Mindira stares out the window to keep her head above the darkness in the bus. It is dark outside, but at least the darkness is free, spreading itself over the hills and reaching the sky. She had just finished breastfeeding her baby and he had latched onto her nipples the way all babies do when hungry, and she had winced throughout, fighting the temptation to gently smack him on the buttocks. Now she moves her fingers slowly over her navel, caressing it. Then she glides them over the scar just below the navel, moving them over and over it, mapping once again the memory of the scar.

Two months ago, her body had bent open to birth yet another child. When she was told by the doctors that she would need a C-Section, she laughed, and the doctor thought it was the stress from the labor making her delirious. But she had been expecting it. She knew that the weakness in her bones and soul would not make way for another child to be born – at least not naturally.

“Where is your husband?” The doctor with the kind eyes had asked.

She laughed again. Her husband was away on a work transfer. He had not been present at the birth of all her children save for the first. He was an Air Force officer, serving his country in battle. Even this thought made her laugh, for she knew his duty was mainly sitting behind a desk and giving orders.

“So who would sign the consent form?” the poor Doctor had asked.

It was her fifth pregnancy in ten years. She’d told herself that the fourth would be the last, but her husband was a sharpshooter. Her pregnancies, just like the other things in her life, had been sudden and unplanned, falling on her like ghosts in a haunted house. When she was seventeen, her father had called her into his hut and the old man had looked at her, his wrinkled face a canvas of smiles, informing her that they had found her a husband. He said it in a non-matter-of-fact way, the way lips announced blessings, but all she felt within her was the burgeoning of a wither. She’d half hoped that marriage would be something of the distant future.

Her older sister was yet to be married, and she thought the mantle would fall on her. But her sister had always been too much. She did not know the ways of being a woman, preferring to tow the path of men, engaging in Dambe with other young boys by the side of the road than taking care of a home. Her husband’s mother had preferred her and her beautiful, fair skin. When Mindira told her sister about the marriage, she’d looked at her with a sadness that could drown a village and pulled her into a deep hug.

After their marriage in her village, her husband brought her with him to Lagos and spent a few weeks with her before leaving, traveling somewhere, for work. She kept herself indoors, watching TV and staring at the white walls of her room till they started spinning, threatening to fall on her. The city was too alive, too vibrant, and she often felt herself cradling loss in her arms.

A couple of weeks after he’d left, she noticed she was filling up – that she was pregnant. This would repeat itself, over and over again. Her husband would come to visit and he would leave behind a gift. For the next few days after the surgery, as she waited for her body to remember to be whole, she watched over and over again, a video of a cesarean section she had found on YouTube, reminding herself of the battle her body had survived. “Why would anyone put up something like this for all to watch?” she’d thought, but her eyes could not lift themselves up from the video.

Mindira was a few months shy of eighteen when she married her husband, and when her days of going without food could not convince her father, she had consoled herself with the fact that this man, her new husband, would send her to school since her father could not. But with each child, the dream faded into an illusory horizon.

As Mindira stares through the window, she imagines her dream to be locked within the darkness around her, lost, floating, and wandering in nothingness. Her husband had brought them to the bus park and got them settled into their seats, and waited for the bus to leave. He told her he still had work to do in Lagos, but she knew that when he was done with the work, he would take a flight down to Maiduguri, and from there a taxi to the village. She had stuffed the three boys, Alex, 7, Jonah, 5, and Obadiah, 3 in seats in front of her, while she and her first daughter, Sarah, 9, sat together with the baby. Her second child, Alex, had become a vegetable since the journey had started, his head buried in the plastic bag she had brought just for this purpose.

The journey to the village was always arduous, taking over twenty-four hours from Lagos. Before leaving, she’d stuffed the children with avomine to prevent vomiting. She knew it would not work, but each year, she kept at it, because her life had become a repeated sequence of madness. Her second son, Jonah, had been staring through the window since the trip started, and even now, his face is glued to the window, looking into the darkness. She wondered what the darkness meant to him; if a five-year-old could know the pain of a lost dream. All the while, her hands remain on the scar, a reminder of what her life has become –  scars, breaking in and bending. Her son’s voice breaks through the thickness of her thoughts.

“Are we there yet?” Obadiah asks.

“No,” she says.

2

They reach her husband’s village as the night slowly spreads itself over the hills. The marcopolo bus had dropped them at a park in Gombe, and from there she boarded a taxi. From the taxi, Mindira can see the hills roll and hide behind the thin harmattan haze. She realizes she doesn’t miss it here. Yes, she was born in a village similar to this one, had spent her early childhood and teenage years here, but she feels no attachment whatsoever to this place. It is as though, in all her time here, she was simply a wind, hovering in the skies above the hilly village, never settling and never digging its tentacles into the sand. Just because we are born somewhere does not mean we belong there.

“Please, can you close the window,” she says to the driver. A cold harmattan wind had suddenly snuck its way through the window on the driver’s side. The windows of the backseats had been closed since the beginning of the trip. It had been cold when they got to Gombe, and it got colder when they reached Biu. But now the cold was different; not  from outside, but from within her. She knew why. They were close to her husband’s family house.

“Wake up,” she says to her children’s sleeping bodies. She taps them gently. “We are here already.” Her voice is soft and low, like the early morning mist. The journey has drained her and all she wants is to remain there in the taxi, or to disappear to her room in Lagos. Her children are all sleeping, and the baby too is sleeping quietly in her arms.

During the trip, at intervals, when she noticed no movement from the baby, she had brought her fingers to his nose to check if he was still breathing. the thought of the baby dying in her arms assaulted her, and she imagined carrying the dead body to her husband’s family house, dumping it in its grandmother’s house while cursing out the cruelty of her husband for sending her and a two-month-old baby and their other children on a bus trip while he boarded a plane for himself.

She checks again now and the baby’s warm breath wraps itself around her fingers. The taxi driver helps her rouse her children, and each child steps quietly out from the taxi, their bodies swallowed by the oversized fluffy hoodies they wear. The hoodies made them look bigger than they were, and as she looked at her children, she felt a chill come from within again.

Her husband’s nephews and nieces soon gather around her like flies on a piece of meat, and Mindira is surprised to see them for they had come out of the darkness, as though they had been waiting all day for her. The thought mildly irritates her, but she is glad they are here, for there was no way she could have carried all the bags in by herself. Her husband had given her money to shop for both of their families and each year she made sure that his family got a larger share than her own family. She was aware that they spoke about her. A village girl who was lucky to be married off to a rich man, the richest among his siblings. They expected her to be grateful for it, but Mindira was not grateful and never would be. They pull her into a hug, bobbing from side to side. The young boys help her take her bags inside.

Mindira smiles her way into the house. Someone takes the baby from her arms. It is dark and she can barely see their faces, but no matter – the morning shall reveal them all. Each year there is always an addition to the family, making the family tree extend farther and farther. She feels alienated from them all, this family she had been planted into and is supposed to belong to.

After the bags have been brought into the house and her children have scattered into the darkness with their cousins, Mindira goes to the room she will be sharing with her husband’s sisters. She checks the bags she brought to make sure that none have disappeared into the darkness, never to return again. It had happened once before, and when no one admitted to taking the bag, she conceded and agreed to losing it in transit just so the matter would be laid to rest.

When she confirms that all the bags are intact, she leaves the room and heads to her mother-in-law’s room at the back of the house to greet her, taking with her two bags holding the things she brought from Lagos.

The woman is seated on her bed when Mindira enters the room and she pulls Mindira into a hug. Mindira could feel the woman’s old bones on her skin and it felt like being touched by sandpaper. When they break apart, the woman asks how the trip was, why her husband had not come with her, and where her grandchildren were.

The first time Mindira met the woman was when she was helping her father sell his calabash at the market. She herself had come from her own village to buy things in the market and stopped at her father’s stall to  look at Mindira with a deep interest. When she’d finished speaking with her father, she smiled at Mindira and held her hands before disappearing into the crowd. A few days later, her father called her into his room to inform her that they had found a husband for her.

Mindira returns to the room and contemplates joining the rest of the family, out in the middle of the compound under the milky light of the moon. But all she really wants is to lay down, disappear into a sleep, and wake up back in her room in Lagos. She puts on the flashlight to chase away the darkness, climbs into one of the beds, and lays down, eyes opened, staring into the darkness. The thought of her kids comes to mind but she shrugs it off. “They are with their family,” she says to herself. “Don’t children belong to the father’s family?”

3

Her husband arrives the next day in the evening, carrying nothing but a small suitcase and Mindira feels bile rise up in her throat. As the only son of the house, everyone rallies around him, like ants chasing after sugar or  winged termites dancing around a light. The image reminds Mindira of a time when she and her sister and Bulus would go chasing after the winged termites that would fall out of the sky whenever it rained. They would chase the termites and clip off their wings and watch them shiver to death. She had barely lived out her teenage frivolities before she was plunged into the role of wife and mother. 

She remembers the first time she saw her husband. He was seated by his kinsmen, wearing a white Garee, and had the look of a child out of place. His hands were placed between his legs as they sat on the mat. They had brought Kayan Tambaya, which included bags of salt, chewing gum, and kolanut. There had been nothing striking about him then, and even now after the years of marriage, there still wasn’t anything striking about him. He was as plain as the tea made purely of boiled Lipton. Twenty-two years older than her, old enough to be her father if he’d had a child as a teenager like other boys in the village; Mindira did not feel any sense of tingle for him. Nothing like the sort she felt with Bulus, whom she had sworn would be her eternal love, but who, like her, had been too heartbroken to fight the will of the elders. 

Her children run off to hug their father and he gathers them all into a warm hug. Her daughter, Sarah, takes the bag from her father and Mindira takes it from her, heading to drop it in the room reserved for him, which belonged to his late father. His sisters swarm around him, joining him in his bedroom, asking him how his flight was, their faces wearing varying degrees of smiles.

Mindira knows that in the coming days, an exaggerated servitude would be expected of her. Every one of her movements would be put under the microscopic lens of scrutiny. Did she pour water for her husband for his bath? Did she serve him his meal when due? Did she ask if he wanted more food? Did she bend her back more for him to step on? She also knew that her husband’s sisters and their children would begin their own grandiose performances of niceness intended to eclipse hers.

Mindira knew her husband paid no mind to these auditions, being a simple man whose simplicity carried a benign absence of awareness. It was why he could send his wife and five children on a twenty-four-hour bus trip to the village with no one there to support her. It was why he was so blind to her needs that if she didn’t build them with words, he would not see them. It was why he could not see that she was unhappy. This man with wrinkled skin and a lithe frame, who turned her over in bed and allowed his alcohol-stained breath to line her lips, who never saw her except when he needed a need of his to be satisfied. She wished she could build something for herself with words, but how could she bring herself to voice anything when her still developing voice had been stuffed with hot yam when she was made to get married? No matter how hard she tried, she could not bring herself to bend the distance between them, to see him as an equal and not someone she constantly had to defer to.

Sometimes she wishes she could tell him that she feels alone in the marriage, or that she wanted to put childbirth on hold so that she could go back to school, or to not go into her roughly the way he did, and sometimes to not go into her at all. Sometimes she wishes she could talk to him, that her voice was something that could ring louder than it did with him and that he saw her as someone. But no matter how hard she tried, she always felt small before him. She wished her husband would ask how she was – really ask it and mean it. For him to hold her and really hold her. She didn’t crave romance, as it was too inorganic and even the thought of it made her wince in disgust. But she wanted him to look at her and see her as she was, not a woman but a young girl, scared and unsure. A young girl who could have been his daughter. Maybe if he had seen her this way when he sat down before her family, he would have objected to the marriage. But she didn’t have the vastness to produce these words. It was as though, all her life, she had gravitated towards being hollow. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like if it was her sister who had been married to him. She knew her sister would have easily shaped the words out of the air and made things happen, instead of waiting for them to happen. Mindira hated that she lacked this quality and felt even more grief with the absence of her sister, for there was no one in her life she could look up to as a model of behaviour.

It wasn’t as though her husband was all bad. He took care of the children’s needs, and they didn’t lack for anything, yet Mindira felt nothing but drought in her soul. He decorated her like a doll to the envy of other women, but with him, she felt she had never explored the fullness of who she really was, forced to bend and crack and shape into whatever it was he wanted. Her life wholly depended on him and sometimes she wonders what will become of her and her children if her husband dies in military service. After the birth of her children, she’d relied on other women like her in the barracks where they lived. These women had stood with her in the small bathroom of her flat and steamed her body over a bucket of hot water. With their hands, they slowly mended her back into wholeness.

Lately, she had been filled with portentous discontent with her life and an amorphous longing for the other lives she could be living.  Mindira wished that she could shape a door out of thin air, a door into the past to when she was seventeen and happy, and run away before her mother-in-law saw her at the market that fateful day. But she knows what other women will say – that she is ungrateful to be discontent, that she should be lucky her husband doesn’t beat her or chase after women. What else does she want? And her reply would have been “Does he see me? Am I a human being to him? Does he see my fears and hopes? Does he know that I have dreams? Does he know I get scared when he comes into the house and that standing before him my words always dissolve into air?”

Bulus, on the other hand, had seen her. With him she could share her dreams and her hopes, her fears and passions, and he would understand. With him, her voice was not something kept under a bushel, but something that rang out loud with buttery excitement. Bulus had given her wings to fly, taken her up to the hills and made her look at the vast expanse, at the rolling hills that came alive when the rain poured, and made her know that there was a life beyond these hills they could together venture into.

Now she had seen life beyond the hills, but Bulus had been absent, and that life beyond the hills had held more darkness than beauty, more uncertainty than truth, and she wished that she could escape from it. Yet with each new dawn, she forces her body to move through the motions of the day, tending to her husband’s needs and auditioning to his family members, and as each moment passes by, the coldness in her bones increases and she dies a little more inside.

So she goes through the motions of each day, smiling with her husband’s sisters, cooking for and feeding her children, and cleaning the house. Each day, she takes her time to dress her children, oiling their skin with enough vaseline so that the harmattan wind finds no place to drill  cracks into their skin. She makes sure her children do not look like the village children with their ashy skin and cracked lips. At night she disappears into dreams, dreams of her other lives, life with Bulus, life without Bulus, of her sister, and a life where she is the young girl that she is and not a wife and a mother.

4

The day after Christmas, Mindira leaves her husband’s village with her children to pay a visit to her father in her own village, a two-hour journey. She had thought that the cold in her body would have reduced by now, but instead, it had gotten thicker. She realizes that it is this trip back to where she was born that fills her with dread. Her old life will be meeting her new life, and her new life is not what she had imagined it to be.

A few weeks before they left for the village, Mindira had received a call from her friend Hannatu, from secondary school. Hannatu had recently finished her NCE program and had started teaching in a secondary school in the state capital of Maiduguri. The news made the wave of discontent she had been feeling for years crest, and when it fell, it eroded everything inside of her and made her feel empty, as if her skin was falling off her bones and her bones were turning to dust. She had been brighter than Hannatu and was on her way to becoming a medical doctor. She’d always studied hard and had the best results, but even that was not enough to save her from the poverty of soul an early marriage had plunged her into. She felt envy at the freedom Hannatu had and at her teaching position, which years ago she would have scorned. Oh, what she could give to be a teacher now. Hannatu also informed her that Bulus was finally getting married and Mindira felt once again the same intensity of loss she felt when she was getting married to her husband.

Her Father’s house, unlike her husband’s family home, is a patch of land dotted with huts and beaten-down buildings. A baobab tree stands, bent, in the middle of the compound. Her father is seated on a Mat under the tree when she arrives with her children. They rush to greet him, falling into his body spread on the mat, and Mindira finds herself wondering where this intimacy with a man they saw just once a year sprouted from. One of her father’s sons, born of adultery, comes to help her with her bags. She smiles a faint smile at him as she allows him to take the traveling boxes, but holds on to her purse. The baby in her hands begins whimpering and she rocks him so he quiets.

“How was the journey,” her father asks her children. Their chattering responses glide up into the sky, settling in the wind.

She carries her handbag into the room she will be sharing with her children; the room she once shared with her mother and sister before her father divorced her. Her mother died a few months after that, and each year Mindira felt a pang of pain and mild hatred for her father. Maybe if her mother was alive she would have resisted the early marriage.

The last time Mindira was here, for her sister’s funeral, she screamed at her father, asking if he was happy with his life, seeing as he’d sold her off to a man. He looked at her and said he did what was in her best interest. Can she not see that she has a better life now in Lagos? Would she have been able to get there by herself, he said to her. Mindira wishes she could hate the man, to lock him up in the umbra of the past, never to be resurrected into her present. There are times she convinces herself that she hates him, but all too soon on those lonely days in Lagos when she would be alone with just  the rankling voices of her children and the white walls that keep bleeding into grey, she would find herself reaching for her phone, calling to see how he was doing and sending him small change for his upkeep.

Later that night, the compound is overtaken by the chattering of voices. Neighbours who had heard of her arrival came to see her, those old women with missing teeth and hunched backs supported by frail walking sticks. They smile toothless smiles at her and she greets them in the demure voice she wears specifically for this occasion. She takes out the bags of soap, detergents, and beverages and hands them out to them as they come. Their voices form the shape of prayer when they receive their spoil, and her father watches from a corner with pride.

When she finishes, she goes to her room to rest but is interrupted by the screaming of her name. Hannatu comes out of the night and pokes her head into the room. The room is an orb of faint light and shadows. Hannatu takes her into an embrace and she feels choked by it. She introduces her children to Hannatu and Hannatu remarks how grown they are and how beautiful they all look.

They both sit on the bed, catching up on their lives apart, snaking through different conversations – Hannatu’s NCE Program, the stress of it, and her recent engagement – until the conversation comes to a rest on Bulus. Mindira feels her throat constrict as the memory of her first love floods her mind. They were 4 and 7. Then 10 and 13. Then 17 and 20. The memories are sharp and vivid; a childhood spent together, running around the fields, playing in the church, and singing in Sabon Rai choir. Then the awareness of adolescence set in, and the girl sees the boy in a different light, fluttering and flustering seeping into their interaction until the sharing of a first kiss up in the hill. More kisses and kisses happen, at each opportunity they get, both fearful of moving to second base. The memories create a dark hole in Mindira and she feels her stomach dissolve into water.

“It’s not as if the girl is even beautiful. She is not from this village. And I heard she is just 17.”

“That’s young,” Mindira says. “I’m surprised Bulus will marry someone that young.”

“Let us go say hello to the family,” Hannatu says.

Mindira wants to say no but agrees for fear of what Hannatu will think, that the thought of Bulus getting married bothers her. She tells Hannatu to wait for her outside, that she needs to quickly do something in the room. When Hannatu steps out, Mindira changes her clothes into something more fitting, a dress that makes her feel like the 27-year-old that she is, and not the haggard mother of five children. She lines her eyes with Kwali and dabs Iman powder on her face. She takes a lip gloss and smears it on her lips, kisses them together, and lets a smile appear on her lips.

Hannatu comments on the change of clothes and the new look when Mindira steps out, which she waves off with her silence.

Bulus’s family’s house is a bungalow higher in standard than her father’s beaten-down hut. The compound is swarming with people, as the wedding preparation is in full blast. The wind carries sounds of cutting, slicing, and frying. A group of men are seated under the Dogo Yaro trees dancing in front of the house. Mindira goes to say hello, squatting to greet the men there.

“How are you?” They ask, their kolanut-coloured teeth peering at her.

“When did you arrive?”

“How’s your father?”

She answers and they pat her back and she smiles so they don’t see her pain.

When she was 17, everyone, having witnessed her friendship with Bulus, thought she would get married to Bulus; that was before her father agreed to marry her off to a wealthier man. The news had been a shock to Bulus’s family and Mindira had not set eyes on Bulus since the news of her marriage was announced. That was months before her wedding and in the days leading up to the marriage, she yearned for Bulus to come for her and to keep his promise of taking her to see beyond the rolling hills. On the night before her wedding, her sister had pulled her out of the room she was stuck in to take her to the top of the hill where Bulus was standing, waiting under a tree.

She walks behind Hannatu and moves from room to room, greeting the women cooking. She goes to greet Bulus’s mother where she is standing beside the kitchen door. The woman’s aging bones swallow her in a warm embrace.

“My Daughter,” she says. “How are you?”

Mindira wishes the truth could fall out of her easily. After her parent’s separation and her mother’s death, the woman had been like a mother to her. She had taken her under her wing, treating her like a daughter, making jokes about the day when she and Bulus would get married. But somehow, the woman knew about her engagement to her husband before she knew it, and she had informed Bulus about it.

Bulus’ mother moves away into the crowd to supervise the cooking, and Mindira feels the beginning of despair but smiles it away. She tugs at Hannatu’s dress and lets her know that she will be leaving; her children are waiting for her at home.

As she exits the compound, Mindira comes across Bulus’s older brother, Wasinda, and on sighting her, he screams her name and throws himself onto her and she loses her balance and almost falls.

“Mindira, is this you?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“I am fighting with you,” and this made her laugh because if you were really fighting with someone, you would avoid them and not carry the person in your arms.

“You left and didn’t return,” he says. “Now Bulus is getting married to someone else and I told him that you would return. Now that you have, let me take you to see him so the both of you can get married.”

Her eyes begin to water, hearing him say it.  The truth of it had finally hit her; her chance with Bulus was gone. Her life consisted of her children now and the thought made her throat croak in pain. Yet the tears were not for Bulus – those tears had been spent years ago. The tears were for herself, for she had never had the chance to mourn the loss of her life.

“Why are you crying?” he asks.

“I am just happy to see you,” she says.

He brings the hem of his shirt and wipes her face. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Now that you are here everything will be fine.”

This was what she loved about Wasinda, his naiveté, and how he always found a way to bring her to the edge of joy and happiness. He had always been a simple child, with a mind that could not comprehend the vagaries of life, and even now, he  saw the world as a child sees it. As children, Mindira and Bulus had protected him from the taunts of the other children who mocked him for his simple nature, and he in turn had been their biggest supporter.   

Wasinda takes her by the hand and points at the moon.

“Look at the moon,” he says.

She wipes her eyes and looks up at the sky. The moon, through teary eyes, sparkles.

He drags her by the hand and begins running, and she follows on, confused.

“See, the moon is chasing after me, chasing after us. Look,” he says, and she looks up at the moon chasing after them, allowing herself a moment of childhood naiveté where nothing else exists but her and the moon and a friend that loves and adores her. They keep on running till everything falls away. They both stop, their chests heaving, and their laughter glides up to the sky and scatters into an iridescent beam, and Mindira feels the heaviness in her chest make way for a lightness.

“See, as long as the moon follows us about, nothing bad will happen to us. So don’t worry.”

“Wasinda,” a voice from behind calls. They both turn and see Bulus, and she finds that she wants to run.

“Mindira,” he says. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“Bulus,” she says.

It had been ten years since she last saw him, and now he had a radiance to him – had grown from the young boy that he was into a man. A 30 year old man. The last time she’d seen him, he was a 20-year-old boy laying her on her back on the hill the night before her wedding. He’d removed her headscarf and spread it out on the ground, and as he moved his hands up her arms, she looked him in the eye, and his eyes told her to trust him, and she did, suspending logic and ignoring the sound of fear ringing loudly in her ears.

He’d held her gently as they both fell onto the ground, and he moved inside her, setting in her a flame that many nights with her husband had not quenched. She had shivered, had seen the stars above them split into many tiny pieces that fell upon them, and they became like two human-sized fireflies, and when he shivered and grunted inside her and she shivered with him, she had a glimpse of heaven. It was shaped like a door, and for years, whenever she looked at the face of her first child, she saw this door.

“When did you come?” Bulus asks.

“I found her,” Wasinda interjects. “See, I told you she will come back. Now you two can get married.”

Mindira feels herself falter and looks away. She could sense Bulus’s embarrassment in the way he avoided her gaze and she found herself yearning for him, to reach and to hold him. He comments about how unchanged she is, and how well she looks. He asks about her husband and children and Mindira feels anew the pang of loss.

“How many do you have now?” he asks.

“Five,” she says.

Mindira sees his eyes widen with shock and she feels shame cradling her fingers.

“It is nice to see you,” he says, and Bulus quietly walks away from them, his hands tucked into the pockets of his jalabiya, leaving her with a wistful sadness. Wasinda runs after him, pulling him by the hand.

“She is here. Can’t you see she is here? You two can get married now.”

Bulus gently pulls his hand away from his brother’s grip and tells him no, that it’s time for them to go home and that Mindira needs to return to her family and they too need to return to theirs. He looks at her and his face says all that needs to be said.

She tells Wasinda that she will come to see him before she leaves.

“Promise?” he asks.

“I promise.”

Mindira watches as the two men walk away from her, each step widening the distance between them, and her heart tears. Wasinda has his face up in the sky, looking at the moon following him, and as Mindira turns to return to her father’s house, she looks up at the moon following her. The sky was filled with tiny stars twinkling and Mindira remembered when she was a child, how she and her sister would sit under the night sky and attempt to catch the stars, both of them laying claim to the brightest stars in the sky in a  moment filled with the purity of the arcadian. Even after their father divorced their mother and scattered his seed all over the village, the both of them remained grafted to each other.

The last time Mindira was in the village after her sister had fallen and broken her head against a rock when engaging a man twice her size in Dambe, the pain of the grief had unfurled something inside of her. She’d been overcome with a rabid need to escape from her life through that door, to blurt out the words to her father and her husband’s family, to tell them, “Look, see my daughter’s face, the girl you call your granddaughter, tell me, where do you see your son’s face in it?” But with her sister gone, and with Bulus a vestige from her past life, she was all alone with no one to turn to, and if she used the door, what would become of her daughter who was still a child? Would she not suffer the same fate as her? So she closed the door, waiting for the day when the call would be too loud for her to ignore. On certain cold nights, the knowledge that the door existed would wrap itself around her, comforting her.

When she reaches her father’s house, her children run out to meet her, screaming “Mummy Oyoyo” till they reach her and throw themselves at her. She bends to hold all of them within a single embrace. She asks where the baby is and her daughter says he is with their grandfather. She gathers her children, and together they walk to where her father is. The moon sits in the sky, watching them, and in its tender glow, an eternal promise of presence.

About the Author:

Theophilus Mshelia Sokuma is a Nigerian writer/child psychologist whose work has been featured in publications such as The Republic, Lolwe, and others. He is an alumnus of the Purple Hibiscus Writing Workshop and currently writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Find him on X: @Oypanio_Toeo and Instagram: sokuma_theophilus.

*feature image by Anna Lysenko from Pixabay