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Orode walked slowly on the wooden bridge. The water beneath him assaulted his senses. It smelt of tar and shit. He strode across the wooden planks. Reeds broke the surface of the murky river. Toads croaked loudly. Mosquitoes buzzed in his ears and found resting places on his naked arms. Lanterns shone from wooden houses with zinc roofs and clotheslines hung from stake to stake. The canoes that floated lazily on the water were full of fishing nets, tin cans, and burlap sacks. Fish roasted over an open fire somewhere and the heavy stench of drying tapioca came and went.

Nights like this were heavy on him. He gingerly walked down the stairs on the other side of the bridge and turned onto the path. He heard the shouting already. He imagined the oppressive heat and the smell of sweat. He saw the yellow kegs of ogogoro, the rusted metal cups, the lit ends of cigarettes. He saw the men. The first time he came here, a man hugged him and lifted him off the floor in unbridled excitement. In that moment, Orode forgot to breathe. What a joy it was to just be held. The stranger bore his weight in the air, his hands wrapped tightly around Orode’s torso, and he bounced him up and down like a child while the crowd in the viewing center chanted and danced to Olé Olé Olé Olé! We are the Champions! because a ball was ferociously kicked into a post.

Orode did not like football. He understood the mechanics of the game. What he did not understand was the aggression of fans or a commitment to their team’s schedule. He did not understand the asinine predictions and the gambling or the idolization of players. He need not understand the sinking sadness because of a loss. In the motor park where he was a driver, he watched two men fight over Ntumba and Touré the day before. Bottles were broken, curses spoken, and bodies bled. But he watched the games anyway. He made the twenty-five-minute walk here every match for the past nine days.

He sat on one of the corner benches like he always did. He nursed his cup of ogogoro like he always did. When someone talked to him he nodded vigorously like he always did. He joined in the screams of Goal! when Cameroon or Zaire scored. He picked a face in the crowd and started to daydream. Then, the man he would soon know to be Efe walked in. Orode held his breath.

Anytime Orode felt a stab of attraction, the same scene flashed in his mind. His scrawny self, at age fifteen, in form four being tormented for having big buttocks. You be woman? See how you dey shake yansh, dey twist waist. The bullying was persistent. It happened every time he rubbed pomade into his hair, or every morning when he applied Vaseline on his lips, or sieved the murky well water to bathe, or used his penknife to scratch the dirt from underneath his nails, or massaged shea butter into his palms, or carefully folded his shirts into shapes so that the lines would form patterns when he wore them. One time, he leaned into Aniedi while they were gisting. He put his hand on his seat partner’s thigh and forgot it there. You be homo? Carry your hand abeg! Aniedi was livid. Orode turned inward.

Anytime Orode felt a stab of attraction, he remembered why he made certain choices. Like becoming a driver. Nobody talked to the bus driver. He liked the long hours on the road. The routes were muscle memory, and he could live alone in his head. He liked the need to keep moving. Nobody could know him well enough. He hated the motor park, though. It was loud. The busyness was a blur. And he had to talk to the other drivers, the attendants, the hawkers, the touts. But they learned to leave him alone in peace. They thought his education was the reason for his assumed dignity and distance. He let them believe that. If he was not a fly on the wall, he sought to blend in. Why else would he religiously watch a game he had no affinity for?

Anytime Orode felt a stab of attraction, he touched his scars absentmindedly. He had an uneven crescent above his right breast, zigzag lines on the backs of his hands, a discolored jag beneath his lip, and his nose was crooked. It was a miracle that he did not have more. Four teenage boys had pounced on him while he was fetching water from the well one night. He knew them and he knew why.

A junior boy, Jokpa, had resumed at his school a few weeks before the incident and the hostel master had assigned Orode the task of helping him settle in. They became friends instantly, despite their age difference. One day, when Orode was coordinating the efforts of the junior boys weeding the school farm, Jokpa told Orode that he was dizzy and needed to get to the hostel to splash water on his body. Orode ruffled his hair, put his arm around him, and said, “I will join you.” Jokpa recoiled. Every day after that brought mockery and resentment. His world turned cold. Nobody asked for his version of events. It did not matter that he just wanted to escape the school farm too. It was Orode that had made such a statement, so it meant something else. He lay still, like a lifeless mannequin, as these boys kicked him in his ribs, pulled out his hair, slapped his cheeks, and stomped on his hands.

He was no longer a diffident teenager. After secondary school, he returned to Ogwashi-Uku. This was where he met Ngoebiye, Abraham, and Ekio. He knew they were scoundrels. But they taught him how to drive. He learned to sleep in the open, hide in trees, to blend in with the creeks. He learned to speak man. The language included the objectification of women, the semantics of football, the courage of self-centeredness, assertion even in the face of wrong, and the will to fight back. They taught him to fight with his hands. To be a good fighter is to channel rage. Orode knew rage. To be a good fighter is to want to cause pain. Orode wanted nothing more. He learned to punch and mean it, to know what was coming, to weave in the wind, to move lightly on his feet. He learned to angle his elbows to strike, to jab with his knees, to sweep with his legs. He began contesting in local wrestling matches. He also began to steal. He did not like any of their activities, but he was the brains of the group. It was something he was good at—thinking through a hypothetical situation, making a plan, seeing the loopholes, tricking all stakeholders involved, having a contingency plan. Here he was revered. Here it did not matter that he had big yansh or that his hair shone sleek or that his eyelashes were long and effeminate. It did not matter what he thought or wanted, because nobody had an inkling.

The football match was forty-five minutes in, and the men in the viewing center stretched their legs, flirted with the servers, made jokes, and ordered fresh rounds of ogogoro. Naked bulbs hung low from the ceiling, and the guttural noise from the generator outside the building rang in Orode’s ears. He watched the short man walk toward him. A slight limp affected his gait, and his hair was plaited in straight, neat cornrows. A cowrie dangled from the necklace he wore, and rows of beads encircled each wrist. He was alert and tense, his eyes darting back and forth. Orode caught the man’s eyes and held his stare until he was sitting next to him.

“Na you be Orode?” Efe asked.

Orode balled his palms into fists. “Who is asking?”

“Hmm.” Efe cocked his head as if Orode was suddenly interesting to him and a half smile lit up his lips. “Abraham.”

“Ah. I see. Abraham has sent someone to me yet again. And who are you?” It wasn’t the first time Ngoebiye, Abraham, or Ekio sent someone to him. It was no longer bizarre, the way strangers showed up at his door, asking for help, for shelter, for money, for transit. Two months ago, a teenager approached him to help him study biology and math for his A Levels. Orode had sat with the boy every night, creating acronyms and mnemonic devices to help him remember faster. Orode wished he had himself when he was a teenager.

“I be Efe.” He kept smiling.

“So what do you need? How can I help you?” asked Orode.

“I fit stay with you?” answered Efe.

“For how long?” Orode asked.

“We go run am,” Efe said.

“So you don’t know when you’d leave?” A slight irritation was in Orode’s voice.

“Food. I wan chop. You get food?” Efe answered, rubbing his stomach.

Orode will remember this strange introduction for the rest of his life. He will remember how they sat in silence until the match ended. Cameroon won. Efe told him he was hungry, and that he needed to sleep. He will remember how they cooked together—Efe’s hands shredding the uziza leaves, his eyes watering as he worked the grinding stone, the single wrinkle in his forehead when he opened the pot of boiled fish. They sat in silence as they dipped bread in pepper soup, separated fish from bone, slurped spicy broth. He had questions, but the only answer he wanted that would not be forthcoming was that Efe was a gift.

They lay together on the ends of the single mattress in Orode’s one-bedroom wooden house. They said nothing to each other the next day as Efe left the house in the morning, or when he came back at night, or as they walked to the viewing center together to watch football. This quickly became routine. Little or no words. Cooking together. Drinking ogogoro on the small verandah and listening to the sounds of the night till they were ready to fall asleep.

After eight days, Efe broke the silence.

“I wan reach Ikiyan.” They were eating ukhodo and the palm oil made their lips shine in the dim light. “You wan follow?”

Orode was taken aback by the invitation. The unripe plantain stayed in his throat. The sudden intrusion into their normal was unwelcome. He said nothing.

“I wan carry oyinbo. Abraham talk say you get brain,” Efe continued.

Orode said nothing still.

“We fit do this,” Efe said.

“We? Have you kidnapped an oil worker before? Is this what you do?” Orode answered, his heart beating a little bit faster.

“Leave that matter,” Efe said.

“So why?” Orode’s voice was laced with anger. “Why? You think Abraham and those boys know what they are doing? Are you a thief too? You don’t have anything to do with your time? Or your life?”

Efe’s signature half smile appeared. He washed his hands in the bowl of water on the floor and got up. He unbuttoned his shirt, turned around and stretched. The seared flesh started from his neck and disappeared at his belt. Orode turned away. The skin was lumpy and thick, black and leathery with specks of yellow. The burn was old but the infection was continuous. Orode gathered the plates and left for the kitchen.

It was nothing new, the scars that stank to the heavens from this topography.

“The fire suppose stop last year. General Buhari don sign am. But the fire still dey burn,” said Efe while putting his arms through his shirt and working its buttons.

Neither of them slept that night. Orode knew Efe was waiting for an answer and he would leave him soon. For good. He thought of Ngoebiye, Abraham, and Ekio. He was convinced that Efe had signed them up already, but they must have insisted they needed a certain Orode. Efe wouldn’t be the first person to think this was the way, to reclaim land, to drive out drilling and the drillers, to stop the betrayal of the government.

Orode thought of those lips and how they curved in that half smile. His blood was pumping. He felt that rush. He lived for it. But he was a man who knew not to want. The neighborhood preacher was screaming at the top of his voice somewhere in the street about the throes of hell.

“Do you believe in heaven, Efe?” Orode asked.

“Why? You wan go heaven?” Efe asked.

Heaven was not a place for people like him.

“I am just asking, Efe,” Orode answered, rubbing a palm across his head.

“Because you don turn militant?” Efe asked.

“Because I be human being!” Orode answered.

It was such a sudden and racking sound, Efe’s laughter. The mattress vibrated under its weight, and the night sounds stopped in honor of it. Efe had turned to fully face him, his stained teeth glinting in the dark and his palm brushing his forehead repeatedly. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and they lay there in silence looking at each other. Efe placed his palm over Orode’s eyes. His heart kicked. He lay still in the darkness, afraid to move, afraid to lose the roughness of Efe’s palm. Efe soon began to snore, and Orode listened.

It was such a catalyzing moment—that sudden laughter and its aftermath, Efe covering his eyes—and Orode would search for that surge in his heart for the rest of his life. Orode knew to never speak the unspeakable and as the years passed, it grew into a love unaccompanied by desire. He dared not ask, tell, hope, or wait. Orode did not want a love story. Love stories are long and performative, forever in search of a happy ending. Orode just wanted a life. That, he was going to get.

---

Later that week, Efe handed him a parting comb. Orode carried a tall stool to the verandah and Efe sat at his feet and turned off the transistor radio. Orode liked to sit here and watch his neighborhood. A row of huts was adjacent to his home and the humdrum of the domestic lives of the families that lived in them was soothing for him. The evening breeze was crisp, and the promise of coming rain and the scents of Orode’s herb plants enveloped the men. He grew thyme, curry leaf, rosemary, and mint in plastic containers lined against the edge of the wall. Orode unraveled each cornrow, pausing to gently turn Efe’s head as needed. He used the teeth of the comb to scratch off dandruff as he came upon each parted row, and he rubbed shea butter into Efe’s scalp before combing the thick full hair. White flakes settled on Efe’s shoulders. Children walked past the wooden house, carrying buckets of water on their heads. They called out to Orode, and he greeted each child.

“You like children?” Efe asked when the children were gone.

“Yes. What about you?” asked Orode.

“You get answer for me now?” Efe asked.

“Answer about what? I asked you a question,” said Orode.

“Ikiyan,” said Efe.

“Efe, I don’t know,” Orode said. A low rumbling started, and a gust swirled sand and leaves into an orbital dance. As thunder and lightning streaked the sky, women and children took clothes off the laundry lines and the men gathered their drying fishing nets and tied down their boats with nylon ropes. But the rain held back.

“One day, this woman wey dance well well, she go market,” Efe started.

“What?” Orode stopped, his fist wrapped around a handful of hair.

“As she dey dance, everybody wey dey watch start to give her money,” Efe continued.

“Are you telling me a story?” asked Orode, startled.

“Na so another woman wey dey sell fish for the market see this woman. She know am before. Them dey live for the same yard before before. One time when person give birth in their yard, the woman wey dey dance steal the baby, run away. This fish woman start to shout, witch, witch, child stealer,” said Efe.

One of the neighbors walking past stopped in front of the verandah.

“Oga Orode, good evening.” The neighbor greeted Orode with a frown, and her eyes were on his hands on Efe’s head.

“Good evening, Mama Azuka. How is your family?” Orode said.

“Oga Orode, I didn’t know that you did hair o,” said Mama Azuka.

“I’m just helping him lose it,” Orode answered.

“Are you a woman? Why didn’t you send your brother to me? You know it’s my work,” she said.

“I can take care of it, thank you. Mama Azuka, this is Efe. Efe, Mama Azuka,” Orode said.

“Well done o,” Efe said and nodded his head to the fat woman leaning on the column.

“Next time, you send your brother to me. Ah, leave woman work for woman you hear?” Mama Azuka said, walking away.

The men watched her disappear behind a beaten lane.

“Continue, please,” said Orode.

“The fish woman no know say the baby wey the woman steal dey for the same market. He don turn big boy now. Everybody for market start to dey shout, witch, witch, witch,” Efe said, “and the boy dey watch. All this time, the boy know say something dey wrong with him mama. But he no do anything. He just watch as them people tie up the woman he think na him mama. She shout his name, he no answer.”

“Then what happened?” Orode asked.

“Nothing. The boy run away. He never see the woman again,” Efe said.

“Why? Did he believe the market people? Did he believe he was the stolen baby? Wasn’t he afraid for his mother?” asked Orode.

“Something no right from the beginning. The boy know,” Efe said.

“So what happened to the boy?” asked Orode.

“He grow up,” Efe said.

“What are you trying to tell me? And?” Orode was now on the last cornrow. Efe’s hair was puffed up, framing his face in a crown of black.

“And nothing,” said Efe.

“Efe, why are you telling me this?” Orode asked.

“Because if something no right, you no suppose sit down and look. The boy no sit down and look,” said Efe.

“I understand, and I don’t understand. You want me to help you plan the kidnapping of an oil worker. Soldiers will come. Even if the company gives us the money we ask for, what happens next? We share the money? And when the money finishes, you would want another high—” Orode started.

“Money? Who talk money? We no want money.” Efe turned abruptly and faced Orode. The rain started slowly and then all at once, and Efe inhaled the fresh earthy smell deeply. The din on the thin roof got louder and Efe wrapped his hands around his knees.

“I’m confused. Why do you want to do this? Are we not going to ask for a ransom, money?” Orode asked. He noticed the warmth of Efe’s nearness.

“Money? No o,” Efe said.

“Why do you want to do this?” Orode asked.

“Na the right thing to get what we want,” Efe said.

“You are a very confusing man, you know?” Orode said.

“Many things no right in this place, Orode. You sef see am. We go demand the right thing,” Efe said.

“I don’t know, Efe,” Orode said.

“I dey leave tomorrow,” Efe said. He stood up quickly and dusted his buttocks.

“What?” Orode asked, his eyes widening.

“Yes. Time don reach,” Efe said and started to walk into the house.

Orode slipped off the stool and blocked Efe’s path, holding up his arms. “Wait. Wait. What if…. What if I plan for you?” He heard his raised voice and couldn’t believe he was saying this. A slight tremor started in his fingertips, working its way up through the span of his arms. It was not a bizarre thing in these parts, to carry up arms to push back against the spread of oil drilling to every small village and town. Delegations almost never worked. No was silenced in the echoes of burrowing machines and projected profits. He knew many men who had made this their life, to fight back or to get rich. What was the right thing to do? Violence was an answer. He just didn’t know if that was his answer. The men faced each other momentarily and Efe took Orode’s shaking hands.

“You dey fear,” Efe said, looking at Orode’s hands.

“And you are not afraid?” Orode asked.

“We go dey alright. Five of us go dey alright. We fit fight. Ekio talk say you fit fight,” Efe said.

“And so what? I am not fighting. I am not touching anybody. I am not carrying a gun. I will just plan. Nothing else,” Orode said.

“Then I go protect you. With my life. I swear,” Efe answered.

“I’m not a foot soldier, you hear?” Orode started to lean forward and stopped.

“I hear. I hear you,” said Efe.

---

Ngoebiye, Abraham, and Ekio arrived three days later. Efe finally told them why.

Oil had been found in a small village ten miles away. In a week, mounds of earth adorned its every path, a testament to the recent excavation. Two siblings flying a kite fell into one of the half-dug wells while their mother boiled crabs for dinner. The engineering team disappeared that night, abandoning their drilling paraphernalia. By morning, the air was thick with rotting flesh and sulfur.

A grieving delegation went to the company’s headquarters, but they weren’t even allowed into the gated grounds. A small protest group formed, taking turns to make an undeniable presence at the gate, waving palm fronds and crowding the windows of any car that went in.

When whoever was in charge grew tired of their antics, the Nigerian Army showed up, dispersing the group with their vans, tear gas, and whips, and eventually, as the soldiers shot in the air, stray bullets hit two people. They died at the gates and the company’s security men asked them to remove the bodies at once. Efe stood in the background all the while, watching the cars drive in and out, watching the people carry the wounded and wrap the bodies of their dead.

---

The kidnapping of Jeff Kallet was seamless.

Abraham spent weeks tracking the number plates Efe had collected and Orode pointed out who was most vulnerable. On Saturdays, Jeff Kallet drove to the expatriate hotel and took a shortcut to buy palm wine and talk to one of the local girls he wanted in his bed. It was well timed and simple. Spikes on the road, a broken window, and kerosene rags in the whimpering man’s mouth.

A mapped-out path through the bush led the group to a waterfront. Ekio had mounted a stolen engine on a stolen boat, and after altering the propellers, they made camp in fewer than three hours. Ngoebiye was the son of a fisherman, and an expert at building fishermen’s huts, and the five men worked hard with his directions, building something that would later be destroyed at a moment’s notice.

Orode had recruited an inconspicuous teenager to deliver a letter to the office gate four days later. While the men waited hundreds of miles away, more soldiers were deployed by the state government, and the village of the protesters was turned upside down. There was a fire in the middle of the night, an evacuation, and then, the land that knew the laughter of children and crabs as big as cats and festivals during the full moon had been laid burnt, black, and bare.

All through, the kidnapping crew relied on Efe. He was the one with a nose for danger. He knew when to stop moving and when to continue. He knew when to cut the engines. He foretold the coming of soldiers. They escaped detection and kept Jeff Kallet in custody for eleven days. The creek they made the first camp proved to be the right choice, and the men took turns being on the watch.

“You have been here before. Right?” Orode asked Efe when he told them that this was it. That they were safe here.

Efe did not answer. Instead, he made a semiconscious Jeff Kallet wear more layers of clothing, old jackets he had procured at a secondhand market. He tied the white man to a tree.

“Are you sure we should not bring him inside? I don’t want mosquitoes to get to him. If he dies of malaria…” Orode said, leaving the last word hanging.

“The oyinbo go dey alright,” answered Efe, sneezing loudly into the quiet night.

When night fell, the heat hung low like a threat at the men’s throats and beads of sweat snaked in rivulets in search of rest. Their bodies glistened in the moonlight and Orode watched Efe trudge at the edge of the creek, his feet occasionally sinking into the marsh. It was all discordant: the crickets chirping, a hidden owl making an unearthly sound, the occasional splash when the stones Efe threw skipped on the surface, and the muffled steps of the other men moving in the dark.

Orode waved to Efe, urging him back to the thatched hut.

“You go chop fish? Or tapioca?” Orode asked.

Efe scraped his feet against the doorpost and shook the dying lantern. After putting out the burning wick, he opened the fuel tank and refilled it. Their shadows danced brightly on the walls after he struck a match, their tired faces suddenly gaunt.

“No tapioca. How you dey?” said Efe. “E be like say we go stay here small.”

Orode lay on the damp ground with his hairy chest flat on the earth. His sweat caked. He turned his face away from Efe. It had been like this in the past few days, speaking around and over each other, neither answering the other’s questions. Little pebbles dug into his skin and after a while, he felt a sting, and then another. He watched closely as a line of soldier ants carried a crumb of dried fish. He wondered where home was for the tiny creatures, and what the cost and weight of the single objective of gathering food were doing to them.

The idea of home had always been an illusion to Orode. Having someplace to go back to no matter what happened, having someplace to call your own. His parents had never been there. He was shuffled off to relatives in the city at a young age, and it was decided that because he was male he would be sent to school, and his younger sister, Clementina, would be sent to Lagos to work. He had not seen her for nine years now, but they exchanged letters through the buses that crossed state lines. She was funny and endearingly honest, but that was all he knew about her.

Burning fish urged him to turn around. He refused. He heard the rustle of the mat and imagined Efe rummaging their sacks for whatever would make appropriate bedding.

“You dey vex?” asked Efe.

“Don’t ask me stupid questions, Efe,” replied Orode. It sounded like he was speaking from his nose.

He knew it was coming before he even felt it, but he was still startled when Efe put his fingers on his head. He exhaled and closed his eyes. Those fingers went to his neck and slowly traced his spine.

This man is going to kill me, Orode thought. He also thought about the white man tied to the baobab tree a mile away. Jeff Kallet had asked Orode what they wanted as they dragged him from his car on his way to work. When the answer was not money, his face turned red and he started to sob as he signed the letter of demand that Orode had drafted.

Orode finally turned to Efe. The confidence Efe exhibited throughout the operation was uncanny. There was no single misstep on the trail, no sign of tiredness as he lugged guns and machetes and guided the prisoner. Not when he slammed the white man’s head on the windscreen and broke his nose, not when he stuffed kerosene-soaked rags into his mouth, not when they changed number plates and drove to the next town, or maneuvered the waterway in the light rain to this marsh. Not even when Ekio had cried out in the darkness on a night watch. The jagged tip of a broken branch had pierced his calf and blood was dripping too fast out of the wound. Efe washed Ekio’s wound with ogogoro and a rag. He gave Ekio a knife to bite down on, and soon he was threading a needle.

“What is that?” Orode asked. “Efe, what are you doing? Why do you even have that?”

Ngoebiye stayed on the lookout, Abraham held a torchlight over the wound, and Jeff Kallet sat shivering on a log. Efe said nothing. He pressed the wound together where Ekio’s flesh had been lacerated, and told Orode to hold it exactly like he did. He worked the needle in and out of the bloody mess.

“Bossman, you be woman? When did you learn to sew?” Abraham asked.

“A very long time ago,” Efe said and worked quickly.

In the thatched hut, Efe rested the palm of his hand over Orode’s eyes. The success of Jeff Kallet’s abduction would precede almost three decades of kidnapping oil workers, destroying pipelines, rigs, and terminals, and employing scare tactics at the beginning of a new oil dig. The group would grow from five members to 334 over the years. They spread far and wide in the South and only convened at the start of a new mission.

“Sleep, Orode. Sleep,” Efe said, and the light from the kerosene lamp danced on his face and his newly shorn head.

In the years to come, this would be Efe’s answer to the unsaid, to the urgent, to the unpleasant. A light touch, a reminder to rest, a signal to temporarily forget.

“I can’t sleep. I’m sorry I made you cut your hair,” Orode said. What he didn’t tell Efe was he had taken a handful of the hair he supposedly swept away. He weaved it into a tight single braid and hid it in the bottom of his trunk. “Efe, what happens after this?

“Na truth you talk. Everybody go remember man wey get long hair,” said Efe. He yawned and closed his eyes. “If we get wetin we want, everybody go home.”

What they wanted was damages paid to the parents of the dead boys, as well as the families of the wounded and dead protesters. They wanted this done at a public press conference, where the company would also announce that they were withdrawing their drilling activities from the village. They wanted the company to set up a community fund that paid everyone whose property had been affected. The company would meet every demand, but Orode would soon find out about the razing and evacuation of the village by the army.

“And you? Do you go home?” Orode said.

“I no know yet,” Efe said.

“Do you have family somewhere, to go back to?” Orode asked.

“Family? No. You get family?” Efe asked

“I have a sister in Lagos. You can come and stay with me, you know?” Orode said.

Efe opened his eyes.

“We can work it out, you know? Get a bigger house in another place? Or we move around, for a while,” Orode started to stutter, “to stay safe, anything you want, I don’t know. Anything you want.”

The light flickered brilliantly in Efe’s eyes. He cleared his throat twice.

“Anything I want?” Efe asked. He cleared his throat once more, and rubbed his neck. “Well, since you no like fighting, I fit protect you.” His voice had an uncanny quality to it. “And I dey work hard. Your bus driver work and my market work. We go have money. We go dey alright.” He nodded to himself. “We go dey alright.”

“I like that. Good. Good. Good,” said Orode, and turned his head away. He pressed his body into the ground and listened to his own heartbeat. He reveled in a fleeting satisfaction, one tinged with yearning. Tears stung his eyes and when he closed them, he thought of the reflection of the single wick of fire gleaming in Efe’s eyes. As he fell asleep, his last thought was of walking toward that light.

 

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AYOTOLA TEHINGBOLA (she/her) is a Nigerian-born lawyer, photographer, writer, and translator. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Washington Square Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Her manuscript was shortlisted for the 2023 Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize for Debut Novel and she is a three-time recipient of a Glenn Balch Prize for Fiction. She has been supported by the Lagos International Poetry Festival, Hudson Valley Writers Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, Alexa Rose Foundation, Idaho Commission on the Arts, and Kimbilio for Black Fiction.

 

Featured image by Artem Maltse, courtesy of Unsplash.