Editor’s Note: In partnership with The 2023 Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction, Isele Magazine publishes the winner, the runner-up, and the notable essays selected by the curators of the award. Shalom Esene’s “Untimely” is the runner-up. 

Award Founder’s Note: In “Untimely,” we are thrust into the deep end of the raging throes of sex, death, lust, fear – all for a young woman who is unfurling underneath her parent’s roof. A delayed period haunts her. Even as death haunts her neighborhood. The writer immerses us in so many compelling emotional landscapes by barings to us the interior of young romantic love, combined with societal mourning cultures, showing us just how fickle, yet monumental life can really be. 

It felt like a hundred needles shooting through my vagina and up my belly. I was writhing maniacally in bed, consumed by a hellfire of pain, reminding myself that I had begged and prayed for this when I heard a Yoruba hymn from next door. Terrible singing, a ridiculous abuse to human ears. With what little strength my body allowed, I gathered myself from bed and parted the curtain. 

A group of mourners huddled around a silver-white coffin in the compound behind mine. A tall man, dark as the bottom of a pot, in blue Ankara and white fila dabbed his eyes. After a minute, he walked away. I caught a glimpse of him far ahead, his back to his family and friends, handkerchief pressed to his face. 

I shut my window and closed the curtain.

8 years ago, the first time I saw a corpse, I did so from thirty feet up. The 2012 Dana airplane had crashed a few streets from where I lived. In the din of whirling sirens and bewildered voices yelling ohs and ehs and imploring God to have mercy on our souls, I raced to my friend’s apartment two storeys above ours. We watched from her balcony, elbows poised on the railing, curious but too Nigerian to admit that we were intrigued by such a thing, as cars and ambulances scooped mangled bodies away. One ambulance had its doors flung wide open, and there the body lay, a thin sheet covering everything but the dead man’s face. I’d only caught a glimpse but for a few days I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t lie alone in the dark.

I have been afraid of death ever since.

*

A few weeks before I nursed my tragedy in bed and bore witness to my neighbour’s tragedy from my window, my boyfriend Toberu came over. We had sex in my mum’s fabric shop where I tended. It was the only place we could have sex whenever he came over without getting found out. Afterward I told him, “Sex is great.” I was wiping my thighs while he rinsed his hands. A few minutes later I said, “Sex is really great.” We were seated across from each other as the evening breeze patted our faces dry. Before he left for home I said, “I really like having sex with you.” It was sweaty, slippery sex. My skin had caught fire. My body had hummed. If Toberu had said, “Sell your soul to me,” as he touched me, I would have said, “You can have it for free.” It was angels-clapping-in-your-throat kind of sex. It was so great I’d almost cried. Except for one thing: we hadn’t used protection. What unfurled afterward was a wait that made me want to claw my brain out of my head. 

In the night when I woke to pee, I slipped my fingers between my legs and checked for wetness. I pressed my forehead to the bathroom wall and begged God for my period. All day, every day, I begged and hoped. In the afternoon of one of these excruciating wait days, I was half reading Lord of the Rings in my mum’s shop, half promising undying commitment to God if he returned my period when I heard a wail in the street. I peered out of the shop. People had begun to encircle a woman in iro and buba with her hands clasped over her head. It was Yeeh!, the very Nigerianly dramatic wail that bended ears, that meant, come and see o, something has happened. My aunt–really a woman who lived beside my mum’s shop and often spent time with my mum and sometimes with me as I tended to the shop, left, bore witness to the drama and returned.

She sat across from me and shook her head. She clicked her tongue. I let her take her time. She said, “O dun mi sha. Chinedu is dead.”

Chinedu was a barber who rented the shop across. I did not remember his face, although I was certain that in the blur of passers-by, I must have seen him once or twice. If someone had shoved a picture in my face, I probably would have recognized him. I didn’t hope that anyone would. I listened to my aunt and shook my head and made the necessary noises. “He’d been ill for a while,” she said. Chinedu had gone from a vibrant young man to pathologically thin in the space of two years. She described him: Light-skinned, a face full of unkempt beards, always wore sunshades. Zero recollection: I sighed in relief. “He took his life,” was her two cents. One by one his omo ise, apprentices had walked out the door as they watched him fold into a shadow of himself, as his skin took on the pallor of death. “Company, human touch, is just as important as medicine when we’re ill. Maybe more,” my aunt said. “But everybody ran away, even his siblings.” She stopped talking then, as though her tongue had grown limp under the weight of reminisce. 

Later, she said, “Kí ọjọ́ jìn.”

In Yoruba land, that is what they say when a person dies. Kí ọjọ́ jìn: may there be a distance in the days of death. I admire the modest audacity of this prayer. It beseeches for longevity between one death and another while acknowledging the proud inevitability of it. That evening, when I returned home from the shop, I invited my sister to lie in bed with me. When the window creaked, I imagined it was Chinedu trying to enter my room, and when the curtain fluttered, I was certain Chinedu was standing over my bed. Like the Yoruba saying, I too recognize the inevitability of death, but it does not assuage my fear of it. I yell at the okada man when he starts to speed on a bad road because I’m afraid of death. I’m watching a movie and a young character in a hospital bed says, “I don’t want to die,” and I break into a sob because I too don’t want to die. For a long time I was afraid of having sex because god forbid it led to pregnancy, or then an abortion in a country where abortion is inaccessible and criminal, or then childbirth, all of which often lead to death.

But this isn’t all I know of death. The thought of it, the constant fear of it. I also know that over 100 billion people have died since the beginning of time. I know that out of the earth springs a flower, titan arum that smells like a corpse. I know that the founder of Pringles wanted his ashes stored in a Pringles can. I know that selfies have taken more lives than sharks have. I know an average of 150 thousand people die every day. So, with each breath that you take, five people are taking their last 

*

Toberu pulled out. I would have taken his word for it even if I hadn’t seen it for myself. I was afraid of abortion, more terrified of childbirth. The idea of destroying my body, even for my offspring, did not remotely appeal to me. He was afraid of raising a child in a financially handicapped home. He’d just turned 25, a struggling photographer who’d recently moved back in with his parents, a Yoruba boy with responsibilities, the only son and eldest of three children. He was a university student. I was 19 and about to become one. 

“We should get you the morning-after pill,” he said.

“You pulled out.”

“You watched me,” he said. “But we can’t be too certain.”

We hopped on okada to the pharmacy on the next street. I didn’t want to go by myself, because the pharmacists knew my mum, whose insulin I often bought from them. Toberu went in and returned with a pack of Postinor 2. I’d just recently started having sex. I didn’t know the dosage of the post-pill, and had hardly heard of the drug until then. “You take one now and the second in exactly 12 hours,” he said. My heart skipped a beat on hearing exactly. There’d been a standing joke about me in secondary school: I would be late to my own funeral. From my schoolmates to the administration, I was known as that one student who never kept to time. I read the Postinor leaflet three times over before I took the first pill. I set an alarm and rolled out of bed at 7 0’ clock the next morning. I swallowed the second pill, ripped the sachet into pieces and burned the pack.

*

The first time I saw my period twice in a month, I’d just put away my shaving stick. “Can’t make it tomorrow,” I told Toberu over the phone. I was supposed to go to his place the next day.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Just saw my period.” 

“Again?” 

“I must have offended someone,” I said. Since then, my period came twice a month, usually every 19 days. She’d allow me an extra two or three days if she was feeling generous. “You bitch,” I would say as I tore open a new pack of pads. Now, 22 days had passed since my last period. I looked into the mirror. I stared at the fold in my belly, smoothed a hand over my neck. “I’m not pregnant,” I said to myself. I couldn’t be pregnant. I didn’t even like children, why should one choose me for a mother? Children were noisy and psychotic and perpetually genuinely shocked when they didn’t have their way. The morning after pill had a 95 percent success rate, according to its leaflet. The odds were in my favor. Every morning I assured my reflection that I wasn’t pregnant. In the middle of the night, I woke to pee and wiped my thighs and cursed. Alone in my bed, I read erotica and touched myself and found blood. I often painlessly bled during sex or after orgasm. I did the math: maybe if I touched myself more, I would see more blood. Maybe I could fuck my period into limelight. 

God help me, I would.

*

24 days had passed since my last period. My aunt sat next to me in the shop as I counted the days on Google calendar. “A young girl died last night,” she said. The young girl had also lived on our street. “How?” I asked, more out of polite obligation than curiosity. My aunt didn’t have the details. I didn’t care much for them anyway. I huffed a frustrated breath and tossed my phone on the table. I just wanted my period. 

“A lot of people have died on our street since the beginning of the year,” she said. I looked around on reflex. We’d hardly wrapped up 2020 Christmas festivities, we’re still in the first month of the new year. Curious or not, I was spooked.

“Someone else died on our street today,” I told Toberu during our evening call.

“That’s unfortunate,” he said. 

“I haven’t seen my period,” I said. 

“You’ll find it in Jesus’ name,” he said. When we’d started dating, Toberu’s sense of humor had delighted me. Now, I wanted to slap him so hard his ears buzzed. I knew he was as terrified as I was and only being pretentiously breezy, and I wished he would come off it. I wanted him to tell me, “We’ll figure it out.” I wanted to hear, “I’m not going anywhere.” 

On the morning of day 25, I woke up to pee and found nothing. “I won’t have sex ever again until I am married,” I begged God. An empty promise, we both knew. I was about to flush the toilet when my phone fell from my armpit and its torch went off. I became hyper aware of the shapes in the dark. The trees swaying beyond the bathroom window suddenly had a sinister rhythm. I could have sworn someone was sitting on the chair in the living room as I crossed the passage to my room. Chinedu, perhaps. Maybe the new girl. I heard fingers smacking away at keys in the next room. My dad was still awake, typing with abandon on his laptop. I called him, just to remind myself I wasn’t alone. 

“Yes dear?” he answered.

“Never mind,” I said. I returned to my room, shut the door and buried my face in my pillow.   

*

Day 26 passed. By then, I knew I was Postinor’s 5 percent failure rate. 

What were the odds? 

I had taken the second pill three minutes too late. Or too early, if you’d allow the irony. I turned left and right in my bathroom mirror. My belly looked and felt bigger. I was pregnant, I was certain. I had taken JAMB three times, and I was also certain nothing in the sun or in the rain would keep me from university admission one more year. Except death, probably. People were dying on my street nearly every day, so I did the math: give or take, I was next. My aunt told me of her friend who’d been found lying breathless on the ground behind her house. Low blood sugar. Half a crate of Pepsi had followed suit. My great grandma and grandma had both died of diabetes complications. My mum was on insulin, and I’d once been as well. I did the math again: if abortion or childbirth didn’t kill me, the family illness would. Look at me: progress. I’d begun to make peace with death. 

Maybe it was inspired by the string of recent deaths on our street, or maybe it was God taunting me, smearing the subject of my apprehension like powder in my face, but every day after Chinedu, my aunt had a new story about someone who’d died or almost died. Day 27, she told me of the food vendor who’d been robbed of her ajo money, one million naira in cash and left for dead in the middle of the road. She lay in her hospital bed for days, maybe weeks until eventually, desperate prayers gave way to hope, and her eyes fluttered open. “So she didn’t die,” I said. 

“It’s God,” my aunt said. “God saved her.”

I wanted that plot twist for myself. Please save me too, I begged God. Please please please. 

On Day 28, I told my aunt, “My friend’s sister slumped dead on her bathroom floor.” I didn’t tell her how the girl’s eyes peeking and smiling at me through my room window on a day we played together had haunted me long after she’d been laid to rest. I told my aunt of the image of an EndSars victim that had stumbled onto my Twitter timeline. I didn’t tell her that for weeks I’d looked over my shoulder in the dark, unable to scrub the picture of a dead man’s arms folded in a coffin and nostrils stuffed with wool out of my head. I bit the roof of my upper lip so that I would not cry as I spoke of losses old and new, of griefs distant and intimate. I was tired of waiting for my period or for my belly to swell; tired of the possibilities that would follow if it did swell. I wanted to slam a button and shut off my mind and stop fucking thinking. I did not want to be next. I did not want to die.

When Toberu called at night, we spoke of everything but my period. He didn’t ask and I didn’t say. We’d been stupid and careless: love will do that to you. I wondered if he stayed up at night thinking about us, the next bend in the road; if he wondered about the potency of the pill which had truncated his transport money back home. He’d been broke that day. We’d both been. We’d sandwinched ourselves in a long-distance relationship. He came to me all the way from Lagos, and I went to him all the way from Ogun state. It was difficult and demanding but we were determined to make it work. “I love you,” he said before he hung up. I didn’t feel like saying it back but I did. It wasn’t fair to be angry at him but I was. 

Anger was easier than fear. 

*

I rolled out of bed on the morning of day 29. In the bathroom, more out of habit than terrified curiosity, I performed my ritual and discovered a thick slipperiness. I stared at my bloody hand. I thanked God and scolded God for having taken so long. I hummed as I washed off and strapped on a pad. Toberu called. Whenever he smiled, his left eye squinted. I loved that about him and I imagined his face now as I heard the sheer relief in his laugh, the buoyant lift in his voice when I told him I’d seen my period. “I’ve never been happy to see my period until now,” I said.

“You’ve become a certified hoe, you know?” he said. “Only hoes are happy to see their period.”

An hour later, the pain arrived like a metal hook curled in my belly, prodding at my flesh. I writhed in bed. I heard the singing from the window and watched the silver-white coffin and the weeping man in the fila. I swallowed hard, choked with a blinding mix of terror and, not gratitude from the preciousness of being alive, but mere relief. I was a 19 year-old Nigerian girl secretly having sex with a boy. I’d beat all that gloriously horrid imaginations of pregnancy, of abortion and childbirth, defeated the looming specter of death. It was fucking relief from the what-could-have-beens. 

“I’ll talk to you later,” I told Toberu. I hung up, burrowed in my sheets and fell asleep. 

About the Author:

Shalom Esene’s writings have appeared in Lolwe, Black Ballad, and elsewhere. She is the winner of AMAKA Studio’s 2022 creator grant for her feature essay, ‘It’s Time to Address the Eldest African Daughter Syndrome.’ She is a university student, but not by choice. She lives in Nigeria.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay