Sọnne cracks and empties the second egg in a bowl and her phone vibrates. The notification sound, muffled like the mid-June drizzle wetting the world outside their flat, is a text message asking her to come quickly to Hope Clinic in Egbeda. Ma’am, your attention is needed… The message is from Ikeobi’s number, but the words are not his. Sọnne is baffled by the multiple implications of that demand. Is a stranger pranking her or is it Ikeobi trying to insert a lighthearted gag into their life? The gelatin has solidified on the cracked egg, and the jelly-like film looks like a shell forming, scooping life back to where it was originally split from. On her way to the address specified in the text message, she smells the egg on her hands. In the clinic’s waiting hall, an oblong-jawed doctor lumbers towards her and informs her that Ikeobi drowned in a swimming pool and was brought dead to the hospital. The cadence doesn’t change as he announces her widowhood. He speaks with his hand. His pinky is filed to a gentle curving point. As he leaves, Sọnne watches him vanish bit by bit down the sloped the hallway. Then, two men dressed in green scrubs, who need her to identify the body, replace the doctor.

The quick deterioration of things suction air out of her brain. Is this all really happening? The men lead her through a narrow corridor, where a strange smell emanates from the walls. Someone lay on a stretcher. The chest is bare. She expects to find Ikeobi seated in a chair, or sitting in a corner of the room waiting for her to take him home, but his body looks like a felled tree. Whatever killed him has stretched him first to his elastic limit, and his face has grown puffy in the few hours of death. His body is pale. She imagines his pores thirsting so badly that they lapped up too much water before help arrived. She nods at the men in confirmation. The egg smell returns, now putrid, sulphorous. She hurries out of the room, finds a sink in the lobby, and scrubs her hands over and over until a nurse touches her shoulders, turns off the tap, and steers her away from it.

Sọnne collapses on a bench nailed to the clinic’s entrance hall. The nurse who rescued her from the tap hovers.

“Do you need me to help you call someone?”

Sọnne thinks of the eggs lying exposed in the bowl on her kitchen counter. She needs someone to fry them before the smell fouls up the air of the apartment. She thanks the nurse and says nothing more. When the nurse leaves, she texts Nwanyịeze, her sister. They haven’t spoken in months. What perfect way to smoothen the past creases in their relationship than through the news of death, she thinks. She texts David, Ikeobi’s personal assistant and supervisor. She also texts Joe, their housekeeper. She sends those texts because when someone dies, you contact people.

Nwanyịeze calls back, but Sọnne busies the call, suddenly lacking the emotional energy required to circle around the loopholes in their relationship, and her loss. At the reception, she pays for the few hours of intensive care Ikeobi received, and the mortuary costs. The procedures are so quick they surprise her. None of the receptionists who accept the payments show pity or unease when issuing her receipts. She is fastened in a bubble where she feels nothing. Her body is so numb that she doesn’t feel her feet while she walks or stands. When Joe and David arrive, a thin-edged scalpel pierces the bubble, and she plummets to earth. The fall opens her lungs and throat and a blast of dry, painful air travels through her. She starts crying.

At home, neighbours dot their porch like flies. The eggs in the bowl have thickened. Dead hatchlings. That night, she sleeps in the visitor’s room because the room she shared with Ikeobi is saturated with his eyes and the smell.

*

She only met Ikeobi’s family on video calls. Ikeobi travelled home alone for village meetings and to see his family. He had planned to take her, and only after they have built a private house on his own portion of the family land, or a more perfect time, though they never defined what ‘perfect’ was. She also knew that Ikeobi was protecting their marriage from his family’s fangs. He didn’t want children, and his family would never understand it. Childlessness, to them, could never be intentional; it is the woman’s fault. They keep saying you are too modern, Ikeobi said, laughing each time he returned from those trips to his hometown. Sọnne had not been in the least amused.

“Why don’t you just tell them that you don’t want children?” Sọnne asked him one day during one of his laughing fits after he shared a comment one of his uncles made. “You are not as traditional as they think. Let them know.”

His facial muscles contracted, moving from joy to surprise.

“Tell my family that I don’t want kids? Me? A full-fledged Igbo man! The first son of a family. You are joking, abi?”

“What’s the worst that will happen? You cater to all their needs. What about their disappointment scares you? If your culture believes in procreation and you do not…”

“You don’t understand.”

“It is just easier if I take the fall for you, right? They believe it’s all me and it makes you comfortable?”

They fought. He apologized afterward and never mentioned the comments from his people ever again.

Now, one week after his death, she boards a morning flight to Asaba, and then takes a taxi to Ọba, his hometown.

*

The elder who first speaks to her is gray-bearded. He is Ikeobi’s uncle. He had attended Sọnne and Ikeobi’s wedding two years ago over zoom, his face bold on the screen, his smile pained. He always called to thank Sọnne and Ikeobi for paying for his insulin injection. Now, he squints as if he were seeing Sọnne for the first time.

“Who are you looking for?” he asks her.

Ikeobi’s mother comes out of the house, sees Sọnne, and lets out low groans. She tilts her plump body forward and backward, her cries drawing out. Ikeobi’s siblings: two brothers and two sisters, and his three cousins, join them too. They all have one dimple on their jaws. Ikeobi had it too.

“Please repeat what you were telling us on the phone. How did Ikeobi die?”

Sọnne understands the uncle’s question in more ways than one. Surely, Ikeobi died quite young, at thirty-nine. But why must he die barely twenty-four months into his marriage to her? They cannot imagine Ikeobi inside the ground while Sọnne still stands above it. Sọnne can tell them what the death certificate says: heart failure, caused by drowning. She has rehashed that day many times, wondering if his heart failed first before he drowned, or if it failed while she was cracking the first egg, or the second, or if it happened a little earlier, while she was lodged in the soothing anchor of morning sleep. When the resort employees were having a hard time pulling Ikeobi out, was that when a bird perched like a full weapon on their bedroom window ledge? Sọnne did not know if, in their struggle to save him, they dunked him too many times in the water, immersing him in the very thing killing him.

“You are only coming now, seven days after he died. All we got from you was a phone call. A whole human being died, and you only informed his family through a phone call?”

The assembly scowls at Sọnne, waiting for her response. A child, who looks like Ikeobi’s niece, emerges from the house with a stack of plastic chairs and unstacks them for the gathering, then she runs back into the house and returns with another stack. A tousling wind rattles the roof of their house, the bungalow she helped Ikeobi complete after it paused for too long at the lintel level. Most of the faces seated before her now had thanked her for her generosity. Even Ikeobi’s mother had danced endlessly in a video call, the poor network buffering the streaming and making her into a gyrating blur. Mary, Ikeobi’s youngest sister, whose business Sọnne and Ikeobi funds, sits between two male relatives. Sọnne looks at all of them for a faint beam of recognition, a reaffirming that they once chose her.

“Bia, did you hear what my uncle asked you?” It is Elias, Ikeobi’s eldest brother. Ikeobi speaks of him, this brother who is on the precipice of fifty but has refused to acquire any skill. His forehead is deeply grooved with lines as if he’d stayed angry for too long. Sọnne and Ikeobi bankroll most members of his family. Over half a million naira is sent out monthly to hospitalize sick children and pay school fees. A child’s voice, indistinct as if gargling and speaking, was always saying, Thank you Uncle Ikeobi for my books.

“I was sorting out a lot of things,” Sọnne says.

“Did you just say sort? My son died and you couldn’t come here immediately? And you say you were sorting what? Ọ kwa ụnụ afụgo?” Ikeobi’s mother spreads her arms looking from one face to another, as if soliciting support. “I told Ikeobi not to marry this girl! These modern girls that give no regard to tradition! I told him!”

“Mummy, calm down. Let her tell us what she was sorting,” someone said.

“I couldn’t find suitable flights,” Sọnne responds from the gut, unfiltered. Her words start brewing reactions.

Ikeobi’s mother places both arms on her head and shouts, “heeei! heeei!”

“So, my brother died, and you are busy spending his hard-earned money on flights?” Elias asks, taking menacing steps towards Sọnne. A cousin grabs Elias from the back and pulls him to a vacant chair.                     

*                                 

When Ikeobi first spoke about the tangled debris his family was, it was during lunch at Soma Deli, their favourite restaurant in South Minneapolis. He dipped lightly into his stories of them and moved away. Sọnne didn’t have many family stories to share. Her parents died one after the other in the final year of her undergrad. She and her only sibling, Nwanyịeze, scraped by for a short time until Nwanyịeze left home, further widening the schism already existing between them before their losses. It was in the stab of fall, a freezing and windy October day, that Sọnne met Ikeobi. This was five years ago. Her bus had sped past 24th Street, her stop, because the signal wires malfunctioned. Sọnne was new to Minneapolis and the city’s strangeness made her feel lightheaded. She crouched at the roadside and wept. Everyone else swept past her to a warmth waiting for them someplace. It was Ikeobi’s firm hands that pulled her up.

“Hey! Not safe here! Which way?” he asked her. His eyes seemed sure of the kind of help she needed. Sọnne nodded towards her address and leaned against him as they trotted back to the 24th street. Their friendship and romance were built around that singular event. It was of this incident that Sọnne reminded him when she broached the subject of becoming more committed to each other, when she said, “Imagine us as husband and wife. We fit, abi?”

*

The gathering gives Sọnne an understanding of Ikeobi’s reluctance to bring her to his people. It was never about a house. They are as clannish as they are entitled. They have eroded the house Sọnne and Ikeobi built. Even cousins claim rooms. Ikeobi’s continued devotion to them and his yearning for their validation irritate her now. Maybe she does not understand because she has no family that demands her loyalty. The voices of the relatives thin out and heighten like radio speakers being covered and uncovered. Elias makes a request.

“We need Ikeobi’s company documents, all his car papers, and documents to all landed property he owned.”

The irresistible need to laugh rends Sọnne’s stomach. She might have underestimated this family’s theatrical attempts at chicanery.

“Ikeobi owns nothing all by himself. Everything you think he has; we both own it.”

“In our culture, everything you both own belong to Ikeobi.”

“Why didn’t your culture stop him from taking money from me when he was building you a house? Why does your culture let you sleep in a house roofed with a woman’s money?”

They turn to look at one another.

Ikeobi’s mother speaks with a surprising calmness.

“My daughter, we thank you for how much support you gave Ikeobi. But we ask you to step aside at this point. We will marry a wife for Ikeobi, a wife who will give him children. The children will need their father’s wealth for their upkeep.”

Sọnne can no longer resist laughter. She stops laughing when she sees their dourness, their faces pleated in the same manner.

“You are being serious? You want to give children to a dead man, children he didn’t father while he was alive?”

“Is it not your fault that Ikeobi didn’t have children?” Elias jumps in.

Ikeobi’s mother speaks again. Her eyes glisten with unshed tears.

“Death is not the end of life. We are giving my son a second chance to have the children you failed to give him, children that will bear his name. It is the Igbo culture. A man can still have children after he has died.”

Sọnne considers saying, Ikeobi didn’t even want children! But what will establishing this fact accomplish for the distorted image they already have of their son? She rises and starts walking away.

“She is leaving o. This woman is walking out on us!” Their voices slither towards her. She imagines them chasing her. Her heart accelerates in fear. She breaks into a run when a curve of the pathway shields her, the urgency of her safety overpowering her pride. A taxi driver, hovering at the roadside, whistles.

“Asaba. Any good hotel you know,” Sọnne tells the driver. She planned to sleep over in Ikeobi’s family house, maybe bond with his family before the burial. They all loved Ikeobi, so she thought they should all get through the pain as one unit.

Sọnne feels Ikeobi in spaces, on the faces of men who share his stout stature. The ghost is always small, like a thin cloud. It crosses the driver’s face now. Sọnne looks away.

At the hotel, all the moments they shared jammed between her chest and throat. Her body feels rubbery. What if Ikeobi indeed wanted children but didn’t say? What if he shared his family’s enthusiasm during his constant home trips, and then switched skins when he returned to her? And the woman they mentioned, what if Ikeobi already knew her, even slept with her? A special village wife hidden from Sọnne, the city wife who was more fitting for his social status. She shrugs off the thoughts. She would have known, wouldn’t she? Ikeobi was transparent like clear glass. When he told a lie, he bit his dark upper lip and wet it endlessly. When he guarded a secret, he paced, even his body quivered as if the secret was a separate organism breathing inside him. He loved her. Their vows had been specific. How he would devote his life stirring her favourite cereals on a low fire, and she, in exchange, would ignore the guttural sounds of his snoring. She’d fallen in love with the most straightened version of a crumpled family.

Her forty-five-minutes flight from Asaba taxis into MMA1 at 8pm. Lagos is neatly tucked into the dark. The new quaint houses in Ajah flit by until her cab stops in front of their home. Joe opens the gate for her.

“Ah!” he says, as if surprised to find her there, “welcome madam.”

Sọnne nods at him.

The shiny parquet flooring of their living room still bears invisible marks of her first sympathizers. Death collects its own crowd. Neighbours. Ikeobi’s intermittent friends. Her scanty list of acquaintances. Their staff. Even Ikeobi is still impressed into the furniture. She sees the outline of his dark arm on the sofa’s inside arm. His wrists sparkle as if burnished, more shimmery than when he was alive. The image fizzles out when she inches forward. Only then does she take notice of Joe who has been fluttering about, asking if she wants something warm or cold to drink. Sọnne nods at him.

Hot drink, cold drink, no drink, what’s the difference?

She spends the night skipping between sleep and wakefulness. Each time she closes her eyes, her subconscious drums up an intimate moment she shared with Ikeobi. In one of them, she was at her study desk in their living room, designing a social media advert on canvas. Ikeobi startled her with a sloppy kiss on her bare shoulders. Then, his lips captured hers.

“Look, I have many designs… I am just on the second one,” Sọnne whispered in-between the kisses, now switching positions with Ikeobi who sat on the study chair and lifted her to his lap.

“What designs were you speaking of?” He slipped a finger in her panties and massaged her. Sọnne, failing in her pleasure to mould words, only moaned.

When she wakes at dawn, it feels like she banged against many things on her way to consciousness. Her pants are clammy with arousal. In the bathroom, warm water splatters on her back from the shower head as she scrubs her knees, crying until everything she looks at develops a softness.

She dials Nwanyịeze’s number and clicks the loudspeaker icon, afraid that her sister’s mockery might scald her if she places the phone too close to her ear.

“Sis,” Nwanyịeze says in a kind voice, as if this loss might begin to patch them. “You sent me that shocking message and went silent on me. Are you okay? Are you home?”

Some hours later, Nwanyịeze stands at Sọnne’s door. Sọnne regards her, their years of malice clogging the space between them. They do not know what to do first, how to liquefy all the fights. It is a dance their bodies have lost the rhythm for. Sọnne should take the first plunge. She is the big sister. In their mother’s words:

Don’t mind Nwanyịeze’s insult, inugo? You are three years older, inugo? Lokpuo ya, inugo? Swallow her wrongs.

They stayed in their parents’ apartment after their parents died. Small-boned Sọnne, a dot of a woman, could not control her bull of a sister. They fought about everything. Nwanyịeze’s late night parties. The smoke from her cigarette that took up residence in the curtains. Nwanyịeze’s refusal to finish school. Their words rose and battled until Nwanyịeze left the house. Sometimes, she called Sọnne with a Dubai or UK number to flaunt the luxuriousness of the path she trod.

“So-So,” Nwanyịeze calls her sister now, slitting open a path of reconciliation. Sọnne falls into her sister’s arms and sobs on her shoulder.

*

In the first few days of Nwanyịeze ’s arrival, she fills the house with bottles of wine and forces Sọnne to dress up even though they have nowhere to go. She pats Sọnne’s face with foundation so thick that Sọnne avoids smiling with the fear that her caked face might rip alongside the powder. During one of dress-ups, Sọnne dusts a pair of heeled shoes. Due to Ikeobi’s insecurities about his height, she’d stopped wearing all her heeled footwear. Now, she puts on the heeled shoes, and they feel good. Then, she feels guilty and removes them.

Elias calls Sọnne one afternoon, one week after she returned from Ọba, to tell her that Ikeobi will be buried in two weeks, in the first week of July. Sọnne reels at the similarities between his voice and Ikeobi’s, the scratchiness at the end of each word that feels intentionally inserted. It feels like a version of her husband was stowed away with the living.

“He is a titled man and cannot be left to dry up in the morgue,” Elias says, his voice a little shaky. He must be quavering with excitement at being the bearer of this information. Sọnne imagines his puckered frown when he says, “And you are not invited to burial.”

The memory of Ikeobi, which was awakened by the voice, sours. It is a faint betrayal that someone who speaks exactly like the man she loved could be so callous and irresponsible.

“How then will you take Ikeobi to them if they don’t want you at the burial?” Nwanyịeze asks as she cuts up the yams Joe boiled into smaller pieces. Since Ikeobi died, Sọnne finds yams comforting: their coarse texture when mashed, their near-choking feel.

“He wants me to deposit Ikeobi for them in a morgue at Ọnicha. They are saying I didn’t have children and have no right to be there. Now, they have a wife for him. Does that even make sense? Even the Ikeobi they are forcing a child on didn’t want to have a child.” She feels tightening in her chest and knows what is coming. Nwanyịeze rubs her sister’s arm until she calms.

“What will happen, say for example, you take Ikeobi down to Ọnicha for them to pick him?”

“My husband is not a piece of merchandise to be way billed. Besides, I’d like to pay him my last respects. Nwanyịeze, that man loved me.”

“Alright. Again, what will happen if, for example, you buy a space in a cemetery here in Lagos and bury him there? That way, you pay him your last respects.”

“Nwanyịeze, I don’t know…”

“I know. We will go somewhere.”

*

The fence around the funeral home is dwarfed. Cars are parked on the terrace. A small crowd surrounds a woman. Their tragedy seems recent. It is Sọnne’s first time in a funeral home. The building’s white paint unsettles her. The air is deeply perfumed, almost excessively, as if the owners are trying hard to conceal the odour of death.

“Let’s go,” Nwanyịeze urges her. Sọnne mopes at a photomontage of Ikeobi that appears only to her. He is dressed in his isiagu regalia and red cap, the outfit reserved for only titled men in Ọba town. In the apparition, he is doing a traditional dance and giving the traditional handshake to other men with Igbo titles: the dorsal sides of their hands slam against each other three times. They conclude the salutation with a dramatic shout. Ikeobi was Igbo at the core. He only deviated from the norm with his voluntary childlessness.

“Sọnne.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I can’t do this.”

“It’s okay,” Nwanyịeze says, exhaling her frustration and easing back into the vehicle. They sit in a brief silence before Sọnne breaks it.

“Ikeobi will not like to be laid to rest in a cemetery. He will prefer to be buried amongst his own people.”

“If you want him buried in his hometown and also want to be there to pay him your last respects, then, let’s get you children.”

“Nwanyịeze.”

“If Ikeobi’s family requires children as your ticket to the burial, then we get them children.”

Sọnne’s heart that has felt leaden for days lightens and she bursts into laughter.

“Nwanyịeze, where will you see children? Will you buy them?”

“I know someone.”

“Wait, you know someone who will loan you her children?”

*

Nwanyịeze takes over the wheel as they drive to Lagos Mainland. The June rain is on a break and has brought in its place a blistering heat. The car’s air conditioner distances them from the cloying warmth. They reach Ikeja and drive into an untarred street that is indistinguishable from the next street and the next street. Peeled wall paints. Rusted zinc roofs. A chubby woman unbolts a rusty gate. Her long fake lashes flap like wings when she blinks.

“Bad girl!” Nwanyịeze jabs the woman. The woman laughs, flashing a strand of vegetable sticking between her incisors. “So-So, this is Chikito. Chiki baby, this is my sister, Sọnne. The one we talked about.”

“Ah, sister, I heard about your husband. So sorry. This life no balance at all.”

Chikito’s living room is spacey. The floor is covered in shiny black tiles. The cream-white settee Sọnne sits on has an unusual depth.

“Welcome, sister. Nwanyịeze told me you are having problems with your husband’s people.”

Sọnne glares at Nwanyịeze and turns back to Chikito, putting on a smile. “Thank you, Chikito. I don’t know what my sister told you…”

“We need your help, Chikito,” Nwanyịeze cuts in. “My sister needs one child so that she can attend her husband’s burial.”

Anger flares in Sọnne’s chest. Grainy memories of their old fights filter in. This is like Nwanyịeze to claim knowledge of other people’s needs. Her evil genius sister. Her fourteen-year-old hands spidering over their compound wall as she sneaks to Lagos night parties. Her palms cupping a brown powder that would attract rich Lagos men to her sixteen-year-old body…

“Sister, you need this help abi you no need am? Because I no come understand this your body language at all,” Chikito says, the pity she had on her face depleting.

“I need help. Thank you.” Sọnne’s voice is small.

“Ehen. Good. Boy abi girl?”

Nwanyịeze sits up. “Can we have two children? A boy and a girl?”

“Wait. How does this work? I can’t give childcare.”

Chikito closes her eyes as if Sọnne’s interruption is a physical pain she must endure. Sshhh! Nwanyịeze mouths at her sister.

“A boy and a girl. Wetin go be the age? Our smallest na four years old. Our organization no dey allow mothers to bring children wey dey younger than four years.”

“Four years old is perfect! My sister knew her husband for five. Friendly children o.”

“Ah! I will give you our best. Jason and Miracle. Star actors. They will call your sister mummy, and everyone will believe them.” She laughs. “Two of my nannies will follow you and take care of the children. You said next month, abi? Okay. Just ring me two days before the day you want to come.”

On the drive back to Ajah, Sọnne feels as though her bones are whittled.

“How did you meet her?”

“Oh, you mean Chikito? We met in a dance club. She runs any business.”

“She’s about to give me other people’s children to take to a place she does not know. Who are these mothers doing this with their children?”

“Madam! Calm down abeg. Don’t start speaking phonetics on top of this small matter. The nannies that will go with you are members of the organization. Some of the nannies are the children’s biological mothers. Look, you don’t have to touch the children. Their nannies take care of them. The organization…”

“What’s with this organization thing? What makes that phony place an organization?”

“Saint Sọnne, you want the children abi you no want? I can call Chikito now and cancel!”

Rain is falling. A heavy shower. None of them appear to know when it started. Every confidence Sọnne has ever harboured inside her body sways with the sheets of rain. She does not know how to put a wall between what she says and what she wants.

“I want them.”

“Thank you!”

Camaraderie is deserting the car. Just like the night their mother died in the small clinic near their rented house at Sabo, and Nwanyịeze went to a club to smother her grief. When she returned, they flew at each other and fought until their strength was spent. It marked the first tear in their decade-long rift.

“How much will it cost?” Sọnne asks, shooing away the silence.

“I will take care of the cost. Don’t worry about that.”

“Thank you, Nwanyịeze. I’m happy you are here. I’m not comfortable with this plan. But thank you still.”

“It’s nothing.”

*

Elias’s calls become more consistent as the date of the burial draws close. Sọnne knows that even though only Elias speaks to her, other people must be gathered around him, leaning close to catch Sọnne’s words.

“Ikeobi’s money should take care of the burial expenses and his children,” Elias tells her during one of the calls.

“Ikeobi would not want us to spend a lot of money on his burial ceremony. Besides, we need the money to take care of his own children here.”

She didn’t plan to mention the children, but their pressure is beginning to illuminate tracts of rage in her. A chuckle from Elias blows tinnily down the phone speaker.

“What children? Ikeobi didn’t make any child of his known to us before he passed.”

“I see. The woman you are prepping as his wife, did he make her known to you before he passed?”

Sọnne snaps off the call right at the first mould of Elias’s next torrents of words. She lowers herself into the nearest chair, feeling light-headed. Every time she thinks she’s grown immune to the family’s drivel, their fresh onslaught disconcerts her. Why is she playing this silly game with them? What is this kind of discomfort worth? She has Ikeobi’s papers and cares not about the little fake widow his family is enacting for the burial. She could give Ikeobi a lowkey interment in a cemetery. She could hand his body over to his family and absent herself from the funeral. The biggest chunk of herself, the one that would want to be Ikeobi’s wife at his graveside in his hometown, sways over the rest mutinous versions.

*         

Nwanyịeze sits in the black jeep bearing Ikeobi’s casket. Jason and Miracle and their two nannies travel with Sọnne in her Toyota Sienna. The children are alike in size and complexion. They flutter about with a confidence that makes Sọnne wonder how long they have been in the business, and if they aren’t seven-year-olds instead of the claimed four. Sọnne sleeps for most of the eight hours they spend on the journey between Lagos and Ọnicha. In her dreams, she sees mostly Ikeobi. He is static and positioned differently in every appearance. She vaguely remembers a few stops at Ore and Asaba where they eat lunch or take a bathroom break. She dreads the fracas waiting for her at Ikeobi’s family home. She wonders if she and Nwanyịeze would be enough to match their madness. She dreads looking at the children, these humans accrued to her through fraudulent means. Perhaps, if she looks less at them, they will remain disembodied threads of her guilt floating on the margin of her mind.

They reach Ọnicha by evening and deposit Ikeobi’s body at St. Charles Mortuary. When Sọnne texts Ikeobi’s mother that they are now at Ọnicha, calls and text messages start raining into her phone.

Why is Ikeobi not brought to Ọba first? Why are you excluding Ikeobi’s family from your plans? You are not allowed into our compound!

*

Sọnne and her team reach the family’s compound on the day of the burial a little after 5am. The compound is lined with white plastic chairs and high tarpaulin tents. Nwanyịeze unstacks some of the white chairs. People tumble out of the house. Loud wails break out. This one moment of raw and unified humanness hurts Sọnne‘s chest as if a knife pares it down. The family takes over Ikeobi’s welfare going forward: where to place the coffin, the best way to tilt it so that it fits the door frame of the living room, how to organize the viewing procession. Sọnne‘s eyes flit to the freshly dug earth, which has become clearer in the dawn.

Mourners trickle in, crying. They wail louder after they come out of the room where Ikeobi is lying in state. Some of them pause when they see Sọnne. Their eyes dance about her, questioning. Her white mourning cloth, the same colour as those of Ikeobi’s family, is proof of her relationship to the deceased. Miracle and Jason are dressed in white too. Ikeobi’s children?

Ikeobi’s family excludes her more and more when the ceremony opens. They barricade the door of the living room when the catechist from the local church invites family members for final prayers. It is true that she had Ikeobi in her life for five years, and that she was the last relative to see him alive, yet this discrimination from his family stings.

Ikeobi’s family leads a woman out. Nwanyịeze nudges Sọnne to look. The woman is robed in white, just like the rest of them. She looks like more years are crammed into her than her appearance tells. Some of the mourners lean close to the woman to offer condolences. This must be the new wife, the chief mourner. Sọnne’s chest twists into an obscene knot at the sight of the woman’s shaved head. Only wives cut their hair while mourning their husbands. This woman has wholly taken her place and left not an inch of space.

“This family is a foolish family,” Nwanyịeze says in a fierce whisper.

When some of Ikeobi’s kinsmen emerge from the house bearing the coffin, the ground underneath Sọnne feels like quicksand. She sits immobile throughout the funeral Mass, as if the sand will swallow her if she moves. It is only during the committal that strength blows on her from an unknown source. The priest asks Ikeobi’s immediate family to come forward for the final farewell. Sọnne walks closer to the grave and parts the crowd with her body. The crowd makes way for her. And for the other woman whose shaved head glints in the sun. Sọnne notices her pregnancy, still unripe underneath her gown. It dawns on her that Ikeobi’s family hired a pregnant wife while she hired children. Each party’s desperation to make a wrong portrait of Ikeobi’s lineage skewers Sọnne’s grief. She finds the whole drama both shameful and funny.

“This is Ikeobi’s wife,” Elias says, pointing at the pregnant woman who starts emitting distressed sobs. As Sọnne pushes closer to the mouth of the grave, her sense of decorum recedes. She hears Nwanyịeze asking guests to make way for the children so that they stand close to Sọnne. Sọnne picks up the shovel. Elias screams from somewhere in the crowd.

“What is this? Who owns these children?”

“Ikeobi’s children,” Nwanyịeze shouts back.

Sọnne digs into the sand heap fringing the grave’s mouth and heaves some sand on the casket already sitting inside the grave. The sand stomps the casket like marching feet. It is also the sound of the unleashing inside her, the anger she’d kept down for the sake of Ikeobi.

“Ikeobi never told us he had children! This woman is a fraud!” Elias shouts, coming closer to Sọnne.

“Don’t you dare touch my sister. Let her bury her husband in peace!”

Sọnne scoops another shovelful for all her shared moments with Ikeobi, and for a life they planned for but will no longer live. She packs the last mound of sand for the children standing by her, this cursory family she’d hurriedly erected just to have this final moment at Ikeobi’s graveside. She drops the shovel and walks towards Nwanyịeze and Elias. She gently pushes Nwanyịeze to the side and stands in front of Elias.

“What is wrong with you?”

The priest’s voice bellows Glory be to Jesus on the microphone, an attempt to inject calm into the atmosphere. People rise and crowd Sọnne and Elias, who are now trading words: Elias saying, my brother never married you! We have no proof! and Sọnne replying to him, you are too dumb! That’s why your little brother fed and clothed you!

“Isi gini?” It is Ikeobi’s mother. She shuffles towards them. “What did you say to my son?”

The priest walks towards them too. The catechist. Ikeobi’s uncle, his skin paler now than it has ever been. The whole crowd of mourners funnels towards Sọnne and Elias, creating an arena with their bodies. At the centre, Sọnne has Elias in a chokehold. Some people try to detangle Sọnne’s hands, which have grown stiff on Elias’s neck, heavy even, as if bearing all the weight of her grief. Death has double-crossed her three times and nicked open a small war inside her. Elias is no longer Elias but has become the ailments that poked out of her parents before taking them. He has become the water that took Ikeobi.

Her feet kick at any attempt to tug her away. “Were you trying to slap me? Eh, Elias! Did you raise your dirty hands to hit me?”

About the Author:

Frances Ogamba is a 2025 Mercatus Center’s Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University, a 2025 Tin House Scholar, a 2024 Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice, and a 2024 Miles Morland Writing Scholar. She received the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the 2024 COGS Research grant, and the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work is forthcoming or appears in The Hopkins Review, Blue Earth Review, Ambit, The Arkansas International, Ninth Letter, Channel Magazine, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop and is a fiction editor for Waxwing Magazine.

*Feature image by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash