On the day Fro-fro, the last of our poultry, an off-white and skinny hen in her last days, dies, my mother returns from the community school, flustered, failing at hiding it. She is wearing a brown dress, the same she has worn the entire week, grieving. She is grieving the little town we live in, grieving the earth, grieving the eleven hens, two cocks and numerous chicks she has lost in the last month. Brown is not the colour of grief, but she wears it anyway, because we will not be here for long, and this is her favourite dress because it is brown.

There is no sun today, just as yesterday and the last three months. The sky is grey, and thick clouds of coal fill the atmosphere. On most days we get soot rain, dark and oily, leaving streaks on buildings and vehicles. People rush for cover, but the rain taints everything it touches, creating a grimy residue. On other days the dark matter settles on everything in its way, like dust in the harmattan. It settles on our roof, the poultry cages, the fish tank, the car my mother has refused to drive, the ground, and her garden. It is the garden that hurts her the most. Her once lush garden is now filled with withered pumpkins and okra amongst others, and her flowers are sickly looking, their leaves coated in a fine layer of soot. Dull, like my mother on all of these days.

“Mummy, welcome,” I greet when she shuts the door behind her. Today is one of those days when the dark matter has settled on her, her rough, frizzy cornrows, her brown dress, her eyelashes.

“Thank you,” she says without meeting my eye. This is what gives. She repeats the same for my brother, who is sitting next to me on the floor, a Ludo board between us both. My brother is winning, but soon I will stand with much vigour that the flat multicoloured token will scatter across the board, and we will lose track of where they were in the game. I will lie it was a mistake; I will act it all well too, and my brother will claim he won, but where is proof?

My mother had gathered the town residents at the community school not too far from where we lived and taught them survival hacks. It was temporary, nothing compared to her office job in Lagos. As the plants and farm animals died, their inside too grey to eat, my mother came undone. She was used to being in motion, running against time like she was running out of it. It was the spirit of Lagos within her, defiant and on its two feet in a fighting stance. Lagos was a big culprit in the thick layer of smog that was upon us. The presenter on the radio said it stretched as far as the corners of West Africa, but she was not a journalist. She had only, by circumstance, been trapped in the radio station, alongside other workers when the storm moved into our town and the government declared a state of emergency, a total lockdown.

Before the thick layer of smog fell upon us, my mother drove her old Mitsubishi around the town twice to clear her head and to let family friends know she was around. It was nothing compared to our father’s car in Lagos, a big black pickup truck which he drove everywhere. It was a big man’s car according to him, unintimidated by the potholes and floods in the city. Now my mother walked to the school. It was a twenty-five-minute walk. She wore her bulb mask, a transparent spherical tank the government distributed when news of the smog was predicted. The smog, they said on the radio, would last just a few days, prolonged beyond that of London in the mid-nineties. It had swept across the country for twenty-eight days, only to settle heavily in the clouds for much longer, and was now slowly dispersing. The skies were still grey, and it did not look like they were dispersing, but the presenter said so. It was why the residents began meeting up at the school three weeks ago. Parents were tired of living with their children day after day, and everyone needed to find food that was not greying on the inside.

*

My mother takes off her bulb mask and sets it on the wooden table. She has no handbag. She carries nothing but a flask of water we make locally since there is no clean water anymore. In the kitchen, my mother set up three huge charcoal filters in plastic bottles that filtered the contaminated water into a big bucket. She learned how to make the filter with locally sourced charcoal as a Girls Scout when she was little. We do not boil the water. My mother is paranoid about more emissions.

She asks if we have eaten Garri and we nod yes. We do not cook the granulated flakes into a firm paste because we do not boil water. Instead, we soak them in lukewarm filtered water with no sugar or salt, daily till it cakes. I think of Mega Chicken on Lateef Jakande Road before the smog. On Sundays, we would go as a family to feast. I think of the fried rice and fried fish, and I salivate.

“We have work to do,” My mother says after drinking some water. She is standing by the door thinking, calculating, her right hand tapping against her knees to an unknown rhythm. My mother was always proactive in this form. You could watch her think. It was the same way when the forecasters first predicted the smog: she began to plot our safety, long-term. Our father did not care even though we’d all seen it coming in the months when the sun scorched hotter and the artificial islands of Lagos sank. He had lost properties to the Atlantic Ocean that rose and swallowed the ports and islands of Lagos. “I’m dead,” I’d heard him say on a phone call.

This is where I stand up to scatter the board game.

In school in Lagos, we’d learnt about the glaciers melting and sea levels rising. It was reasonable science, yet it baffled the whole class that no one—adults, really—cared enough. My father drove a pickup that contributed immensely to the pollution. The woman outside the estate we resided who sold delicious smoked fish contributed equally, and so did people like Uncle Sege, who burnt his trash on environmental Thursdays. Bubbling with this knowledge, I chose to confront my father about the folly of humanity, as my teacher had termed it, but it did not go well. I received a slap that reddened my cheeks like the scorching of the sun.

Our mother’s scheming afterward was simple. She would stock up and take us to her hometown in Osun till the smog passed. She begged my father twice to accompany us, after which she left him to mourn his loss. She had also lost her elder brother and his family who lived on the island. I pictured them, her brother and his family, drowning in the putrid lagoon mixed with the ocean that had come to claim them. The airports would be shut down for weeks.

“Do you know where the handsaw is?” she asks now.

“In the storage,” my brother responds almost immediately as I ask, “For what?”

“Go and bring it,” she says to no one in particular, but my brother leaves for it while I wait for her response. By now, she is sweating profusely. Since the air quality index was very unhealthy, it was advised that all windows and doors be shut and that gaps be blocked with wet clothes and towels (my mother suggested that last bit).

“Mummy, are you fine?” I ask. She is biting her tongue, calculating. It would be her nails, but she is yet to have her bath.

My mother stares into space calmly and speaks of another child who died today. People died everyday because they were not privileged to the bulb mask, with its neck suction that prevented the smog from passing through. We have ours because my mother’s friend, a senior doctor at the teaching hospital in Lagos, was able to lay hands on the first batch of twenty million bulb masks that were donated by a French pharmaceutical company. The government and the affluent had seized the masks for themselves while the rest of the country waited on other donations. It was useless to wait, so people were advised to buy cheap goggles and oxygen masks, sealing the nasal cannula as they stepped out. The government claimed to disburse funds to sellers to make the items cheaper but did not. But the sellers, from the kindness of their hearts, still did so without the government’s help.

My mother’s temporary job at the school was not one she was hired to do. It was rather one she had chosen to do. She had chosen to educate the locals on how to protect themselves, how to filter water, how to seal their doors and windows shut, and how to turn plastic bottles into oxygen masks in the best way possible. She did not go every day, but whenever she did, she always returned with news of one death or the other.

“How does one heal the earth?” she asks me, wiping her sweat. My brother, who returns with the saw, answers: by healing the heart? He is only nine, four years younger than I am.

*

On the day we left Lagos, my father, sulking on the verandah, not helping with any of the packing, did not say goodbye. My mother said he did not hate us but that he was sad, extremely sad, and my brother asked if it was because of the properties he lost to the ocean, and she said yes.

“But he is losing us too. Wouldn’t that make him sadder?”

“It will,” my mother answered, but I wished she had said something else. He was choosing to lose us.

My mother packed grains that wouldn’t need to be cooked to be eaten. She bought powdered egg yolks and she made powdered egg yolks. She said you could never have enough powdered egg yolks. She packed canned soup, canned beef, and canned vegetables. She came prepared.

“In case your father joins us,” she added. But we both knew he would not. He was waiting for the rest of Lagos to capsize; we lived in Ikeja. He knew we were headed to my mother’s home in Osun, the home her parents had left to her as their only child. Still, she mentioned as much as she could so our father would hear, should he change his mind.

Among all my mother packed, she packed seeds. Seeds of hibiscus, sunflowers and dewdrops; seeds of tomatoes, and bell peppers. She bought them in packets at the supermarket.

“My mother had a beautiful garden,” she said, reminiscing as she put them in the trunk. “It will be nice to farm once this is over.” This being the smog, or perhaps my father.

The first thing my mother did once we arrived was tend to the garden. She cleaned the tanks and tried to clear the weeds around the plants while my brother and I unpacked. She bought some poultry and fish with the money she had to help the locals. She knew that once the smog descended over the town, no one would be spending any money because there’d be nowhere to. It would lose its value. She also knew the animals would die from the sulphur poisoning, but at least the squawking would give her peace while they were alive. The smog was poisonous and the farm would not survive, yet she did anyway.

*

“Fro-fro is dead,” My mother says now. It had been my brother who had given her that silly name because her clucking began to sound like a frog’s croaking in her last days. I am not surprised by the hen’s death, but I am only just realizing that I had not heard her croaking, her jumping on the window, her last clucking. My mother must have seen her on the way in.

“The radio. They say the smog is clearing.”

“Yes. It is. That is why I need the handsaw. We will build a greenhouse. We will get planks from the neighbours, then we’ll place big plastic bags around like walls. We’ll start somewhere.”

“Are we going back to Lagos?” my brother asks. I know that he intends to ask about our father and if we’ll ever see him again, our decorated rooms in Lagos, our friends and classmates, and perhaps, Mega Chicken.

“We’ll start somewhere,” I say.

About the Author:

Victor Ola-Matthew is a storyteller from Lagos, Nigeria, currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. His work has appeared in the 2022 Afritondo anthology Rain Dance, Brittle Paper, and The Republic.

*Featured image by Monisha Selvakumar on Unsplash