The mosquito coil was just a smudge of ash on the windows. Lagos was another dead prayer filled with sirens and the ugly sound of breaking glass, but inside here? The air was a thick, rotting thing. It smelled of us. Unwashed skin and that cheap lemon air freshener that couldn’t hide a thing. Twelve women squeezed into a box built for two. Us breathing was an act of defiance.
I sat on the floor, my back against the peeling floral wallpaper, watching Chidi. We had found this place six months ago, after the MHP raided The Velvet Lounge in Yaba. It was the same night Pastor Ade had done his “Purge of the Temple” sermon. We had been dancing to ‘Daddy Yo’ when the doors were kicked in. The police hadn’t come alone; they had Volunteers with them, boys from our parish who quoted scripture while they shattered beer bottles. Boys I could recognize.
We jumped through a narrow window, the silver glitter on Chidi’s eyelids stinging from the tear gas. We ran through the backstreets until we reached this tenement. The landlord, Brother Samuel, had been waiting for us. He didn’t ask for names; he just looked at our linked fingers and our ruined party clothes. He took triple the rent in cash, his gold cross swinging as he counted the notes. “The temple has a basement for the lost,” he had said, “but the lost must pay their NEPA bill.”
Chidi was hunched over a battery operated lantern. She was unraveling her braids. There was no tenderness in the way she handled herself anymore; her fingers moved like a machine devoid of the usual ritualistic care, no oils or widetooth combs. Instead, her hands were driven with a cold, industrial necessity. It was the same way my mother used to pluck chicken when the visitors were already at the door.
“Chidi, slow down, your scalp is bleeding,” I whispered.
She did not respond. Instead, her thumb and forefinger pinched another knot, twisting and pulling until the Xpression attachment dropped into a pile between her feet. It looked like a nest of small, dead snakes.
“The radio says they’ve reached the Third Mainland Bridge,” Chidi whispered. She didn’t look at me. Her voice was thin, like paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times. “They’re checking cars. They’re looking for elements of instability. That’s what they’re calling us now. Elements.”
I reached out and placed my hand on her knee. “Let them check,” I said. “They can’t find us. This room doesn’t exist to them. We don’t exist to them.”
Aunty was sitting in the corner near the kitchen door. She was a nurse who had spent seventeen years stitching up men who didn’t deserve her labor. Now, she was cleaning a deep gash on a younger girl’s arm using a bottle of cheap gin and a torn piece of one of her lace dress. The girl didn’t cry. She just stared at the ceiling with eyes that had seen the sky fall and decided it wasn’t that impressive.
“Those people are mad gan. Them think say just because their world don scatter our own sef go scatter,” Aunty muttered. “But we don dey suffer since them born us. Our papa say we be useless pikin, our pastor go say we be abomination… e no get wetin we never hear.”
Chidi finally looked at me. “The churches are empty, Bose,” she said, her thumb grazing the back of my hand. It was a slow, deliberate touch. “The pastors ran away with the tithe money as soon as the first tank rolled into the square. They left the glory to us.”
That statement made me remember the first day the world officially collapsed. We did not go to the hospitals or the police station; we ran to church. We had believed the propaganda that God’s door was opened to all and oh, how we were wrong.
My mother had spent her life sowing seeds into a soil that was never meant to grow anything for her. Our living room was a shrine to Pastor Ade. His face was the first thing I saw every morning, staring down from the glossy “Year of Supernatural Abundance” calendar that hung over the dining table. My mother treated that calendar like a second Bible. She had bottles of his “Dominion Oil” tucked into her underwear drawer, behind the family photos, and under the car seat. She believed that as long as we were under his spiritual canopy, the fire would never touch us.
“We are going to the house of God,” she said, her voice shaking but certain. “Pastor Ade said the gates of the temple will always be a refuge for the faithful.”
But when we reached the iron gates of the Sanctuary of Transfiguration, the “Abundance” had been replaced by a terrifying scarcity. There were hundreds of us pressing against the bars, holding up our tithe cards like passports to a country that was suddenly denying our citizenship.
I saw Pastor Ade then. He wasn’t on the altar in his white and blue agbada. He was on the roof of the administrative wing, standing near the helipad. He looked small from down here, stripped of the stage lights and the reverb of the microphones. He was clutching a briefcase, his tactical vest pulled tight over his stomach.
My mother fought her way to the front, her fingers white as she gripped the cold iron bars. She held up the bottle of his oil, shouting his name as if it were a magic spell. She truly believed he would look down, see her face, and command the guards to open the way.
The megaphone crackled to life. It was a quick memo. “The Lord calls his shepherds to higher ground,” he shouted. “We cannot risk the sanctity of the temple! Pray where you stand! The fire is a test for the unrighteous!”
When the signal finally snapped into a flat, grey hiss of static, it felt like the most honest sermon he’d ever given. The shepherd hadn’t stayed for the sheep; he had used our tithes as diesel to get as far away as possible.
He didn’t mention the widows. He didn’t mention the girls like me who he had spent years calling “abominations.” He just left. He took the tithes, the seeds, and the hope my mother had traded her life for, and he used them to get away.
“Mama, jekamalo,” I said. We still need to find a place to stay. Our home was not safe anymore.
“Bose, we are not leaving! We will stay here!” she had shouted at me, her gele askew, showing the grey patches in her hair she usually dyed black every Saturday. “If we leave the gate, how will he find us when he sends the buses back?”
I tried to grab her arm, but she shoved me off with a strength that shocked me. She looked at Chidi standing behind me Chidi in her trousers, with her long braids and her hand reaching for mine and my mother’s face twisted. She looked at me like I was the reason the gates weren’t opening. Like my “sin” was the weight keeping the church doors shut.
“Go with your friend,” she said, spitting the word friend like it was a piece of rotten meat. “Go and find whatever hole you people hide in. I am staying where the light is.”
So I left her. I did not bother to tell her bye. The air was getting hot and the soldiers were starting to move in with the tear gas.
*
By the second day of the blackout, the hunger had stopped being a sharp pain and had become a dull thrumming in our ears. We had enough water; Aunty had been obsessive about filling every bucket and empty ‘Chelsea’ bottle before the taps went dry, but food was a ghost.
Then Efua reached into her backpack. She moved as if she were handling live ammunition. When she pulled out the three mangoes, the room went silent. They were overripe, their skins mottled with black spots and bruised purple.
“I found them near the bus park,” Efua whispered. “The woman had run, and the crate was overturned. Most were smashed. These were the ones that wanted to live.”
Aunty brought a rusted kitchen knife and sliced the first mango into thin, translucent slivers, laying them out on a plastic tray that used to hold someone’s birthday cake.
“Na the person wey get am naim go chop first,” Aunty said, handing a slice to Efua.
Efua took it, but she didn’t eat it alone. She pressed a corner into the mouth of the girl sitting next to her. We are not like them, if one of us tastes sugar, we all taste sugar. When it was my turn, the juice was explosive. It ran down my chin, and I didn’t wipe it away.
“This is the only body of Christ I ever want to eat,” someone whispered from the shadows.
“Careful, Hauwa,” Chidi muttered. “You know what the Bible says. Taste and see that the Lord is good. But if the Lord tastes this sour, I think He’s been sitting in the sun too long.”
“Hope say the Spirit wey move Pastor Ade go heaven go move all of us for this room,” Aunty chuckled. “Lord abeg forgive them, una no know say na only anointing suppose full una head.”
The laughter was cut short. Kpo. Kpo. Kpo. The sound was slow. Deliberate. The sound of someone who knows you have nowhere to run. We all froze.
“Open this door!” a voice shouted from the hallway. “We know say people dey inside. We be MHP (Moral Hygiene Police.) Open this door or we go break am! Na una dey spoil our country!”
“Make nobody tok anything,” Aunty whispered. She clicked the lantern off.
“I say open this door!” the voice came again. “Na una landlord tell us! Open this door or we go burn all of una inside.”
I walked toward the door. “They have nothing left, just empty threats. Lagos is dead. They are just men with matches and if we are going to die, let us get it over with.”
“Aunty, light the lantern,” I commanded. I pulled the bolt and threw the door wide.
The man in the hallway was smaller than his voice. He stood there with a jerrycan and a pack of matches. Behind him were three boys wearing white armbands the “Moral Hygiene” volunteers and Brother Samuel peeking from behind them.
“You people are the infected sheep,” The man croaked. “My pastor tok say na because of una heaven gate dey locked. If we flush the durtee, God go hear us.”
“The fire doesn’t have ears, Oga,” Chidi said. “And your God is currently at ten thousand feet. Look at these boys. You want them to become murderers?”
“Ehen Oga landlord, how is your son, Tayo?” Hauwa’s voice was low. “The one you sent to London? The one who stopped calling home two years ago?”
Samuel retorted, “For your life, no mention Tayo name again! Na child of God hin be!”
“Oh really? Because I saw a boy in The Velvet Lounge two months ago, Oga landlord,” Hauwa said, leaning into the doorway. “He had the same eyes as you. You think just because you shipped him across the ocean the fire won’t burn him?”
“Light that matches now!” Samuel roared. “Burn these bitches!”
“Oga, the wind is changing. If I light it, we sef fit burn,” the first man whispered.
“Yes, sir. The fire is coming for them either way. They can’t survive here forever. Please let’s go back, sir. My mother is expecting me home by eight.”
Samuel looked at the jerrycan of fuel. He didn’t say another word. He turned and walked down the stairs while the rest followed.
“They are right. We can’t stay here forever,” the student said. “The water will run out. We have no food and the mangoes are gone. Lagos has fallen.” By the third hour the decision was made. We couldn’t stay. Oya, pack,” Aunty commanded. “Only wetin fit save your life. If na makeup or koi koi shoes, abeg put am for dustbin.”
“We get where we fit go. Them dey call am The Unhidden,” Aunty said firmly. She reached into her bosom and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of blue fabric. “For three years, every time woman disappear from our parish or every time a man pursue hin wife because of… Wetin pastor dey call am again sef? ‘Unnatural leanings,’ this material go full market people wey understand know wetin dem go do.”
Teni, the university student, was the only one who refused the purge. She was shoving a massive textbook into her bag. “Teni, that book is too heavy, everybody is leaving their box behind even Joy dropped her wedding certificate,” I said. “You go tire before we reach where we dey go.”
She pulled it away. “It’s not my business that Joy left it na, it was just a piece of paper but this is a Botany text, Bose. It tells you which herbs are actually medicines and which could kill us. The pastors took the heavens, the soldiers took the streets, but they forgot to take the soil. I’m not leaving the earth behind.”
*
Leaving the flat felt like stepping into a dream someone had while they were dying. We did not take the main road; we used shortcuts and passages. We saw the Sanctuary of Transfiguration from a distance. The iron gates were bent, the ‘Supernatural Abundance’ banners now just charred rags flapping in the breeze. I thought I saw a shoe near the gutter that looked like my mother’s. I did not stop. I couldn’t.
We reached the edge of Makoko, where the stilt houses rose like birds from the mist. Here, the ‘blue’ appeared again; it was tied to a fishing pole. As we descended toward the hidden wetlands, the smell of burning tires faded, replaced by the scent of damp mud and clay.
Figures emerged from the tall grass. They weren’t soldiers with kpako. They were women, the ones the city had spat out years ago, the “un-hidden” who had realized that when the world ends for everyone else, it is just beginning for you.
One woman stepped forward, her face lit by a small, contained fire. She didn’t ask for our tithe cards. She didn’t ask for our sins. She didn’t ask why Chidi’s scalp was bleeding. She looked at the blue scrap in Aunty’s hand and nodded.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
It was the simplest, most divine question I had ever heard.
I sat down next to Chidi in the red mud. Our feet were caked in the earth that Teni had promised would save us. I looked back at the horizon where Lagos was. For years, we had been told that we were the reason the grace of God had departed from the land. I leaned my head against Chidi’s shoulder and closed my eyes. The heavens were empty, but the earth was full. We were the pulse in the silence. We were the salt in the water. We were the only gods left in this room.
About the Author:
Ogechukwu Vanessa Ekwem is a Lagos-based creative writer and Computer Science student whose work investigates the nuances of autonomy and the structural barriers of the modern world. Her writing, which spans poetry, short stories, and social commentary, seeks to bridge the gap between technical systems and narrative truth. When she isn’t writing, she is a dedicated observer of the “social code” and an enthusiast of digital word puzzles. “We Are the Only Gods Left in This Room” is her latest exploration of the human condition.
Feature image by Rynco Maekawa on Unsplash