The room is a slow oven. Heat sits in the corners, in the thin cotton of my wrapper, in the little bone hollows behind my knees. I sit on the edge of the bed, and the wrapper clings to my thighs. The ceiling fan fights the heat, turning with a tired groan. Each blade bows like a bird that has forgotten how to fly, and the motion takes me back to the white dress I wore when I was five. Round and flaring, it spun as I jumped in front of my father’s photographs. The memory is a film strip stuck under my ribs.

I can almost smell that day. My hair tied in a ponytail, chalk and dust, and the faint sweetness of the powder my mother pressed behind my neck. I wore a little white dress, the one every daughter dreamed of that year. It was in vogue, and wearing it made me feel briefly complete.

There was laughter in the air, maybe mine, maybe my mother’s. I felt light then, as if the world might tilt and let me fall into something that keeps me up instead of flattening me.

My father. People say he was kind. That is the thing people always say about the dead: kind, generous, loving. Death makes saints out of men because it is easier that way. Sometimes I bend my head and picture how different things might have been if he had lived. Maybe I would have kept dreaming. Maybe the dreams wouldn’t have leaked out of me like dirty water down a drain. Maybe I’d have learned English properly. Maybe I would have said no to some things.

The fan keeps turning. The memory thins, and the heat returns, thick and unmoving. I let my eyes drift to the man beside me. My husband. He is snoring, mouth slightly open, a small bubble of snot trembling at the edge of his nose. In the past, his breath was a comfort, and I would wake just to watch his chest rise and fall and feel something like safety. Now the sound is a clock that measures what I have given away. There was a time I admired him. His certainty used to fill rooms. He was steady, and I believed steady was enough. They said I was lucky. My sisters said it, and I wrapped the word around myself like cloth.

Half my life I have been folding him into order. I learn the angle of his collar. I iron shirts until the creases look like devotion. I make tea and place it by his hand like an offering. I teach my mouth to swallow words so the house doesn’t shake. I tell myself that love is patience. I tell myself that patience is enough.

A mosquito hums near my ear. Small, urgent, it does not care for my regrets. It lands on my arm, and I slap and miss. It hovers again, shameless, a tiny engine of insistence. Its wings remind me of airplanes. When I was a child, I thought only birds and insects and God could touch the sky. The first plane I saw left a silver scratch across the sky, and something inside me unclenched. I wanted that air. I wanted the feeling of being unmoored, weightless, free.

The radio crackles from the corner. A woman’s bright voice breaks through the static. For cleaner, brighter clothes, use Omo. Her cheerfulness grates against the thick night. I turn the knob until her voice sounds far away, like a lie I no longer have the energy to argue with. The word brighter clings to me, though. It reminds me of sitting face pressed to the window, watching the girls in blue and white uniforms board buses that smelled of diesel and possibility. I used to imagine myself among them, my name stitched on my uniform, my bag heavy with books and something like hope.

But then I met him.

He was calm, soft-spoken, the kind of man who never raised his voice. Musa had that civil servant quiet, not the loudness of traders or the weariness of farmers—just calm, like life could no longer surprise him. When he looked at me, I thought maybe my fantasies could take shape, the ones I built as a girl walking home from the market in Kunchi, watching tidy houses with yellow-painted walls and lace curtains. My sister used to whisper, that is where civil servants live. I thought they were princes with briefcases instead of swords. Men who smelled of Imperial Leather soap. A life of order. A veranda swept in the morning. Plantain frying in a kitchen that did not leak.

When the proposal came, I said yes. He was the dream I was told to want.

Last week, I saw one of those girls, Bintu. I did not expect her to recognize me after so many years. She stepped into a car, driver in a crisp shirt, the window tinted. She gave me a warm smile and a wave, and for a moment, I believed she meant it. When I smiled back, my lips twitched in a way that felt wrong. I became painfully aware of my cheap Ankara. I smoothed the creases as if that could hide what the fabric already betrayed. She looked soft and poised, like someone who had learned to carry the world lightly. Her dress was clearly expensive. It did not fight the wind the way mine did. I told myself she was kind, but a small part of me thought she pitied me. I felt small, like a child caught doing something wrong.

That is the thing about envy. It hides beneath politeness and pretends to be admiration. I watched her disappear into the tinted window and knew she had moved faster than I ever did.

**

The radio mutters again. A politician promises things in a voice that slides too smoothly over static. The words mean nothing in my room where the air tastes of kerosene and frying oil. I change the station, and Bollywood music bursts in, bright and tinny, then another woman’s voice selling detergent. The cheerfulness grates. I laugh, and the sound is small. The advertisements cling to me anyway. Bright laundry. Bright futures. Bright girls on buses.

There is a tin of powdered milk on the table, Ramla’s brand when she was small. The label reads fortified with calcium in English that glints under the weak bulb. I mouth the words, and they feel foreign on my tongue. I never learned much English. I told myself it did not matter. I raised a daughter. Raising children felt like a school of its own.

Yesterday, Ramla called, and the city rushed through the phone. “Mama,” she said, “I passed the bar. I am a lawyer now.” I said Alhamdulillah. I said I was proud. I said the right things. When she hung up, I sat with the phone and felt a small stone settle in my chest. Pride and something uglier sat together under my ribs. Why does her success feel like betrayal? Maybe because she steps through doors whose knobs I never learned to turn. Maybe because I taught her to dream and forgot how to dream for myself.

I walk back to the bed and sit. The tea on the bedside table is cold. I sip it anyway. The cup is sticky where condensation has gathered. The taste is thin and bitter and fits the night. I think of the last thing I cooked for myself, a meal that belonged to no one else. I cannot remember when that was. Mostly I cook in duty, in ritual, in the names of others. My hands have learned to be generous with food and tight with confession.

I think of Aunty Immigration, two houses down from where I grew up. They called her that because her husband worked at the Immigration office and because she was always a little elsewhere. She moved like someone whose mind lived in a different room. She made carrot stew instead of the Nigerian red stew everyone else made with tomatoes. Carrots are enough, she would say, and chop them slow. The pot would shine copper-gold, and the whole house would smell like a small rebellion. She wore perfume at noon and laughed at what people said. The neighbors teased her, who cooks stew without tomatoes? but she kept stirring and humming. Children pressed their faces to her kitchen doorway. I often think of that pot. Maybe freedom smells like orange and steam.

The mosquito zooms near my ear again. It lands. I do not slap. I let it drink. There is something small and soft in the surrender. Maybe I let it pull a piece of me out so I do not have to give the rest away. The bite pricks, and a hot thread of sensation spreads. The insect swells and lifts, and I watch it go, fat and bright against the night. For a moment, I imagine the mosquito as my own private plane. It carries something I cannot name and leaves a space in my chest I didn’t know I needed.

There are nights when I consider the pillow. The thought arrives like a whisper, precise and dangerous. I can picture the pillow over his face and the room becoming wholly mine, the hush that follows cutting everything clean. The thought does not shout. It is a quiet thing, a precise instrument. It comes, sits like a mosquito, and hums. The pillow stays where it is. I do not move. I whisper Astaghfirullah and say no, but my fingers have already known the feel of the thought.

To imagine taking away the sound is not always hatred. Sometimes it is curiosity about a silence that would let me breathe. I do not move. The idea folds back into my chest like a paper bird.

The plane trails a thin silver line somewhere far above the city. I remember reaching for a plane once with the foolish certainty that it would notice me and lift me. Sometimes I still do that. I imagine waving as it passes and feeling the air clear. I imagine days where I do not fold someone else’s shirt with trembling hands but fold mine first and press hard into the creases.

Maybe tomorrow I will walk past the market and buy carrots. Maybe I will chop them slowly and let Aunty Immigration’s defiance fill my kitchen. Maybe I will fold Ramla’s shirts and pretend not to think of doors. Maybe I will sell the powdered milk and buy a single mango that tastes like freedom. Maybe I will do none of these things.

The fan turns. The radio hums low.  Musa stops snoring for a moment. The mosquito is gone. My chest feels hollowed in the place something left. I hold that emptiness like a coin that does not shine. It is mine.

I close my eyes and let the night tie its slow knot. The five-year-old in the white dress spins behind my eyelids. Bintu’s smile looks out from a passing window. Aunty Immigration hums over a pot, and the scent of carrots twines with the smell of kerosene. Ramla’s voice is still bright on my phone. The plane’s echo disappears.

Morning will come with its small chores. I will fold the clean shirts, make tea, and iron the edges until they look like new promises. I will put one plate of food on the table for him, set my own bowl aside for later. I will chop onions slowly. It will be ordinary. It will be enough for now.

About the author:

Taslym Umar is a Nigerian creative writer and editor. She works as a creative writing editor at The Stirling Review in New York and has been a staff writer for Tajurba | Experience, Vizz Magazine, and The Narrative Lit. She collaborates with several other literary platforms, including Magnolia Lit, Vermillion Lit and Daintle Magazine. Her work has appeared in Maison Laurêve, Ozezi, and redrosethorn.

Feature image by Fausto Ribeiro on Unsplash