When she woke, it was drizzling. She stared at the cloudy sky, her eyes drawn to a crescent-shaped, red-coloured moon.
She took out a chemical-filled bucket and attached the sulphur filter to it. Then she dove into the water to retrieve her capsule. She found it lying nestled in a bed of kelp. She retrieved it, then raced toward Miebi’s house.
He was thirteen. He didn’t need much, just a contraband dose coded with inscription, designed to act as both pacemaker and DNA filler, repairing the gaps dug by the hostile and contaminated environment.
As the serum took effect, the boy’s eyes turned amber. His hair curled into soft, floating coils. He looked up at her.
The gene was working. It wasn’t natural but if it saved lives, it was enough.
Who knows? Maybe this was a future president. One who would give voice back to the people and silence the bots.
Orire smiled and gently fiddled with the boy’s hair.
Khayelihle Benghu is a South African writer who resides at 185B Lefu Street, Phiri, Soweto, Johannesburg. She has been writing since 2008. Her poem “In This Den Should We Offer Our Sacrifice” was published by Decolonial Passage in 2024. In 2025, her works “The Heart of the Boy” by Aliko and “Colours of Rainbow” by Literary Cocktail were published. Her piece “It Might Take a While” was published by Suburban Witchcraft, and “The Jewel of Sympodial Palace” will appear in Person of Interest.
“… and our land … is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it…”
Mahmoud Darwish, To Our Land.
#
It is a warm August afternoon in the year 2118 C.E*.
They are at the top floor of a mid-sized wooden one-storey house with a large grassy yard, deep in the heart of the Creeks, in those parts that were referred to as interior Akwa Ibom before the war, far from the bustling city centers and their artificial fauna.
They are in a study that is really just a near-empty room with a carved seat and a wiry tan bamboo desk, and an old, pale blue two-setter couch made from what might have been some sort of cellulose fabric, which seems to be a reading nook. Scattered on the table are a pile of coarse, brown, bio-pulp papers and notes, one of those cheap bio-metal tabs everyone has now, and a reusable pen.
It is quite cool as there is just one small circular stained-glass window atop the couch, and it is also quite dark, save for the meagre sunlight dripping into the room from the window like hot drops of water, and some ethereal purple light, spilling into the room from under a small carved oak wood door in the corner.
“Those foreign scientists… They came from all over, you know. The president thought he was onto something huge, and so he absolutely splurged. There were geologists from Spain, botanists from Portugal, petroleum engineers from the UK, chemists from India… All over the world. It was a team of almost 30 scientists, and none of them were Nigerian. I was the only Nigerian working with them, as their lab scientist, helping them to clean the saucers and prep the tools, and used as a tool myself.”
She pauses to adjust and clean her glasses with a little blue cloth. There is a meticulous method to the way she cleans, perhaps because her glasses are archaic, horn-rimmed, medicated — a delicate antique — or maybe it is because she has learnt the hard way the virtue of handling things with care. Her wiry, tired hands lift the glasses back to her eye carefully.
Her entire body is small, hollow, wood brown, like a carving, and almost swallowed up by her outfit, a threadbare cellulose fabric (C-Fabric, as it’s called these days) sweater worn over a cheap stretched out blue bio-satin dress.
There are lines around her small mouth and veins showing on her taut skin. She has been through a roughening that made her age faster, made her look like a 70-year-old relic, although she is in her 50s.
But she is strong in spite of it, and it shows in the way she twists her mouth to contain the tears that sometimes threaten to undo her, in the way she adjusts herself demurely on her seat; a fragility that was learnt, a fragility that is strength.
“Are you okay, Madam Ivy?”
It is Dr Douye Tari who asks. The couch making a wheezing sound as he leans forward on it.
She looks at him and forces a small smile, just like the one she learnt to affect whenever she was harassed at the commission, just enough to conceal.
“Yeah. Yes. Yes. I’m fine. Thank you. Very fine.”
She shakes her head to better dispel remnants of the bad memories.
“Back to my story. Where were we? Ah yes. The scientists. They were very shady people, those scientists. But they were smart. You see, when we first discovered the gas in liquid form in that erosion puddle I already told you about, we thought this was a liquid form of energy. But they discovered that it was a form of gas, and that its real origin was from a type of shale rock.”
“Shale rock? The same one that crude oil is found in?” Douye asks.
“Yes. But these ones are different. You see, some bioremediation microorganisms used during the cleanup to break down toxic oil residues in the Niger Delta soil, had somehow seeped into the fissures of some shale rocks and had interacted with the fossil fuels already existing there to create this new gas.”
“How is that possible?” He asks again.
He is relaxed on the couch, long legs spread out in front of him, brows furrowed, and his fingers rubbing his left ear, which houses a ridiculously expensive dangly lab-grown gem (G-Gem) earrings with a design of the Idia head from Ancient Edo.
“We are not exactly sure. But we figured that the simple reason for that is the C-2 robots.” C stands for the Commission for the Recovery of the Niger Delta (CORND), the organization the robots belonged to. They were used to dispersing microorganisms during the cleanup and another name for them was –
“Spray balls? You think they had something to do with this?”
“Possibly, Dr Tari. Those little things could enter anywhere, and occasionally they did. It’s a theory, though.”
Dr Tari looks down in thought, his hand still flicking his ear.
He is a good-looking 36-year-old, with a full beard, dressed in expensive mush leather jeans (made from mycelium, which is all the craze now), and bulky Hi-Tech copper glasses that he doesn’t accept are out of style. Born to a prince father from a privileged Ijaw royal family and a French doctor mother, and being a doctor himself, he exudes an air of organic opulence.
And he reminds Madam Ivy so much of her own mixed-breed son—Lumen. She makes a mental note to call him and his wife later, see how they and her grandchildren are doing.
As Douye contemplates, Nkoyo Etim Tari, his wife, known to everyone as Koko, continues pacing, unsettled, worriedly wringing her ring-studded fingers. They are all cheap biopolymers, except for her custom ₦10 million Cartiér teardrop cut, grown diamond, and emerald wedding ring.
That is the kind of rich that she is.
The kind of rich that grew up dirt poor in the inner sectors of the Creeks, which still smelt like crude oil, and had to hustle her way through life, making a name for herself, till she met her rich husband.
The kind of rich that feels that they should maintain an affinity with the poor, despite wearing custom Lucién, who is the hottest fashion designer right now, and expensive Hi-grade Lyocell jeans.
When she finally stops pacing, the final click of her custom-made, ethically sourced hemp (ES-hemp) Lucien black heel boots on the wooden floor echoes across the small room.
“The spray balls… I remember as a child growing up in these Creeks, we were always warned to stay away from them, because what they were spraying could cause rashes and burns on our skin. Doesn’t that mean the gas is unstable and dangerous?”
“Of course not.” Madam Ivy answers quickly, stressing the “Not”. “Listen, whatever process those microorganisms went through in that shale rock, it purified them, stripped them of harmful effects, especially towards humans, plants, and animals. As for petrol-based products, lithium-based products, iron, and some forms of metal, that is a different story.”
“Mm hmm.”
The old lady licks her dry lips.
“They tried harnessing it, those scientists. But it never worked. It melted iron, metals, all sorts of conductors, lithium-based things. Whenever they brought such things close, it would pulverize them. Its original chemical function is to neutralize such stuff. Even as a renewable form of energy, it is still doing its clean-up work. No heat, no flames, no burning, it would just melt them. Clean and efficient.”
The two guests shudder and look at themselves in fright.
“I don’t know, Madam Ivy. That sounds like the gas is indeed dangerous.”
“He is right.” Koko agrees. “Madam Ivy, we watched it pulverize our son’s ball, melt it into freaking nothing. First you say it is not dangerous, now you say it does that to everything…”
“Not everything, obviously. Just the ones it’s averse to.” As Madam Ivy speaks, the single-line tribal mark on her left cheek deepens into a frown. “What make was your son’s ball?”
“It’s plastic, one of those cheap plastic balls that can still be found in sectors here.” Duoye says with a grimace, as if voicing out that he had bought cheap plastic for his son somehow demeans him.
“No wonder. It also reacts to plastic, especially the cheap petrol-based plastics. How exactly did your son’s ball get in contact with it?”
Koko takes a deep breath.
“We actually came around with the children to visit my parents. It was my mother’s birthday yesterday. We decided to play a game of catch-ball with the children this late morning on a small, picturesque piece of depressed land, not far from my parents’ place. During play, the ball flew out of my hands and got lodged in a tree, some distance from where we were playing. My husband and I went to retrieve the ball. And well, somehow, the ball fell into this pond, that bubbled and glowed a kind of purple. And we watched the water melt that ball. It was a scary sight.”
Douye leans forward, touches her hand and takes up the story.
“So, we asked her parents, who had worked with the commission in their earlier years, and they directed us to the CORND headquarters to get answers. We went there and there was nothing, nothing at all. The few old hands milling about told us about you and where we could find you, that you might have the answers we were looking for.”
The end of the story hangs in the stiff air of the room, as if afraid of touching the ground and evaporating, as Madam Ivy reflects on their story.
“I’m confused though. How did you manage to contain it, if it seemed to destroy everything?” Koko asks suddenly.
“Oh. The scientists discovered that wood and glass could contain it. And I discovered that those same resources could also act as its conductors.” She answers in the midst of her musing.
Koko looks at the older woman, at her vein-filled hands, at the pinch of her lips as she focuses on something on her tablet, and wonders if she should get her help after all this. How long had she been staying here? And what has it done to her? Were her children aware?
But instead, she asks,
“You discovered?”
Madam Ivy looks up from her tab.
“Yes. Ever since I was sacked from the commission, I have been doing some on-and-off research on the gas, which I call Aethelene by the way. Don’t ask me why. It just sounded good at the time.” She breaks off to consult her tab again.
“And I discovered a lot of cool stuff about it, like the fact that it reproduces in the presence of sunlight and water. Also, it’s practically harmless to humans, with no side effects, even when the human is wearing anything that contains harsh metals, steel, petro-based products, or lithium-based products. It just melts the other stuff and leaves the human intact. And this is the real game changer…” Her face seems to glow, and her tone is almost breathless, as she focuses on them.
“Apparently, it can be harnessed only with natural resources sourced from the earth or mild materials derived from natural products. I’m not done with the research though.“
The others are silent for a while, then finally,
“You were sacked?” Douye asks.
Her expression falls and becomes taut again.
“Yes. I was sacked from the commission, threatened, and made to sign an NDA. The order came from the president’s office.”
“Why?”
“Well, Dr Tari, I got wise to the foreign scientists. They had discovered the potential of the gas and how harmless it was. I didn’t even know the full scope then. But they discovered something special about the gas that they wanted to keep to themselves and so they lied to Ubong Samuel, saying the gas was possibly more dangerous than a radioactive element and that he should shut down the research and bury everything, so as not to risk a destruction worse than the massive oil spill of 2039.”
“Which is valid.”
“Yes. Except, they were lying, Dr. They were lying. I knew they were. So, I dared to meet the president and tell him myself of what I knew, tell him of everything that had happened to me, how I was harassed and abused in secret, even though I couldn’t get any concrete evidence” Her hands are trembling now, and there is at last, a little glimpse of the weakness that once held her captive.
“And do you know what he did? He laughed. Ubong Samuel might have been a decent president, but he was not a good man. He accused me of telling tales because I was made a mere lab scientist, and he sacked me. And he made me sign an NDA, so I wouldn’t say a thing.”
The air is thick when she finishes, and she lets herself sink deeper into her seat as if a huge load has been rolled off her back, and it seems like the room has gotten warmer during her tale.
Guilt creeps into Koko with this new warmth, and it comes with a weight that bears down on her, an unwanted load that tries to stifle her and she is aware of the strained pitch of her voice when she asks,
“Why didn’t you come out about this all this time? Ubong Samuel has not been president for over 20 years now, and he is bedridden currently in Malaysia.”
“I was scared. Very scared.”
“Of what?”
“The presidency. I try to follow the news from here, you know. There are files filled with information on the gas, lots of files that could only be accessed by the president, but none of the other presidents even breathed a word about the gas. One even tried to shut down the cleanup. I… I thought it was an organized secrecy now, and that if I tried to speak up, I would be silenced immediately. I have a family, a son, and wonderful grandchildren. I couldn’t take the risk.”
Koko tries to find words but how does she reassure this woman? How does she reassure herself?
“I… I… I didn’t even know about all this. And I doubt the other presidents did. Whatever files exist or existed, God knows what hole Ubong Samuel dug and threw them in.”
A short silence again.
“And you are sure that this gas is completely harmless to humans and other living things? You’ve tested it?” Douye asks.
“Yes. Of course. You know what? Let me show you…”
***
Light spills out first, scattered streaks of bright sunlight yellow, slowly bathing them in its warmth, as the carved wooden door creaks open. The suddenness of the radiance momentarily blinds them, and they open their eyes to a sight that stuns them speechless, motionless, and near breathless.
Before them, on a pale cream cane wood table with bent legs, is a nearly 2 feet-tall glass jar with a wooden latch, facing the sole open window and the sunlight, and housing the only thing in the room, the cause of their entrancement – a sort of gaseous substance, that thrums, and throbs, and glows a vibrant, magical purple. Whatever it is, it is alive and its glow reflects on the walls, mingling with the rays of sun and washing the room in varying hues of purple, and white, and lavender, and indigo. And it emits an energy that pulses in the room, and it is as if the room is alive, one big purple organism.
Koko steps forward hesitantly, breaking through the trance that holds them, the glow in the room reflecting dimly on her glassy Lucién bio-silk shirt, which shimmers and shines on her dark skin. She approaches the glass jar reverentially, for surely, this must be holy ground, and stands in awe, staring at the subtly rippling gas.
Madam Ivy walks past her, strolling easily to the jar, the glow bouncing off the stretchy surface of her gown. She unlocks the wooden latch, opens it slightly, and thrusts her fingers in. Koko takes a step back, unable to peel her eyes away, and watches the older woman twirl her wry fingers inside the jar. Slowly, the gas swirls around her fingers and starts pulsing actively, rising rapidly towards the opening of the latch. She quickly pulls back her fingers and locks the latch, but not before some of the gas escapes.
They watch enraptured as the gas sways slowly through the air, as if dancing a slow dance with gravity, before it drops delicately to the ground. Koko follows its rhythmic journey down and now notices that there are a few spots on the ground, stained with this same pulsing gas, and that the floor is wooden.
Art By Sunny Efemea
Madam Ivy looks up at them triumphantly.
“I cannot believe it.” Douye breathes out, awe imprinted in his voice. This is the future, a clean future, a sustainable future, a lucrative future, and he, Douye Tari, would be a big part of it.
He who had grown up, seeing people throw around careless talk about his family, because apparently his grandfather had been one of those who had orchestrated the sale of huge swathes of the Creeks, or Niger Delta as it was called then, to a particular foreign company – a sale which triggered the bombing of several oil facilities, which in turn caused the massive oil spill that almost destroyed this region and kick-started the country’s second civil war, the End War.
His grandfather was greedy and kind of a klutz, but why are they still being defined by his legacy? His parents and he have had to work extra, involve themselves in all kinds of philanthropic work to clear their name, and still…
But this… He can feel it. This will change everything.
“I can’t believe it.” He whispers again.
Koko can’t either. She slowly takes off the rings on the fingers of her left hand and bends to touch one of the glowing spots on the ground. The gas is chilling and it swirls around the tips of her fingers, pulsing and twitching like a million tiny fairies are floating through it.
In a world like this, where everything is grown and cultured and controlled in labs, where labels were the norm and everyone is concerned with who produced what and how it was produced, where everything is lifeless and has a dull shine to it.
Here… here is something that seems to draw its essence from the life source of earth itself, something that shines vibrantly and unashamed, unfettered, uncontrolled.
Koko regards it and its aura, and suddenly she feels that if she stays there longer, she might actually start crying and never want to leave. So, she stands up abruptly and walks out of the little room, and one by one, the others walk out with her too.
***
Rich, dense foliage stretches for miles on both sides of the road, casting long shadows on the smooth stone-laid road. The trees blend with the bio-steel streetlight poles, so it seems like the light emanates from them, and it gives the road an ethereal feel. The road is empty, quiet, with only the chirping of forest insects and the occasional villagers passing with wooden carts and bamboo baskets as company.
They are floating at a leisurely pace and Koko can take in the sights of the Across Delta Link Road that they are travelling along. They pass an old man in a threadbare, cheap, cellulose-based C-fabric shirt and matching trousers, which look like a knockoff of those high-quality bio-linen clothes that changed colours when one moves; this one just glitches tiredly, now a pale yellow and then a sad dull green. He is driving a wooden cart with sparse foodstuffs inside, and he pauses in his walk to stare at the car as they pass, before going on his way.
Ah… The car –
Personalized for Koko, with smart polymer paint that flows through all the shades of grey, from a mildly angry cloud to the dense charcoal of a moonless night sky, the squat, boxy, tempered bio-steel electric car is Hyundai’s latest offering from their Anodyne collection, a hard-edge departure from the classic arch style recycled-steel (Re-steel) cars that is commonplace now.
They are out of place here.
The big cities where Koko stays are filled with long, smart houses longer than these trees, and roads crisscrossing the sky, and floating cars, and selfish people cosplaying as nice.
But this place feels like they stepped into a time machine and went back to a period when everything was not grown in a lab, including humans. A time her grandmother called “simpler times”, when cars rode on tires on asphalt roads, and children read from white paged notes, and clothes and songs and art and people were simpler.
Now, everything is careful, everyone is more complicated and living feels like a brittle cracker.
They are out of place here and no one is more aware of that fact than Koko.
On trips like this, she typically pays more attention to the foliage and the ambience and considers how successful the clean-up of the Niger Delta was in the aftermath of the spill, and how potent government actions can be when it is backed by constitutional strength and disciplined political will. Today though, she is too overwhelmed to think. So, she just presses her head to the car window and sighs.
At the driver’s side, Douye’s phone beeps and lights up. He looks at it and sneaks a look at her.
“Davina just texted me. The entourage got to the villa since 3pm. The children are watching TV. She said she tried reaching out to you several times.”
Koko shrugs.
“My phone is on airplane mode.”
He nods and turns back to the road.
Koko makes a mental note to tell Davina off for allowing her children watch TV at this time, and then she promptly forgets.
They ride in silence for some minutes and then he looks at her again.
“We have to talk, Koko, before we get back.”
She remains glued to the window.
“Can you hear me, Koko? I said we have to talk.”
“Uh uh… About what?”
“About the gas, Aethelene, and its implications for your big meeting tomorrow.”
She grimaces.
“What meeting?”
“Have you forgotten? With the foreign aid guys?”
She remembered. The foreign aid guys, who according to the black brief currently sitting on Koko’s desk, are an entourage from the Organisation of United Nations and the One World Bank Project.
“Of course, I haven’t forgotten. So, what about them?” She adjusts on her seat, annoyed, but not quite figuring out whether it was the thought of meeting those people or the idea of talking about state matters here, when all she wanted to do was watch the sky and the trees.
“What about…? Are you serious? Madam Ivy said she suspects that they might have something more sinister than aid in mind, seeing as they are asking to be part of the last batch of the clean-up exercise. There is a possibility that they just want access to Aethelene.”
“Yeah. She did.” That woman was highly distrustful of foreigners, and maybe she should be, too. “There is also a possibility that they don’t know about the Aethelene gas and they just want to help.”
“Hmmm… But what if she’s right? What if they are not to be trusted?”
Koko sighs heavily and twists her mouth.
“I don’t know. Maybe we refuse the aid?”
“Valid. But are we going to refuse it in a public meeting? That could cause outrage.”
She chews on this. He is right, of course. Her predecessor became unpopular because he refused aid and tried to shut down the cleanup. And she had campaigned on that flaw in his decision.
“I could stop the… the… meeting from being televised or live-streamed.”
Douye scoffs as if to say, Like that would do anything.
“But the news will still come out, and people will still get outraged.”
“Ugh!” She melts deeper into the mush leather chair, exasperated. “So, what do I do then? I’m completely blank.”
It’s been less than a year since she was sworn in as president of the Republic of New Naija, a fresh-faced 31-year-old articulate lawyer/business content creator and here she is, already stuck on what to do.
Thankfully, Douye isn’t, and he had been formulating a plan since they left Madam Ivy’s house. He smiles now.
“I’ve been thinking, yeah and I suggest we assemble a team of intelligent scientists and like, expert engineers in the country – Madam Ivy could head them, to do in-depth research into the gas, and slowly introduce it into the New Naija energy sector. After the successful rollout in our country, we start selling to other countries at our own rates. Boom! How does that sound?”
Koko looks at her husband with a mix of admiration and wariness. On the one hand, that idea is quite impressive. And on the other hand, where was this sharp business acumen coming from? From a pediatrician, no less?
“Yeah. That could work. But that could take years. Years… What of these foreign aid people? How will I stall them?” What of the indigenes of the Creeks who were still recovering from the trauma of the spill? How would she convince them to agree to this? What would another round of mining do to their land? As thoughts tumble about in her head, Douye starts talking again.
“We will find a way. Tell them something. Maybe tell them the people are still… You know… full of anger, for foreigners. So, to avoid any mishaps, we will appreciate it if they hold off their aid, until the emotional scars of the people heal. The entire world is more sensitive now. They will accept that explanation.”
She sighs and focuses on his big hands as he controls the steering stick, and there is silence for a while, save for the low humming of the car. They are now out of the forest roads, the colours of the stones on the road are more visible now, and Koko can see children playing in the rain, in the yards of those circular, flat-roof Enhanced Mud (EM) solar-powered houses scattered along the road. They are lucky. When she was their age, the air wasn’t this clean.
“Koko…”
“Mmmmh…?”
“This thing is huge, massive, revolutionary, and it could be the answer. It could be the tool that would transform New Naija, turn us into a world power.”
“Or it could be the weapon that will destroy us again, turn us against each other once again. It always starts with something like this. Don’t you remember?”
Because she does. She remembered pictures of pain in her history texts; growing up in a highly evolved world that is still struggling; her grandmother’s scars from surviving the spill and the war; cracked farmlands that looked like they were recovering from a bad bleeding; a world with a lifeless energy; and a people who still harbour deep scars and trust issues.
“So, are you saying you are going to continue with Ubong Samuel’s style? Bury everything and pretend the Aethelene doesn’t exist? When it could transform the Creeks and the entire New Naija?”
Koko is a little disappointed. Clearly, her husband doesn’t remember.
“I… I don’t know, okay? What if we don’t need it? We have done well for ourselves so far, without it. What if we don’t need Aethelene’s transformation?”
“Ugh, Koko. Your self-righteousness sometimes gets to me. What are you even saying?!”
“Why are you all up in arms against me, D? I thought we were talking.”
“We are, Sweet,” his voice softens as he turns to look at her briefly, and places his palm on her thigh. “But I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to take advantage of this miracle. All this time, the Creeks have suffered vilification and abuse from the rest of the country, who accuse us of using up the country’s resources on the cleanup. If it weren’t for the Niger Delta Clean-Up Act of 2047, the clean-up would have been abandoned a long time ago. It is time for us to get back to contributing to the success of the country. It is probably for a time like this that you were elected as President.”
“It is probably not.”
“Koko…”
“Fine. I will think about it.”
She will think of a way to move heaven and earth to protect her people and make sure that their resources benefit them. She is not sure she became president for this, but she knows she will do it, anyway.
But for now…
She turns back to her window, she closes her eyes to sleep, and she dreams of purple gas and a future.
C.E: Common Era.
Mary Ini Okaka is an aspiring writer from Edo State, Nigeria with a first degree in English and Literature. She is interested in media for social change and has worked for several media outfits, while she dreams of becoming a published author and writing for the big screen one day. She has had works published by SprinNG, Wax Poetry and Loun Loun. When she is not writing, she is working, reading or sleeping.
The sky hangs low, a yellow-white sheet that refuses to give shade. It has the colour of sickness, a sky that has forgotten rain. The air is not dry in the way of deserts, but heavy, holding the stench of something rotten far beneath the soil. The earth itself seems to breathe wrong here. Amina walks toward the Authority outpost with a knot in her stomach that tightens with every step, each movement accompanied by the faint clatter of the seven empty water Jerrycans strapped to the truck behind her. The sound is hollow, a cruel reminder.
Her sandals grind against the hard-packed road. Beneath the surface, the clay is cracked but not in the jagged, storybook way. Here the cracks are thin, black lines like veins, marks left by ruptured pipes far below, that had bled oil for years. The Authority once buried their waste deep in the earth, and the press of time has forced it upward, staining the ground itself. When the wind cuts across the plain, it carries the acrid tang of petroleum, a seep that never fully dries. She knows the smell without knowing why she knows it, as if her body remembers what her mind cannot. It clings to her nose the way the taste of brine clings to the tongue. She tells herself it has always been there, though a restless part of her mind insists otherwise.
Ahead, the outpost rises out of the flatness like a tooth of white stone. It is not stone, of course. It is the Authority’s polymer skin – a synthetic shell extruded in single sheets, impossible to crack or corrode, layered so no weather nor acid dust can wear it down. The walls have no seams because they were poured whole, a trick of their engineers to suggest permanence, purity, untouchability. A pipe runs from its side, wide enough for a grown man to crawl through, bolted in place with a precision that admits no rust. It hums faintly, not just the whine of pumps but a tuned frequency, low enough to shiver through bone. Villagers say it is engineered that way on purpose: a reminder that the Authority’s machines live in the body, that even silence carries their mark. It is not merely sound but ownership, pressed beneath the ribs.
Her throat aches, not from thirst – she drank what little she could before leaving – but from the thought of what she will have to give this time. She already knows the Archivist will demand more than she is ready to give. She has no choice. The reservoir in the village had been poisoned by seepage, the same black oil that creeps from cracks in the earth. When the bloom spread across the reservoir surface two days prior, fish floated belly-up before nightfall. The elders had argued over whether to boil it, or filter it through the reed mats, to take the risk. But everyone remembered the sickness last time, when oil-laced water had boiled into fever and rot inside their bodies, killing the frail within days. It had been her voice that decided it. Her voice and her burden.
The polymer door slides open as she approaches. No sound of hinges. No smell of dust. Inside is the kind of cold that makes her skin prickle instantly; not the natural cold of weather, but engineered chill, air stripped of heat and humidity by hidden ducts that cycle constantly. It smells faintly of antiseptic and something metallic. The silence here is worse than outside because it is absolute: no buzz of insects, no scrape of sand, not even the whisper of air. The Authority designs these interiors with sound-dampening panels, meant to unnerve, to make visitors feel that even their own breath is trespassing.
The Archivist stands behind a counter, his hands folded loosely. His uniform is the same clean white as the walls, though the fabric is softer, almost luminous under the overhead lights. His hair is thin and neatly combed, his eyes the gray of unpolished steel. He knows her name before she speaks. They always know. His voice is low and unhurried when he greets her, as though time itself bends to his schedule.
“You are here for an emergency distribution, Amina.”
Her nod feels heavy. “The reservoir is gone. We have nothing.”
He studies her as though she is a specimen. “Your ledger indicates you have little left to offer. To meet the volume you request, we will need a foundational memory. One that defines your selfhood. We will need something… irreplaceable.”
The words feel like a blade drawn slowly across her chest. Foundational does not mean simply old or cherished; it means the kind of memory their machines can measure in resonance, threads wound so deep into the brain that they anchor identity. The Authority values them because such memories carry influence – they shape choices, loyalties, even the limits of fear. Once taken, the gap is permanent. People forget songs, faces, sometimes even skills that were born from those moments. It is a theft not of detail, but of direction, of the spine of selfhood.
She thinks of her father, not the blurred images she has of him mending nets or laughing with neighbours, but the one she has held on to like a relic: him taking her through the swamp paths, showing her how to read the currents, how to know where the ground lies beneath the water. His voice had been low, patient. The sun had been caught in the ripples like gold. The smell of wet earth had been clean, untainted.
Her fingers curl into her palms. She does not want to give this away. But she sees her village in her mind: the thin faces of the children, the way their lips crack after a day without water. She breathes once, shallow, and meets The Archivist’s gaze.
“You can take that one,” she says.
He inclines his head slightly. “Very well.”
The machine waits behind a glass partition. She has been in this room before, but never for something this deep. The chair is molded to hold the body still. She sits, and the surface chills her through her thin dress. Cold pads press against her temples. A faint vibration starts in the back of her skull, rising until she feels it behind her teeth. The Archivist’s hands move across a flat panel beside her, his expression unreadable.
Her father’s face rises before her, not in the room but in her mind, as vivid as it had been many years prior. She feels the humid air, the gentle rocking of the boat. She is small again, holding his hand. The water gleams green-gold under the sun. Then something twitches in the vision, almost like a ripple, but wrong. The color of the water darkens, shifting to a thick, oily black that reflects nothing. The air smells acrid. On the bank, she sees figures in white uniforms — the Authority’s white, the same as the Archivist’s. Her father is speaking to them, his jaw tight, his eyes sharp with an emotion she has never seen before.
She knows this. And she does not. It is as if the machine, normally precise in isolating and copying memories, has misread the layers of her mind. And her mind seems to have accidentally stripped away some imposed veil. She does not know that the memory was altered deliberately long ago; earlier extractions had overwritten the visual and emotional details of the swamp, leaving her with only sanitized fragments. This glitch has revealed the original sequence, the suppressed truth of oil-black water and collusion. Presently, her pulse thunders, a deep drum of disbelief. She opens her mouth to speak, but the vibration cuts suddenly, leaving her disoriented.
The Archivist slams a control on the panel, stopping the process. His face shifts for a heartbeat, and she glimpses recognition, a flicker of fear; he saw what she just saw. What was that memory? Where did it come from? Why did the Archivist’s eyes flicker like that? Is it possible…? Could he and the company have a hand in the contamination of the land? Could he…? And then the mask of calm returns to his face and she isn’t sure what to think anymore.
“That will suffice,” he says. His tone is calm again, but his voice is tighter.
The pads release from her skin with a faint hiss. The room feels too bright now, the air is sharp in her lungs. She tries to hold onto the darker version of the memory, but already it slides away, leaving only a smear of unease, a taste of oil in her throat. She watches him seal a small, transparent capsule containing a swirling, silver haze. It looks harmless. It is the most dangerous thing she has ever given away.
When she steps out of the outpost, the light outside is harsher than before. The Jerrycans on her truck are heavy now, sloshing with the ration the Authority has granted. Each step back toward the village feels slower. She does not remember starting to sweat, but her hands are slick on the truck’s handle. The image of black water and the white uniforms clings to her, a shadow that will not fall away.
Somewhere inside her, a seed of suspicion begins to take root. She does not yet have the shape of it, but she knows the Archivist saw the same thing she did. And he did not want her to.
The village crouches low to the ground, as if trying not to be noticed by the dry wind that combs through it. The roofs of zinc and frond creak under the push of air, a slow, restless sound. Amina drags the trunk past the central fire pit, its ash scattered and gray from the last community meal. People watch her pass but do not call out. Their eyes flick to the truck, then back to her face, and she sees in them a mixture of relief and the quiet mourning reserved for those who have paid the Authority’s price.
She lowers the truck handle in front of the communal storage hut. Her arms tremble, not from the weight, but from the cold that still clings to her skin from the extraction room. Inside, the women measure the water into sealed gourds and buckets, first for families with the youngest children, then the elders, then labourers. Only when every household has received its share may she pour her own. This system, enforced for years, is written into custom and watched by the village council, violating it brings shame as severe as denying water itself.
But the unease from the outpost presses on her ribs. The black water. The uniforms. Her father’s face drawn tight with something she had never remembered before. The thought is raw, too fresh to ignore, and the only person she can think of bringing it to is Elder Bassey.
She finds him at the far end of the village, near the mangrove edge where the ground dips toward what used to be one of the cleaner creeks. His hut leans slightly under the weight of nets strung from its beams and rafters. The air carries the tang of river mud and a faint bite of salt, though the water has been poisoned since the upstream rigs ruptured. The oil seeped into the riverbed, coating plants, killing larvae, and infiltrating fish tissue. Even years later, its residue made the water toxic to nets and netsmen alike, a slow decay that no boiling or filtering could reverse.
She stops outside his doorway, clearing her throat. “Elder,” she says.
A shuffling sound comes from within. His voice follows, dry but firm. “Come in, Amina. You carry the outpost’s cold on you.”
She steps inside. The dimness here is immediate, the daylight cut by hanging nets that sway faintly in the cross-breeze from the back window. The fibers are dyed in muted colors — not the bright reds and blues she remembers from childhood festivals — but deep browns, tarnished golds, dull greens. Each knot seems deliberate, each twist of cord part of a pattern that draws the eyes into its complexity. The hut smells of rope fibers, old smoke, and the metallic tang of heavy metals leaching from the riverbanks, a lasting trace of the oil and chemical contamination. It lingers in the reeds and mud, a reminder that the damage is chemical as well as visual.
Bassey sits cross-legged on a low mat, fingers pulling cords through knots with precise pressure. He builds nets for safekeeping, for when the water becomes pure again, or so he hopes. Each loop marks a date, each intersection a connection between events. Patterns encode disasters, alliances, and disappearances. Adding new events involves tracing threads from older knots, maintaining consistency so a reader trained in the craft can decode the past. Accuracy is preserved through repeated retelling, inspection by elders, and cross-checking with other nets.
“You’ve seen something,” he says. It is not a question.
She sits opposite him, legs folding stiffly beneath her. “During the extraction,” she says. “It—changed. For a moment. My father was taking me through the swamp, but the water… it wasn’t the way I’ve always remembered. It was black. Thick. And there were men on the bank, wearing the Authority’s white.”
His fingers pause on the cord. The quiet stretches until it becomes something she can feel pressing against her skin.
“You are not the first,” he says finally. “But you are the first in many years to notice.”
“What does it mean?”
He leans back slightly, studying her face as if weighing how much to tell. Then he sets the half-finished cord aside and gestures toward the nets overhead. “These hold more than fish, Amina. They are living records. Each knot a mark, each space a guide to the next event. Nothing is written, but everything is preserved for those who know how to read.”
She looks up. The nets sway gently, their shadows moving like water over the hut walls. “Stories?”
He rises, his joints cracking softly, and reaches for a net hanging from the far beam. He brings it down with care and spreads it between them. His hands trace along the cords, stopping at certain intersections. “Each knot is a mark. The spaces between them tell you where to look next. To most, they are patterns for strength and catching fish. To those who know, they are a map of events.”
He begins to trace one line of knots, his fingertip pausing at each as if pressing on an invisible page. “This is the Great Blight. Here, the rains vanish, the soil turns bitter, the fish rot in their own water. And here—” he taps a knot dyed darker than the rest “—the river dies.”
She follows his finger, her eyes narrowing. “The Blight came from drought.”
His gaze holds hers. “That is what the Authority wants you to believe. But this shows the truth. The Blight began with a spill. Oil from the rigs upstream. Not the kind you clean with cloth and prayer, but the kind that seeps into the bones of the earth. The oil company denied the spill and bribed local officials to silence complaints.”
“They did?” Amina asks, bewildered.
“Yes. When disease spread and protests rose, they absorbed their remaining infrastructure and knowledge, consolidating water distribution under their name. Technology that tracked usage became a tool to monitor citizens. Historical records were digitized and selectively erased; every water payment became an opportunity to remove memories of dissent. The Authority rose from the company’s ashes, controlling both water and memory.”
The knot in her chest tightens. “My father…”
Bassey nods slowly. “He exposed the spill. He delivered reports to villages downstream. The Authority marked him. He disappeared one night – taken by officials in white uniforms. Some say he is dead; others think they hold him in a secure facility, a warning to anyone else who dares speak.”
Her pulse feels heavy in her ears. She can almost feel the extraction pads pressing to her skull again. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
His hands close around the net. “Because they take more than water. They take the memories that carry the truth. One by one. And without the truth, no one believes there was ever a time before.”
Before she can speak again, deliberate footsteps echo outside, boots striking the ground with authority. A hidden sensor near the hut, part of the Authority’s surveillance network, has flagged her prolonged visit with Bassey. Within a minute, officers arrive, bypassing the village council entirely.
Bassey glances toward the door, jaw tight. “They are here.”
The first man steps inside without asking. His uniform is white and seamless, the Authority’s insignia stitched at the breast. Behind him, two more block the doorway, their faces as expressionless as carved masks. The first man’s eyes scan the nets without interest until they land on the one Bassey holds.
“Unauthorized historical artifacts,” he says. His voice is flat, practiced. “These are now the property of the Authority.”
Bassey does not move. His fingers tighten on the net. “These are fishing tools. Nothing more.”
Art by Sunny Efemena
The man steps closer, and Amina catches the sharp, synthetic smell of whatever they use to keep their uniforms spotless. He takes the net from Bassey’s hands without force, but with the finality of someone who knows he cannot be stopped. Behind him, the others begin pulling more nets from the rafters, folding them with mechanical precision.
“You will also be informed,” the first man says, “that due to repeated exposure to unauthorized historical materials and the potential for unrest, the water tithe will be doubled. All future payments will require two memories of acceptable value.”
Amina’s throat tightens. She feels the weight of the memory already taken from her skull, and now the thought of giving twice as much. The man turns to leave, the nets bundled under his arm like meaningless rope.
When they are gone, the hut feels stripped, not just of the nets but of the air they held. Bassey stands still for a moment, his chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate breaths. Then he looks at her.
“They are accelerating,” he says. “They must be afraid.”
She hears her own voice, quieter than she means it to be. “Afraid of what?”
“Of the day,” he says, “when enough of us remember to resist.”
Amina sinks to the mat. “They took it all,” she says, her voice low, trembling. “Every story, every knot you’ve kept safe for years.”
Bassey’s fingers twitch. “They cannot take memory itself. Not the ones that live in our hands, in our minds. Not all of it.” His gaze fixes on her. “You saw what the pads revealed today. The truth is in you, Amina. And it will not stay buried.”
She shakes her head. “But the dam… it’s theirs. The broadcasts, the water… we could be killed before a single village sees anything.”
He leans closer, voice firm. “If we do nothing, the lies live forever. If we act, at least our people will know. At least they will see.” Amina looks at him. Her chest tightens, but a flicker of resolve lights her eyes. “Then we do it. Together.”
***
The dam rises like a wall built to divide more than just water. Its white surface glints beneath the last red wash of sunset, every edge sharp against the dimming sky. The air is heavy with a deep throb of machinery. The vibration creeps through the ground into the legs, into the ribs, as if the structure itself is alive and breathing in slow, mechanical rhythm.
Amina moves along a service path overgrown with reeds and creeping vines. The route is narrow and uneven, following the bank where the mangrove once met clear water but now borders a slow, dark flow that smells faintly of oil and iron. She takes each step with deliberate care, keeping her eyes forward. Her mind holds the map of this path without hesitation — a survival skill taught by her father, supposedly erased in earlier extractions. Its persistence suggests the Authority’s machines cannot fully remove deeply ingrained procedural memories, or that some core memories resist alteration. The knowledge that she still remembers cuts through her with both satisfaction and unease.
Elder Bassey follows, his frame stooped but steady, the wrapped bundle in his arms pressed close to his chest. She knows the net inside holds his last unconfiscated story. Earlier, he had told her what it shows, how he had hidden it from The Authority’s men. His voice low in the darkness of his hut, he had talked about the oil spill that bled into the swamps, the dead fish floating in clusters, the sickness in the children’s faces, and finally, her father – not in the middle of teaching her, but standing in his boat shouting at Authority men as they forced barrels into the water. Bassey had told her it ends with what her father saw when he turned away from them. She had not asked what that was. She would see it soon enough.
The maintenance door at the dam’s base is painted the same blinding white as the rest of the structure. The metal is cool under her palm. Her fingers move automatically, pressing a code she inherited from her father, who had obtained it while overseeing dam operations to monitor water safety for the villages. The green light signals the lock releasing with a sharp metallic click.
The corridor inside is narrow and dim, lit by strips of cold light. Pipes line the walls, their surfaces warm with the force of water surging within. The vibration of the pumps grows stronger the deeper they go, until it feels like the ground itself is shuddering in time with some buried pulse. The smell of metal is thick here, mixed with the faint bitter tang of old oil.
They emerge into a chamber that overlooks the main broadcast hall through a wall of reinforced glass. Below, the Authority’s emblem turns slowly on a massive screen above the main outlet where the water will flow at the end of the report. Rows of consoles and wires crowd the floor around them, their small lights blinking in patient rhythm. The broadcast will begin in less than twenty minutes.
Bassey kneels at the main console, unwrapping his net. The cords spill onto the metal floor with a muted weight. The strands are dark, the knots dense and precise, certain sections stiffened with resin so they keep their shape. He feeds the cords into the console’s junction ports, where embedded nano-sensors and conductive resin translate the knots’ tension, pattern, and placement into synchronized audiovisual signals. Each connection is precise, the console decoding the traditional net into streaming images and sound. He glances at her once. “When it starts, they will see everything. The sound, the faces, the water. They will see what was done.”
She takes her position near the doorway, scanning the corridor beyond. Footsteps echo faintly, growing sharper. She doesn’t need to look to know who it is.
The Archivist enters without haste, two enforcers just behind him. His uniform is spotless, his hands empty. His gaze rests on her first, then moves to Bassey and the net. “I thought you might come here,” he says, his tone almost conversational. “You believe this will save them.”
“It will show them the truth,” she answers.
He takes a step closer, his voice low but firm. The Archivist warns that revealing the truth risks panic, chaos, and rebellion. Beneath his pragmatism lies self-preservation: maintaining Authority control ensures both survival of the population and his power, masking personal gain behind a veil of concern.
“They are alive in your cage,” she says.
His eyes harden. “Without the cage, they drown.”
Bassey’s voice comes from the console. “It’s ready.”
The Archivist’s gaze flicks to the console. “Amina, if you connect that final cord, you will not only condemn them to thirst, you will also condemn them to war. The images will spread, yes. But so will panic. So will violence. And when the wells are poisoned again – as they will be – they will have no one left to hold the pipes together.”
She feels the weight of his words pressing against her ribs. He believes them. She can see it in the tightness around his mouth, in the way his voice does not waver. But the image of her father on the riverbank burns in her mind, his voice raised in anger, his stance defiant. She steps to the console and pushes the cord into place.
The screens flicker. The Authority’s emblem shudders, breaks apart. Images replace it — the oil spill spreading through the Delta, barrels tipping their contents into once-clear channels, fish rotting in clusters on the surface, villages emptying under the stench. Sounds rise with the images; shouts in panic, children coughing, the sharp slap of boots on wooden planks. Then her father appears, his voice sharp, his words carried clear: “You cannot poison a river and call it a gift.” The scene shifts. He turns his head, looking toward something behind the camera.
The final image fills the screen. A massive pit, part industrial waste site and part hydraulic overflow system, sends thick, black water upward through pipes and cranes. It channels wastes into the mangroves while feeding the Authority’s reservoir system, linking environmental damage directly to operational control. Dozens of men in Authority white stand around its edge, directing the flow. And behind them, half-hidden in shadow, the Archivist watches, his expression calm, a clipboard in his hands.
Gasps rise from below in the hall. Through the glass, Amina can see workers staring up at the screen, their movements frozen. Across the dam’s public broadcast, the images will be spilling into every home, every village square, every outpost along the Delta.
The Archivist does not move to stop it. His eyes are fixed on his own image on the screen. “So now they will know,” he says quietly. “And what will they do with this knowledge? Tear apart the pipes that give them water? Kill the ones who manage the flow? You’ve shown them their enemy. You’ve given them their own destruction.”
She meets his gaze. “Maybe they will choose it. Maybe that’s better than living in your lie.”
Bassey disconnects the net. The broadcast ends with a final image of the black water pouring into the mangroves. The screens go dark. The vibration of the pumps continues, unchanged. Below, workers scramble in confusion. Villagers, receiving the broadcast, now face the choice to dismantle pipelines, confront Authority enforcers, or find new strategies to reclaim water. The Authority’s ability to control memory and information is fractured; the story will spread faster than their machines can erase it, leaving future resistance open-ended but inevitable.
Amina knows she will remember all of this. The Archivist’s face. The pit. The truth. Bassey will remember too. The Authority cannot erase it fast enough now. The story will spread faster than their machines can take it.
The Archivist turns to leave, his voice flat. “Then we will see who survives your truth.”
Bassey gathers the net, his hands steady. Amina steps to the glass and watches the river below. It flows on, dark in places, clear in others, carrying the poison and the truth together toward the villages. For the first time since the Blight began, she feels the current changing.
Ikechukwu Henry’s Writings tackle the issues of Environmental and climatic crisis, mental health, queerness and family dramas, and speculation of otherworldly. When not writing, he could be found sourcing out latest magazine to submit to or growing his large followers on X. He lives in a country that threatens to swallow him whole and tweets at @Ikechukwuhenry_ on X.
With every issue of Omenana, we recommit ourselves to the task of holding space for African imaginations that bend time, twist memory, and summon futures. In this 33rd edition, our contributors once again challenge form, embrace myth, and confront the complex realities that live at the edge of the known.
We open with “The Return” by Jen Thorpe, a story set in a post-apocalyptic world where, with many things from the old world banned or extinct, a couple join the ranks of others who attempt to re-enact ancient ways of family life with the help of a robot. But things go awry when one person shows they’re still human; and selfish.
In Oyelude Jomiloju’s “The Things They Buried With the First Wife”, tradition digs up the past—literally. When a man dies, his young wife is tasked with opening his first wife’s grave so he may be reunited with her. But what happens when the rituals of the old world don’t quite fit the anxieties of the new?
“Drum Call” by Seun Lari-Williams revisits the harrowing myth of the Abiku child—doomed to return again and again through the veil of life and death.
In “Metempsukhōsis” by Chiemeka Akaigwe, a bold and unrepentant Gen Z influencer believes she’s cornered the art of control, until a supernatural reckoning takes her down a path of revelation. It’s a sharp, unsettling look at ambition, technology, and the ghosts that feed on attention.
“Dust and Echoes” by Amani Mosi is an ethereal journey into cultural loss and memory. Here, they stole Africa’s dreams and her songs, and buried them in your sleep; but the time has come for an ancient griot release the secrets and their melody. The result is a story that reads like a ceremony, pulsing with grief and resistance.
Lastly, “Gecko Girl” by Hussani Abdulrahim takes us on a body-horror ride that begins as a childhood game and spirals into a chilling transformation. The titular gecko is no innocent creature, and what it awakens in its host is something wild, primal, and irreversible.
As always, Omenana remains a vessel for stories that defy category and resist erasure. We are proud to showcase writers who understand that speculative fiction is not just the means to escape reality, but one for confrontation, re-imagination, and healing. It is, in many ways, our most urgent form.
We hope you find something here that lingers in your bones.
I don’t know what we were expecting, exactly. Maybe a special carry case, or at the very least something cozy. The box was corrugated cardboard, the kind that smells strong and is horrible to touch. Coarse. The box was not fitting for the contents is what I’m trying to say.
When I heard the doorbell, I said to Lou, my husband, I said, ‘Lou, it’s here!’ And Lou said, ‘Georgia, I don’t think we should be calling it an “it”, do you?’ And then I said, ‘Oh Jesus, Lou, just open the damn door and let the delivery guy in.’ An inauspicious start if there ever was one.
The delivery man was all full of smiles and congratulatory remarks.
‘Other couples have been really pleased with their orders.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, wanting the interaction to be done so we could unbox.
‘The company has had almost no returns at all so far.’
‘Almost none?’ Lou said, and I gave him a look that told him now wasn’t the time. There just wasn’t space in my heart, you know, for any thoughts of ever sending it back.
It took a while to get ours. Once they hit the market everyone wanted one, and I mean everyone. It had been decades since anyone had a real one, so the idea that we could all have a try and see what it had been like in the old days was … I don’t know, there was some novelty in that, I guess. There was a waiting list as long as the oceans are deep.
The thing about them was that in a way, they made everyone equal. You didn’t have to have special skills, or take a test, or have a home inspection. You could just get one and go from there.
Lou and I lived in a simple two bedroom house on an ordinary street in a suburb like any other. We had a tiny garden, a kitchen with the basics, and a shower over the bath. Lou worked at the post office, which I know people think is a dying profession, but that’s only because they don’t understand it. Me, I worked as a receptionist at a dentist’s office. I know they say it’s the doctors who see the whole of humanity, but I’m telling you now that you can’t even begin to picture some of the things that I’ve seen sitting at that front desk. There is more than one way to lose a tooth, and that’s the truth.
I’m getting sidetracked. By the time ours arrived in that understated cardboard box there had been several versions on the market. The first ones had flaws that had been fixed in the subsequent models. Excessively noisy and demanding, was what one online reviewer had said. The company said that most of the kinks had been worked out in the next few versions and we all trusted them. Nobody wanted to seem like theirs was out of control, or like they weren’t able to handle their order.
‘Things are never as good or as bad as they say they are’, Lou always used to say, when I’d read him posts from other buyers.
We waited for the delivery guy to drive off, and then took our box through to the spare room. We’d set it up with ample space, dim lighting, the works, just like they said to do on the website, and in all the online posts I’d read by people who’d received theirs already.
‘You open it,’ I said. ‘I’m too nervous.’
Lou moved closer to the box I’d placed on the dresser like he was approaching a cat that might scratch.
‘No,’ I said, stepping forward. ‘Let me do it. I should be the first. Like in the old days.’
‘Okay.’ Lou stepped back. ‘Though technically—’
He saw the look on my face and didn’t go on. Though he’d listened to me, I hesitated. It felt like something was missing. Like we needed a ceremony or something to mark the occasion. I’d heard stories from my mother’s generation that they used to gather people for times like these – mostly women, but sometimes men too. In the past this was an important moment, but for us that grandeur was missing. We were all alone in this, right from the beginning, but with extra pressure from the world to succeed given all the information and advice we had at our fingertips.
‘This is it, Lou. It’s finally happening.’
Lou took my hand, and we stepped closer, together this time. He handed the knife to me, and I slid it along the thick tape that held the box closed. Instantly noise erupted from within. A shrill piercing sound.
‘Hurry up, Georgia!’
‘I’m going as fast as I can. I don’t want to slip the knife in and …’
I couldn’t finish that sentence. The thought was too ghastly.
Finally, the knife met the end of the box, and we could pull apart the flaps. Inside was our very own baby.
‘It’s a girl!’
I started to cry, and laugh, and breathe out of rhythm so that before I could reach in and pick her up, I found myself sitting down on the floor. Thankfully, Lou took charge, scooping her up from the box and wrapping her in one of the stretchy muslins we’d bought from the store, based on its many good reviews.
‘She’s perfect,’ he said, his voice catching too now. I watched him look at our daughter, beaming love down at her. Not just the two of us anymore, I thought. Everything was shifting right in front of my eyes.
‘Hi there sweetheart. We’re your Mom and Dad.’
The baby continued to wail.
‘Georgia, get up and look at her! Come on.’
I stood up on shaky legs and we both examined her, wonderful and strange. Lou started to bop on his knees, rocking her from side to side, making shushing sounds. I stood there like a limp cucumber in a fresh salad, useless and unwanted.
‘Hand her over,’ I said, not meaning for it to come out so forcefully.
Lou was startled but did as I asked. She was lighter than I expected, though it had said on the order form that she’d be around two and a half kilograms and would stay that way. Light enough to take on trips as hand luggage, was the selling point.
Somehow the company had made it look so alive, just like I imagined a baby would look. The skin on her cheeks was smooth and soft, and her little hand was balled up in a fist, shaking at the air with the commitment and vigour of a tiny dictator. Her hands and feet were bluish – something they said would change over time as the in-built circulatory system kicked in. She was warm too, not cold like the plastic I knew she was made of. Something about hydraulics and thermoregulation … I can’t remember what it said in the ad. Seeing her, so vulnerable and powerless, it was moving in a way.
My mother said there had been a similar toy in her day. Back then it was an egg that you carried around with you – pocket sized. All the girls her age had had one. Her toy sounded to me like a key ring. Our T-baby felt like a human.
I tried to bend my knees and bop like Lou had, shushing gently at first and then progressively louder as her screaming continued. It got right to the core of me, that noise. Prompted animal feelings. Rage. Fear. A desire to run and hide, but also to battle and defend and spill blood.
‘She won’t stop crying.’
Lou grabbed the instruction manual and began to page through it.
‘It says to check her levels as soon as you open the box.’
Each T-baby came with four measures that had to be monitored at all times, and a bunch of other vitals that could be read on your smart watch once you’d synced up. There was the hunger meter, which told you when you were supposed to feed her with milk, or a snack. The happy meter showed you when you were supposed to play with her or talk to her or read a book. Some of the T-babies could be persuaded with a snack for happiness too, just like a real person. The sleep meter said when she needed to go down for a sleep. The final one was the discipline meter.
It had always struck me as strange that this was necessary for a baby, but the developers said it was one of the ways they’d managed to sort out some of the more unpredictable elements. We were supposed to use it to guide us on when not to respond to her cries. Like if we’d fed her and played with her and she was still crying, there shouldn’t be any need to console her. Or if we’d put her down to nap, she was supposed to sleep. She shouldn’t call for attention and should learn to self soothe. At least, that’s what all the guides said. It felt off to me, but I wasn’t an expert after all.
I slowly turned her over, checking the meters behind her neck. Both the hungry meter and the sleep meter were very low, flashing red warning signs.
‘She’s starving and exhausted.’
‘You’d think they would have given one that was in a better state. How are we supposed to get to know it if it’s screaming or asleep?’
‘Not “it” Lou. Anyway, we’ve got time. At least we know what she wants.’
My mom said in the old days you just had to work that out on your own. Try everything and see what helped. I thought that sounded exhausting.
‘I guess.’
The baby’s crying turned to a choking wrenching sob, her body shuddering and her face scrunched into a look of extreme pain or fury.
‘We’ve got to sort this out. Is there milk in the box?’
Lou rummaged around and pulled out two bottles. They looked full, but when you tilted them, the milk seemed to disappear. If you righted them, the milk was back. A trick of sight. The company said they’d based them on an old children’s toy, back when there were children. The plastic of the bottles was thick and would definitely yellow if left in the sun. It seemed poor quality, but Lou said I’d been overspending so we hadn’t bought any others.
‘You sit down with her in the chair, Georgia. I’ll bring them over.’
I sat in the armchair we’d bought for just this purpose and rested the baby’s head on my arm in a way that seemed comfortable for both of us. Lou handed me a bottle and I tilted it so that it fit into her open mouth. Silence descended and I noticed that Lou was breathing loudly, almost panting in panic. Poor guy had been as upset as I was by all that noise, but it was hard to be sympathetic to each other when we both felt we were responding to a crisis.
‘You were right,’ I said, wanting to smooth things over between us.
‘Huh?’
‘She is perfect Lou. And she’s ours.’
He came closer and looked down at us both, tenderness in his eyes like I’d never seen before. I could hear the little beeps as her hunger meter started to replenish. It was impossible for me to imagine how it had been in the old days. I’d have had to be half topless, breast flopped out while she was attached to it. The idea felt indecent. This was better.
When the international government had declared all that time ago that it was best for humanity and the planet that no further babies be born, it had been a lot for the world to handle. I’d only been about five when they made the announcement, so most of what I knew was from reading the news and speaking with my own parents.
A simple way of looking at it was that there had been two major responses. Agreement and relief from those who could see how badly things were going, what with the rising temperatures and pollution and flooding and wave after wave of pandemic. Then there was the other side that believed it was the natural order of things for people to breed and connect with children. There had been protests. Lots of deaths – essential or unnecessary, depending on which side you were on.
Of course, it had taken more than the law to get the whole mess sorted. They’d had to deal with the problem of fertility. I was only ten, too young to understand what it meant when my parents told me I was going in for the essential procedure.
‘Will Bobby be going in too,’ I’d asked about my brother.
‘No, this is a special thing, just for girls,’ my dad had said.
My mother hadn’t come along. She couldn’t stop weeping for months after that. It was hard for me to have strong feelings about something that was happening to everyone else around me. I wasn’t unique. Every girl I knew went in and came out with the script for a lifetime of pills that we had to take. It was, it is, just the way things are. Better than some of the other things I’d heard had been done to women over the centuries.
‘How long does it take … to feed her I mean,’ Lou’s voice brought me back to the present.
‘I don’t know. What does it say in the manual?’
Lou flipped through the pages and began to read.
‘Feeds will be around twenty to forty minutes, eight to twelve times a day for the first few weeks. Some models fall asleep during this time. This is fine but if they do not grow you may have to wake them to make sure they drink more. Growth will be measured by weekly scan and synced with your smart watch. Use the following QR code to register your model and upload statistics.’
‘Up to forty minutes! Jeez. That seems a bit intense.’ His face had fallen, and he was frowning.
‘I guess. I’m sure it will get easier over time.’
‘But I mean, what do I do while you’re doing that? That’s almost eight hours a day you’ll be sitting here feeding.’
‘Not just me, sometimes you’ll be doing it too.’
We hadn’t talked about this. I didn’t think we needed to.
Things were different in society now, different from how they’d ever been. Women like me didn’t have to give up years of our lives to care for young children and could do things my parents’ generation could never imagine. Study longer. Work sooner. Excel. Some argued that the essential procedures had been the real start of the equality of the sexes. Workers not wombs, was one of the slogans of the more radical feminist groups. It shocked me to hear stories from my grandmother and parents about some of the things women had been expected to do, just because we birthed the children. Women my age could be whoever we wanted to be. No guilt about what we were giving up in order to fulfil our dreams, because there was nothing to give up.
It was widely agreed that this was an age of progress. But, given the surprise and resistance that was writing itself across Lou’s face, I realised that there was possibly still some of that old habit left in the men my age, to pass the buck to women when things felt inessential to the world. It was like it was absorbed by osmosis or epigenetics or something like that.
‘She’s both of ours, Lou. Not just mine. We chose this together.’
‘Yes, but you’re the mom …’
He paged through the manual as if it was going to relieve him of having to argue his point. I felt an unfamiliar rage begin to grow inside me.
‘What does it say Lou?’
‘Joint parental involvement is the healthiest thing for a baby’s happy meter. Parents who commit to and connect with a baby build stronger bonds and increase the likelihood that the child will grow up to be smarter, healthier, and more independent.’
Saved by the book, I thought. I tried to keep any trace of smugness out of my voice.
‘See.’
‘It just says I have to connect, not that I have to feed her. I don’t have the time for that. It’s like a full time job.’
‘Exactly. That’s why we should share the load.’
The baby’s eyes cast around, listening to our voices but not yet able to see Lou since he was so far up. It was awful, him towering above us in that moment.
‘I think you’re missing the point—’
‘Calm down Lou. Lower your voice. You’re upsetting her.’
There was a long silence as the baby suckled the milk and I stared at her, partly because I couldn’t stop, and partly because I was avoiding making eye contact with Lou who I knew was trying to think of ways to justify his unreasonable idea. Eventually, I caved. I didn’t want our first moments with our little girl to feel so fraught.
‘We should name her.’
‘You’re right.’
We’d made lists of baby names for months and had settled on our top five. When I looked down at her I saw a Stella. Lou, on the other hand, saw an Astrid. Nothing was going the way I’d expected.
‘We don’t have to decide now,’ said Lou, after some terse debate.
‘She can’t just go around without a name.’
‘She not going to be going anywhere. The manual says it’s best that the family stays home for the first two weeks to promote bonding.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I mean, I don’t know why I should be here. It doesn’t sound like there’s much need for me—’
‘What?’
‘I’m just saying that if you’re doing the feeds then—’
‘But—’
‘Georgia—’
‘Lou—’
‘Let’s talk about it when she’s asleep.’
He looked at his watch.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Checking how long you’ve been feeding for. We don’t want to give her too much. It says in the manual that it can give them gas. And you’re supposed to change sides, so they don’t get imbalanced muscles.’
‘Her hunger meter is only half full.’
‘She’s falling asleep.’
Her eyes were closed, and she looked so content, so peaceful. She was still suckling the bottle, but the rhythm had slowed.
‘Do I wake her? Or is this fine?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If I wake her, she might be upset. If I don’t wake her, she might not grow.’
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t just say okay! What should I do?’
‘Leave her to nap, and then we can talk about names and read the rest of the instructions until she wakes up. It’s the first feed. If we get it wrong now, we can correct it later. I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
This approach to life was a key difference between Lou and me. He’d always been the what’s the worst that could happen type, while I’d always been the type to find out what the worst that could happen was and prepare against it with everything I had.
I realised this situation was going to require a lot more negotiation than I’d planned for. We’d never really argued before and I didn’t have the stamina.
‘I’m going to wake her,’ I said.
‘Don’t.’
‘I want her hunger meter to be full. I think that’s best.’
‘But what about her sleep meter? It’s low too.’
He was right.
‘Fine.’
I slid the bottle out of her lips and put it back on the coffee table next to the feeding chair, watching the viscous liquid wobble back to full again. It would be this, over and over again for weeks, maybe years, I realised. Feeding her only to do it all over again. The need felt like a noose.
I stood up and tried to lay the baby down in the small crib we’d bought for her. As if I’d tasered her, her eyes flung open, and the crying began again. I picked her back up, and she stopped, her eyelids drooping down almost instantly. I shushed and rocked again and tried to put her in the crib. The result was the same.
‘It’s like she only wants to sleep on me.’
‘The manual says that’s normal and that after a few months we can try something called sleep training. Guess you’re just going to have to hold her while she sleeps for now.’
‘You can hold her if you want. I could do the feeds, and you could do the naps. At least at the beginning – I’ve heard they’re short then. That will mean we’re both in the trenches together.’
I held her out, my shoulder tired from the way I’d had her propped in my elbow to feed. Lou stepped back.
‘No, she looks happy on you. I don’t want to wake her.’
I clenched my jaw, taking a deep breath.
‘Okay, then you better get a chair.’
His face was the picture of confusion. ‘What for?’
‘So that you can come sit in here and we can talk about names and read the manual together.’
‘She needs to sleep, Georgia.’
He’d lowered his voice to a whisper.
‘She is asleep, Lou.’ My voice sounded like a hiss. ‘Doesn’t mean we have to stop talking to each other.’
He looked at me as if I’d gone dim, a light switched out or dulled.
‘I’ll bring you some water so you can get comfortable, and we can pick this all up later.’
He walked away then, easy as a breeze through an open summer’s window.
By the time he was back with the water, I’d logged the return on the company site. They said it would take twenty-four hours. Even that felt too long.
Jen Thorpe is a feminist writer and researcher. She writes novels, essays, reports, short stories, features journalism, and poetry. Her latest book – Adulting 101: How to Survive the Real World was published by Kwela in 2022. Her short stories have been published via BooksLive, Itch, Poetry Potion, Jalada, Litro, Omenana, and Everyday Journal. Links to all of these works can be found via her website – https://jen-thorpe.com
Motorists come to a begrudging halt at the traffic stop. A sense of harried anticipation grows as the numbers count down. Like zoo animals set free, the cars zoom off in different directions once the light changes, each setting off a cacophony of horns, yells and curse words.
In all the hubris and confusion, a driver narrowly misses a young woman dashing across the street.
“You dey craze? Abi na for my hand you wan kpai?”
His unkind remarks have no effect on the intended. She is oblivious to the eyes following her mad dash into a side street. Her only goal is to reach her destination.
The destination turns out to be a three-storey building. She runs into the flat downstairs and locks the door. The house is poorly lit, a sharp contrast to the sunny outdoors. She runs into a bedroom and once again locks herself inside. In the bathroom, she slumps to the floor, eyes closed, chest heaving beneath her multi-coloured bubu. She is safe here, she will not be found.
She nearly misses the footsteps, as her erratic heartbeat thunders in her ears. Her eyes fly open, and she stumbles to her feet with uncertain movements. The footsteps are louder now. She hears the door open. Someone enters the room. A gust of wind flows in as the bathroom door opens. She looks at the mirror in front of her and screams.
*
For heaven’s sake. Enough is enough.
This is the fourth time she has woken up this week, drenched in sweat, chest heaving from a nightmare.
She leaps from her mattress.
“Ouch! FUCCCKKKK!”
She has forgotten about the bowl of sage burning beside her all night and has now stepped on the bowl, sending it flying across the room. Creating a mess she doesn’t have the strength to clean. Thank God she lives alone.
“It is not like you were useful. Useless piece of shit.”
This is what she gets for buying herbs from an Instagram vendor. Who buys sage from an account named Crystals by Mistys? A desperate woman, that’s who.
Queen Igbokwe, or @whimsyquimsy, as she is known on the internet, is nothing if not desperate. She has collected healing anointing oil, rubbed balm of Gilead cleansing balm, slept with several religious ornaments around her neck. Nothing has worked. Each night, for the past month, her sleep has been taken with a vengeance.
Maybe @duhitzseffiii, the account she dragged on Tiktok last month, made good on her threats and took her picture to a Babalawo. Either way, she is tired. Worse, she is terrified.
Since she received the BIG news that is going to change her life for good, she has lost sleep. Is this a sign from the universe telling her this is the wrong move? Or are her jealous haters up and active?
Whatever this madness is, nothing will stop her from meeting her glory. On God.
She falls back on the bed and reaches for her phone. The time is 7:39; she glares at the screen until time moves a minute more. She goes straight to Twitter and checks the trend table; she’s still trending. Is God not good?
She taps her name on the trend page and laughs while she reads tweets.
Everything I know about this Quimsy babe is against my will.
God Abeg! Get this nuisance off my tl.
I know I’m following the right people since nobody has retweeted that Quimsy video.
I’m a simple gal, I see a Quimsy video; I scroll past immediately.
Feeling cheeky, she makes a tweet.
Wednesday morning talking bout moi while I’m making mulaa. Heath.
Almost immediately, her phone is buzzing. Her fans are retweeting immediately and liking her tweet.
Period.
Quimsy the standard!
Quimsy doesn’t chase clout, Quimsy is clout! Period!
The video of her and actress Tope Salami ‘arguing’ at her movie premiere yesterday has made rounds all over social media, especially the video of her yelling curses while being thrown out by four security guards.
She is being dragged by netizens while her fans are fighting fire for fire. Nothing new. People are buying movie tickets to encourage Tope, who is happily milking the attention with an emotional Instagram live on the lack of support in the industry. Most importantly, her payment is chilling in her account, a generous contribution to the one-bedroom apartment she’s been eyeing at Ikate.
She doesn’t have time for internet drama, she has a life-changing event to prepare for.
After bathing, she shoots a GRWM video. She uncharacteristically mixes up brand names and has to reshoot three times. NEPA takes the light, and she hisses for the fourth time that morning. She has to switch to the inverter to complete the video and then send to Caleb, her video editor, to work his magic.
Three months ago, she would have gone through the arduous process of painstakingly watching every scene, nit-picking for faults and any errors, struggling through Canva and Capcut tutorials to get a good video. Now she has an agent, all that is someone else’s headache.
The Uber arrives at 11:30. The gods of Lagos traffic are smiling at her and it takes about twenty-five minutes from Badore, where she lives, to Victoria Island. Throughout the drive, her mind is swirling with vivid pictures from her dreams. Four nightmares in a row would spook anyone, but she has good reason to be terrified. Her dreams are never ordinary; they come to pass.
At just three years old, a nightmare about a burning house had jolted her awake. She was greeted by thick clouds of smoke, then passed out, only to wake up in the hospital as the only survivor of a house fire.
When she begged Uncle Okey not to travel because she dreamt about an accident, he laughed and shook his head. The look her aunt gave her when the news of the accident reached their doorstep was forever entrenched in her head. She was passed from one house to another, an unwanted, unloved burden nobody wanted but was scared to reject. There were tales of the uncle who delivered a sound beating, then woke up with a swollen right arm which gradually withered away. There were deliverance sessions with various men of God which involved her enduring multiple beatings, and swallowing gallons of oil till she passed out. By age sixteen, she was on her own, surviving on her wits and charm.
If going ahead with this deal means some unfortunate lives may be lost, so be it. She survived her childhood. There is nothing on this planet she cannot endure. Besides, it is too late to back out now.
Queen is tired of being an Internet nuisance. For goodness’ sake, she has been in content creation for five years! It is high time Nollywood took her seriously.
She did what she had to do. Representation from Belev changed her game. Belev represents international celebrities, the kind of people who win Oscars and Grammys – not her standard. The internet had raged for days, and her followers tripled. Brands were reaching out, almost desperately. Haters were hating, potatoes were potatoing, it didn’t matter. She was a hotcake. She had arrived.
Now, she is the envy of other influencers; a day doesn’t pass without her hearing how lucky she is. Frequently, she gets jabs and accusations of sleeping with her agent, Gbenga Adebiyi, to get representation. She believes it is Gbenga’s truth to tell, not hers.
When he told her about the offer, she had promptly ended the call and then launched around her room in a series of excited quacks and jumps. Of all the models, actresses or even beauty influencers, one of the largest skincare brands in the world had chosen her to headline their Africa campaign and given her a brand ambassadorial deal.
Queen arrives at the swanky hotel in VI where she and Gbenga are meeting brand representatives to finalize her contract. The meeting is a formality, just to create some media buzz and do a photoshoot. She spots Gbenga’s car surrounded by some of their media crew and walks towards them.
Gbenga—all 5’5 of him—is barking orders at the media crew. He is dressed in his characteristic grey suit, complete with waistcoat and bowtie. Queen often wonders how the man survives in Lagos. His office and car are always cold, mortuary standard, Caleb jokes behind his back. His face is scrunched; the familiar white handkerchief nestles in his left palm, ready to dab any sign of perspiration.
He answers her cheery greeting with a scowl. “You’re late.”
“Queens are never late. Y’all are just too early.”
He shakes his head, still scowling, rising to his full height. Queen knows how uncomfortable their height difference makes him and makes sure to look down on him at any given opportunity.
He gives her a one-over. “You look parched.”
“Trust me, some of us are feeling the Lagos heat.”
He motions to one of the men. “Give her a drink.”
“Awwn. How sweet.” She accepts the cup of iced coffee gratefully. Her stomach is empty save for the half apple she swallowed before leaving home. The cold drink is sweet and cools her nerves.
“Be fast so we can start shooting and start the meeting. Time is going.” He turns away immediately.
In public, Gbenga and Queen have the perfect manager-client relationship. He is a paternal figure and concerned manager, while she is a respectful, grateful client to the man changing her life. Only her team knows of the sarcastic comments, scathing jabs and curses they both throw at each other.
The next hour is spent shooting videos of her ‘arriving’ at the hotel in a Mercedes Benz, walking around the hotel, signing autographs and taking selfies with fans. Normally, she is bright. She genuinely loves showbiz and the whole shebang that comes with it. Right now, she feels the wrath of a month of sleepless nights.
The company representatives are already waiting in the conference room. Her exhaustion affects her nerves, her ability to charm on the spot. Luckily, Gbenga takes over the small talk. She tries to keep up with the conversation until she gives up.
She closes her eyes momentarily. She can hear the discussion happening around her, laughter echoes around her, calm and collected, then rises gradually, sounding more sinister.
She opens her eyes and looks to her left, confused. She jumps in her seat. The woman was not here earlier. She is bleeding from cuts all over her face. One eye is gone. Her once pretty face is marred with slashes and cuts. Her neck is mutilated; Queen can see the tendons and bones jutting out.
She turns her face anticlockwise and looks Queen in the eye.
“You’re next.”
Queen can only leave her mouth open in shock, which the lady takes as an invitation to burst into mocking peals of laughter, shaking in her bubu now stained with blood and dirt.
A cold finger taps her shoulder; she looks back to see a young girl of about ten. She is in a long, oversized gown flowing to her ankles. Her eyes are sad, hair cropped short. She shakes her head mournfully. “You’re next.”
Suddenly the room is full of women and girls talking to and above each other. They all have wounds and cuts on them, all wearing shorn clothing.
“I was going to leave him. I didn’t know he would come that early.”
“It was an accident. He didn’t mean it.”
Queen jumps to her feet, swaying in her six-inch heels. The women surround her, bony fingers reaching out.
“Get away from me. All of you.”
“You’re next. You’re next.” They continue their frenzied chanting. Queen fights them off, throwing jabs and punches as she races out of the room. She totters on her heels and stops to take them off. Then she continues running. She has no destination in mind, only knows she must get away from there.
In the midst of the dark hallway, she sees a dim light. She follows it; the light growing brighter as she comes nearer.
She must have stumbled into one of the hotel rooms. An expensive one nonetheless. The gold carvings and ornaments look real. The carpet is plush under her feet. She stumbles to the bed and sinks in. So soft. And that beautiful humming sound, coming from … the front of the room?
There is a lady at the window. A gold wrapper is tied across her chest, under her armpits. Her hair is artfully decorated in elaborate plaits twisted into a crown, fashioned together with golden beads. The lady turns to face her. They both gasp.
Ethereal. There are no words to describe such unearthly beauty. Her eyes are the colour of the sun setting after a long day. The cheekbones so sharp they could slice metal. Her bronzed skin sparkles, giving off a luminous glow. The two women stare in silence till they both speak at once.
“Who are you?”
“I remember.” Her voice is hesitant, as if afraid to be used, a voice accustomed to silence.
“I can’t believe it, after all these years.” The lady shakes her head. “I can see clearly now. I remember.”
“I want to see clearly too. Who are you? What do they mean by I’m next?”
The woman looks up, muttering to herself. She is still distracted.
“Tell me what is going on?” Queen is at the window now, grabbing the lady by her shoulders.
The woman sighs. “Your life is in danger, my dear.”
Queen barely registers her hands falling limply to her sides, and her vision getting blurry as she sinks to the ground.
*
She is on the floor, in the hotel lobby. Furious hands are shaking her awake. She blinks and hears the sound of lights flashing. Camera lights.
“Queen, what is wrong with you? Are you on drugs?”
“Is this one of your stupid skits? Do you have any idea of the damage you have done?”
If Gbenga had a lighter skin tone, he would be red in the face. Right now, his left cheek shows angry claw marks. Queen is too frantic with fear to listen to his ranting. She pushes him away and walks towards the exit. Eyes and clicks follow her un-triumphant exit as she limps away, chanting under her breath. I will not cry. I will not cry.
Gbenga marches after her. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Who are you leaving this mess for?”
“Get the hell away from me.” She grinds out. Maybe it’s the tone of her voice, but he stops.
The crowd is more persistent, chasing after her. “Quimsy, you don craze?”
She turns toward the voice in a fury. “Na your mama dey craze. Bastard.”
She knows she should ignore them; that’s what all the media training was for. She does not care. It does not matter; she has lost her career anyway. Her head hurts. Every fibre of her being is holding her up, trying not to fall apart, not to shatter uncontrollably. Not to roll on the floor screaming.
She takes an Uber home. She covers her eyes with dark shades and doesn’t say a word to the driver. When she gets home, she strips off her clothes, tearing the mesh of her top. It doesn’t matter; none of it matters. Her career is dead. If the women from her dream are correct, she will soon be dead too.
The cry that leaves her throat is akin to that of a wounded animal. Crying all the while, she reaches across her room and flings anything her hand touches to the ground.
She is so tired. Tired from the day, tired from her fears, tired from chasing after dreams that were never within her reach. After a futile fight with exhaustion, she is asleep again.
“You’re back.”
She is back in the beautiful room with the lady from earlier.
“Who are you? And what do you want from me?” Queen is tired of it all.
“I am … my name is Adaku.” She rolls the name on her tongue, as if unsure.
There is a silence as Queen waits for more information. Sensing none coming, she sighs impatiently.
“I am going to need more than that. What did they mean by I’m next? Am I going to die?”
“Earlier you said you wanted to see. You will see now. Close your eyes, then open them.”
She is still in the room but hidden behind a potted plant. Adaku is on the bed staring morosely. The door opens and a man walks in. He is handsome, dreadlocks flowing to the middle of his back. His eyes are a shocking orange, like blazing flames. His only item of clothing is a loincloth tied artfully around his waist and through the middle of his legs. The rest of his body is dotted with intricate tattoos and scars. His steps are gentle, yet each step towards Adaku fills Queen with a sense of dread. He reaches for Adaku and she stands shaking. His hands cover her shoulders and wrap around her. It appears to be a loving embrace, but his arms are tight, cutting off circulation. She is shaking, sobbing in his arms, while he looks at her in ecstasy.
Then she is on a bus. She sees the young girl who tapped her at the meeting. She remembers her now, from another dream. This girl has suffered a lot in her few years; the sudden death of her parents, being branded a witch by her community, starved and beaten. Her village believes she has cursed them; is responsible for the drought they have faced for months. She has been rescued by missionary sisters. She is leaving the village to start her new life overseas with her new family. One of the sisters turn to smile at the girl. That is the last thing she sees before the screech of metal, the terrified screams as the world spins, the heat, and then her eyes close.
She is in a shabby apartment watching a woman pack her bags. Pack, does not describe the frenzied throwing of clothes. She needs to leave before her husband gets back. Five years of enduring his fists have aged her beyond her years; she cannot take anymore. The door flies open and the thick stench of alcohol fills the room. The pot-bellied man takes one look at the woman and the bags and flies into a mad rage. The beer bottle in his hand is smashed on her body, jagged pieces plunged into her neck. The last thing the woman sees is the fiery glow in his eyes before hers close.
Queen is back in the room with Adaku. A trail of goosebumps erupts from her shoulder down to her fingers.
“Who is the man with orange eyes?”
“Anieriobi. My husband.”
Queen gets up and begins pacing the room.
“It is obvious I do not come from your world, is it not?” Adaku speaks softly. “Things are a bit different where I come from. Time moves faster. Our bodies don’t age or wither. Such a beautiful place.” She sighs. “So unfortunate that I had to flee.”
“Anieriobi was perfect, at least I thought so. It wasn’t until we were married that I saw him for the monster he is. I refused to spend eternity with him. I begged my goddess Ala to help me. She hid me down here, to be forever reborn as a child on earth.”
“Ani found out. He was furious I had gotten away. He could not bring me back, but he could still make me suffer. He cursed me. Every life I lived would be marked by a childhood of sorrow. Despite it all, I would overcome the odds.
“But just at the pinnacle of success, or a breakthrough, I would die. Horribly. Reborn with no memories of my past lives, and the cycle continues.”
“I don’t understand. What are you saying?” Queen steps right in front of her.
She continues, “So I’m what? You in the future? How does any of this even make sense?”
As much as she wants to deny it, Queen knows not a word Adaku has said is false. Her dreams confirm it. Overall, Queen feels a kinship deeper than she has had with any family with this woman in front of her. They are connected.
“Never in so long a time have my wits been so clear.” Adaku looks at her in awe. “I don’t know how you did it, but they spoke to us. In dreams.”
Queen starts to speak, but Adaku cuts her off. “Listen! He will come for you soon. He won’t expect me to remember. This time, I will be ready. We will be ready.”
“You really think we can stop him?” Queen scoffs.
“Yes.” Adaku stands.
Queen lets out a shaky breath. “Okay then. After this, it’s all over, right? I get my career back? No more nightmares.”
“I … I don’t know. I… haven’t thought that far ahead.”
Queen looks at Adaku for a long minute then sighs. “So if I help you, chances are we defeat this bastard, if I don’t, I die anyway. Not like I have much of an option.”
“I’m sorry.” Adaku’s tone rings with sincerity.
Gently, Queen holds her hands; “Make sure we win. Or else I’ll haunt you forever.”
She continues, “By the way; you could have chosen a LESS dramatic way to reach me.”
“That was not me. That was the person who drugged you. I only took the opening I saw.”
It is almost midnight. The Lekki-Epe expressway is traffic free, a rarity. The few cars on the road pay no heed to traffic lights in their bid to get home. A black sedan makes a left under Jubilee Bridge and drives into Badore. He continues, muttering to himself until he parks a street away from the apartment building he is heading to. He avoids the streetlights, walking around them, face downwards, completely covered in a black hoodie. On the street, a church is running a vigil, he knows this from their social media handle. The blast of singing and instrumentals is loud enough to mask the sound of the gate opening. He glances around and slips inside.
Gbenga is not a bad person, although his colleagues think he is too stuck up. His superiors say he is efficient, gets the job done. The congregation at St. Andrews, where he serves as Vicar’s warden, sees him as a role model. He has never laid a finger or raised his voice to his wife or children. He doesn’t fuss about food offered to him, never casts a wandering eye on a maid. He even helps with the baby sometimes, if he’s asked nicely. So you see, he’s not a bad person. He is just a man with a lot to lose, which is just as dangerous.
Three months earlier, Gbenga sat at his desk, filtering through emails when he noticed one particular mail from a funny account name, isockballs@gmail.com.
He thought it must be an impractical joke, or spam mail. He still opened it. The email had no subject, just a link and a phone number.
He had heard of phishing mails; yet premonition moved him to click the link.
It took him to a video of him, half-naked, fully erect penis pulsing deep into that boy whose name he had forgotten by the next morning.
He closed the link and dialled the number. As Queen’s cheery voice listed her demands, the normally cool and collected man felt the red-hot flames of anger wash over him. Growing stronger till this day.
It wasn’t hard to get a copy of her house keys. He took them from her bag during a shoot, duplicated and returned them with her none the wiser. The girl needed to learn to be more careful, especially as she liked to threaten people.
It infuriated him; why would this trashy internet nuisance have the guts to blackmail him? Signing her to the agency raised a lot of eyebrows. If he had to explain her potential to one more person, he would lose it. The worst part, everybody thinks he is fucking the bitch. As if he would ever defile himself with something so nasty.
Her apartment door slips open. He is in. The bottle of Sniper is in his jacket. Beside it is the suicide note. In the other pocket is a plastic bag containing drugs that will be found in her apartment. That and what he put in her drinks that morning came from the same source. Her death will be good for business. A win-win, he tells himself.
The house is dark. He moves quietly, feeling the walls with his woollen gloves. He opens the bedroom door quietly; he can make out the silhouette on the bed. As he approaches, a strange sense of rage fills him, almost like a burning fire. Like a man possessed, he makes unsteady movements, all he sees is red.
He doesn’t notice the figure in gold appearing behind him. He is fixated on the figure on the bed, his eyes burning brighter. He reaches out to grab hold of her and touches… nothing. She is gone in a puff of smoke.
Adaku speaks behind him. “Anieriobi. It’s been a while. Come out of him. This is our fight.”
Gbenga drops to the floor as the deity steps out of his body. Ani stares at the body for a few minutes then kicks it away. He turns slowly to face Adaku, a snarl on his face.
“You should never have left.” His voice is husky and deep. “I had to punish your disobedience. None of this would have happened if you had stayed.”
She shakes her head. “This ends now.”
“Yes, it does. I have found a way to bring you back for good. Return with me; I knew you would eventually come to your senses.”
She laughs. “I came to my senses the day I left.”
“It must be madness you came to. Where did you get the nerve to speak to me like that?” His voice takes on a deeper, more menacing tone.
“How many innocent women have you killed? In your bid to harm me?”
“Being in this world has made you soft. When did we start to care for mortals?” He scoffs. “They would have enjoyed their lives if you never left me. You did this. If you feel any remorse for their deaths, know it is in your hands. You killed them.”
Adaku gasps. “I … I didn’t. This is on you, and your desire to control me.”
“I have had enough of this conversation. I am going back. With you,” He reaches for her and she steps back.
“No.”
Ani laughs. “You think you have a choice in this matter.”
His voice becomes softer as he steps closer to her. “You think you can stop me?”
“I may not. But WE can.”
Adaku breathes in deeply and closes her eyes. She plants her feet to the ground and calls on Ala. She calls on her selves by name, asks for their help.
Ani laughs. “What is this nonsense?” Suddenly he feels a shift in the atmosphere. A storm is brewing, energy fuelled by the rage of women scorned. Women who left too soon, died too horribly. He tries to move but discovers he is stuck to one spot. Captive.
For the first time, Ani is unsure. He snorts and yells, tries to set himself free but is held by a force greater than him.
Adaku walks to him, chanting under her breath, her eyes glowing. She holds a dagger in her hand outstretched. Anieriobi stares at her with a horrified expression on his face.
“How did you get that? Listen to me. You don’t want to do this.”
Adaku hesitates, just a fraction of a second, but it is enough for him to go on.
“I have spent a millennium searching all corners of the earth to find you … “
“To kill innocent women. To harm me. It all ends now.”
“I will always find you. You will always be mine. Always.”
She plunges the dagger deep into his chest. “I was never yours.”
*
The sound of a phone ringing jolts Queen awake. She gets up groggily, feeling around the bed.
She pauses suddenly. That is not her phone’s ringtone. Whose is it?
She turns in the direction of the sound and her eyes widen at the sight of the body on the floor.
Fully awake now, Queen jumps out of bed and is beside the body in a flash. She frowns, confused.
What is Gbenga doing in her house?
She kneels beside him and checks his wrist for a pulse. Still alive.
Like a dam unlocked, the events of yesterday come flooding in.
“Oh my God! It wasn’t a dream.”
Gbenga’s phone rings again, startling her. She reaches into his jacket pocket. As she does so, some other items fall out.
“Blood of Jesus!”
A quick glance shows his eyes are still shut.
The phone stops ringing as she calmly digests the contents of the letter. She looks down at Gbenga, then up to the sky.
“Adaku, thank you.” She whispers.
She finds her bag flung into a corner of the room. As noiselessly as she can, she fishes out her phone, takes photos of the letter and contents of the bag. After she returns the contents to his pockets, she takes more pictures and videos.
Satisfied with her handwork, she opens all her windows and begins to scream for help.
*
Oreva wakes up gasping, right hand clutching her chest.
“What is the matter? Another nightmare?” Her husband Bala is awake.
Unable to speak, she nods.
“Sorry, my love.” He holds her tight. Too tight, but she needs it. She is safe.
“You need to lay off those horror movies.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” He prods.
She nearly spills, but part of her is holding back.
It has been three years of waking up with no memories. All she knows is that she is married. To Bala.
As much as she tries, she cannot remember the previous years of her life. These dreams, are they glimpses of her past? Did she really kill that man?
She eyes her husband warily. Bala’s eyes are a beautiful brown, not orange like the man in the dream. Still, she cannot help the dread and confusion flooding her as she looks at him.
He kisses her forehead. At once, a feeling of calm enters her. She is being ridiculous; how can she be in danger from the man who saved her life? He has the scars on his chest to prove it.
“Go back to sleep dear.”
“If you want, I can stay awake with you.” He continues.
“I’m alright. Good night sweetheart.”
He gives another forehead kiss and she smiles at him.
Bala waits until her breathing is even before the smile leaves his face. He runs his hands softly through her hair, staring at her. His eyes, brightening until they are a fiery orange.
“I told you, you belong to me,” he whispers softly. “Forever and always.”
Chiemeka Nancy Akaigwe is a writer of Nigerian descent. She is a new writer who is excited to explore different themes and genres in writing. She believes in telling stories that accurately depict the realities of the African continent. She recently won her first writing contest; so she must be doing something right. When she’s not writing fiction, she is reading voraciously, taking tech courses and trying to make sense of life and her recent geology degree. You can reach her on Twitter @mekkahwrites
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.
Hussani Abdulrahim is a Nigerian writer. He has a degree in Pure Chemistry from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. Hussani was shortlisted for the 2024 ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award and the 2024 BWR Summer Fiction Contest. He won the 2023 Writivism Short Story Prize, Ibua Journal’s 2023 Bold Call, the 2022 Toyin Falola Prize, and WRR’s 2016 Green Author Prize. He has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and Afritondo Prize. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Wilted Pages, Brittle Paper, Evergreen Review, Solarpunk, and Ibua Journal. He lives in Kano, Nigeria.
