Obiora arrives at the T-junction, not sure which way to take. It has been more than a decade since he left Kogi State. Except for the many checkpoints guarded by soldiers, which weren’t prevalent in his childhood, not much has changed since he left. From the few crammed streets he has whizzed past, he noticed the large potholes on the roads, and the houses and their walls still lined with cracks, still drenched in that air of something that wouldn’t be remembered, that would remain in desolation.
He pulls over by the roadside, where tall slender trees stick out like praying hands, and turns to the car’s GPS, which instructs him to go left. It says he’s heading towards the Federal College of Education. He remembers FCE. He would sit at the far end of a class bigger than the one he was used to, enthralled as he watched his father, a professor of chemistry, move around, not with a whip, as most of his teachers did, but with a marker, his other hand wedged behind him as he lectured a group of older people, almost same age as he.
He couldn’t believe that time had slipped away, along with his father.
Leaning forward, he picks up the phone from the dashboard and pretends to check the time, which is two minutes past three, but checks his inbox, hoping to find a message from Mama. There’s nothing from her.
Cars continue to swish past him as he wonders why she hasn’t called him or attended to his calls since he arrived in Kogi State from Ibadan. The last time he called, about five minutes ago, her line was switched off. He assumes this was done on purpose. Maybe she’s still angry with him.
When he turns on the radio, the Angelus comes on, and without meaning to, he finds himself humming the words, pausing at intervals to glance at the window by the passenger seat, as though he’s been watched, sized up by invisible eyes.
With the prayer over, he wonders what people are talking about on the internet now that he’s no longer a priest, now that he has given up everything. Perhaps, Mama has watched the news or read the stories on the internet.
He imagines one of the headlines: Famous priest, Fr Obiora, renounces celibacy.
He wants to call her again but stops halfway, remembering her outburst over the phone. Two nights ago, he had informed her of his plan to relocate to Abuja but would spend a few days with her in Kogi, and she had cut him off mid-sentence, the shrillness in her voice tearing through the thin veil of the night.
“What for, Obiora? Haven’t you caused me enough pain and shame already? What are you coming to see me for? Thanks to you, I’ve become an object of mockery among my fellow women.”
Before he could speak, to let her in on the exact reason he left the priesthood, she hung up.
Even now, he imagines her pain, the enormity of her shame, how it hunched her shoulders, forcing her to avert her gaze from the women in the church, muffling her mind to their incessant whispers, their jeers, and wishes there was a way he could rewrite this story, undoing what had been done.
His inbox looks clean, save his messages to Mama and a message from the bishop of Oyo diocese, wishing him well on his new path, reminding him of the content of the oath he took during his ordination: To submit himself to the authority of the Church. To place the interests of the Church and the community before his own.
The rest is just a section of praises Obiora thinks are excessively flamboyant and unnecessary. He wasn’t the hardest-working priest in his time. Other priests were doing small things in big ways. Perhaps, if he wasn’t famous, if he hadn’t gone ahead to enroll for a course in mass communication and journalism after studying theology and philosophy, becoming a TV presenter for AIT, hosting the critically acclaimed Life Show every weekend at Ibadan, he would have been like every other priest, restricting himself to his pastoral assignments.
The Life Show addressed topical issues around politics, religion, family, sexuality, gender-based violence, and science, enchanting its large audience, mostly young students from the University of Ibadan, who came with their questions, their fears, and silent desperation in their eyes.
Obiora recalls one of the guests in the show — a name he has forgotten, but a divorcee in her mid-forties — smiling at him, telling him about his handsomeness and endearing mannerisms, declaring her availability if he ever decides to give up celibacy. He doesn’t remember the discussion that led to the woman’s proposition, but he recalls the staggering look of disbelief on the faces of the audience in front row, some hooting from behind at the woman’s outright disregard of shame, of her courage.
He remembers the internet running agog with excitement, various blogs carrying different versions of the story: Audacious lady proposes to priest on TV; Courageous lady proposes relationship to famous priest Fr Obiora on stage.
He remembers receiving a phone call from his mother in the early hours of the day during the buzz of the news to ask what was happening with him, that she didn’t understand what she was reading on the internet about him, and he was trying to calm her down, to put things into perspective.
…
He tries fixing his mind on what he must do, how he has to come out to Mama, as he navigates the bend to the left, leading home. But no matter how he brought himself to think straight, he couldn’t completely erase the soldier from his head, the same soldier he had met at the checkpoint at Abobo.
The soldier had a name so soft it betrayed his mean face, the marks on both sides of his cheeks, his eyes hooded behind sunshades. At first, Obiora had felt a gathering in his chest of something he couldn’t name. When the soldier leaned in, with an AK-47 slung around his shoulder and introduced himself as Jeff, extending a hand to Obiora, who hesitated for a while, the feeling in his chest now ballooning into worry, wondering how to name this gesture. Yet, he had received the hand, which was cold and imposing in the way it almost swallowed him, a hand that must have taken more lives than it had spared. A hand different from the ones he had experienced in secret hotels behind closed doors, hands that evoked both firmness and warmth, twirling around his body.
He didn’t quite remember the names or bearers of those hands, but he recalled the precision of his joy and sadness as though they were inseparable. How the latter had filled him with rage, a flickering rage, as he rolled off the bed, cleaned himself, and handed them the pay for the night, threatening to sweep them from the surface of the earth, even though he was certain he couldn’t break a bone, if they ever breached the oath of secrecy, exhuming the skeleton of their past buried in that room, in the cover of darkness.
Obiora told the soldier his name, peeling his gaze from the soldier’s face.
“Nice name,” the soldier retorted, still scrutinising him like a scientist studying a specimen, his eyes lingering and searching.
Obiora managed to turn his gaze towards Jeff, and at once, he was transfixed, lost in that moment of wonder, licking his lips and wheeling a finger behind his left ear while envisioning the taste of Jeff’s lips on his.
“Do you live around here or are you visiting?” Jeff asked, breaking through Obiora’s reveries.
Obiora’s lips parted, ready to speak, when another soldier in front bellowed, “Jeff, you have started again? You won’t leave that civilian alone?”
Obiora didn’t see the face, nor the next soldier who spat on the ground, blurting, “Bloody civilian,” as though he was in a tussle with the earth.
The next minute passed in a blur, but Obiora remembers Jeff straightening up, adjusting his gun, and saying, “Haba, I just dey play with this one. E be like say he be dan luwadi. See the way he dey blush. He dey lick his lips sef.”
And, suddenly, the other soldiers burst out laughing, and one of them scoffed, “Nah, fourteen years for jail o.”
Of course, he knew what dan luwadi meant, one of the many derivatives for a homosexual, but it was the context of the word that broke him, stripped him of his defence, garbed him in shame, and plunged his heart into a wild, erratic dance as the soldiers raked with laughter.
He manages to move past the fog in his head, climbing down from the car and standing before the tall black gate and the low barbed wire fence that snakes around the two-storey building where he spent his childhood. The sky is awash in dazzling yellow, and the birds mill about it in a frenzy of excitement. He looks around, surprised that he still remembers some houses in the town, a small section of Itakpe, the one fondly called Camp One. On his right, his eyes meet the mango tree behind Engineer Wale’s house, where he and some of the neighbourhood children sometimes spent the evening nudging down ripe mangoes with a stick.
To his far left, he recognises Mallam Yaro’s bungalow, the small bush he never trims down still in place, the entire space looking desolate, and wonders if anyone still lives there. He recalls Mallam Yaro always saying that if the war in Borno and Yobe ever escalated, soaring down to Kogi State, he would finally return to Kano, alongside his flock. Maybe Mallam Yaro finally left. Maybe he would be disappointed to know that, many years later, the country is still ravaged by the blight of insurgency.
Obiora takes a deep breath as he steps towards the gate with quivering hands, unsure if his courage won’t filter out of him when he finally meets his mother’s face. Still, he’s certain this is the right thing to do.
…
Chetachi doesn’t want to have a conversation with her son. At least, not yet. Still, she could feel it rising, like a wave, steadily colouring his tone, as he talked about the things that had changed since he left Kogi State, the houses and people he hadn’t forgotten. She knows communication is a two-way street, but is tired of pretending that she enjoys the angle the conversation is taking, smiling and nodding appropriately to his jokes.
God knows she hates the silence more when it comes. It fills her with a dread of something she couldn’t explain. She watches as he pauses his food and scoops the cup of water to his lips. Sated, he drops the cup on the mahogany centre table and then asks her about Fr Albert, and if she saw him at the church.
She says no. Didn’t he know it’s been such a long time since he left St Philip Church? That Fr Albert has been transferred to an outstation in Okene?
She thinks of her short trip to the church, which she had embarked on in a hurry, when she saw his texts informing her of his arrival, because she didn’t want to look at him when he came through the door. She had sat in front of the tabernacle for hours, hoping by a stroke of luck, by just staring deeply at the Blessed Sacrament in it, she could give words to the things lodged in her chest. But she had gazed at the Blessed Sacrament for too long, her eyes steaming, without the tears unfurling down her face.
In a different circumstance, she would visit the Blessed Sacrament to pray for other things, for her family, for Obiora, for the hand of God to continue to steer him in the right direction, towards his calling, so that he wouldn’t lose focus, regardless of his adversities.
“Mama,” he calls out now, in a soft voice, and Chetachi’s heart ripples with anxiety.
“Do you know I bumped into many checkpoints and soldiers on the way? So many of them, even in Abobo.”
It’s a question disguised as a statement, probably to awaken something in her. Perhaps, he has sensed her passivity. She watches his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows the morsel of garri, shocked by the impermanence of things, how time sometimes shifts things and reshapes people. She is saddened that her son is no longer a boy, but a man, dressed in intricacies, which empower him to make decisions without first seeking her consent, without considering the weight of such decisions on her. She notes his upper jaw is now slathered with black curly hair. She spots the darkness that has nibbled away his youth and wants to reach into him and hack it out, to once again exert her supremacy over him.
She hears her name and thinks it’s coming from within, until a hand smacks her shoulder, wriggling her from her thoughts.
She’s pleased with the skitter of fear alighting his eyes, glad at the way it rattles him, making him gaze at her for too long, his mouth half-opened, before he takes his seat.
He tries to speak but stops. There’s something else that weakens the fear in his eyes, a truth she struggles to comprehend.
“Some boys killed a soldier last week and made away with his gun. Since then, the soldiers have been on the hunt for the boys,” she says, glancing at the muted TV flickering its light across the room, at the priest in a white chasuble standing before an altar, arms spread out in a prayer mode.
She trains her eyes on him briefly as he stares at the screen, and wonders if he feels an emptiness, a longing for a moment now out of his reach. She turns her gaze to the window, where dusk blooms, pockets of stars poking their heads in the sky.
Obiora hesitates, watching her, as though seeking her permission, then he says, “These boys and violence. I thought they have changed.”
He’s washing both hands in a bowl of clean water on the table before him. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand while she rises to clear the table.
Holding the tray to her chest, she walks to the kitchen but turns around when he calls to her.
“Thank you, ma. I enjoyed the food.”
She smiles.
…
Obiora stares at his father’s portrait affixed on the wall opposite the dining area. He’s holding a wet rag. He has just finished sweeping the house and dusting the chairs. In the portrait, Papa is wearing an Isiagu velvet top against black trousers, grinning from ear to ear, as he poses in front of a sculpted figure of the Nigerian flag.
The picture was taken during Obiora’s graduation from secondary school, where he had won some awards, including mathematics and English Language. And he remembers standing at a corner, chuckling, while the photographer taunted Papa for the frown on his face, insisting that it wouldn’t hurt if he smiled a little.
He remembers their usual morning run around the town, how Papa would halt in the middle of a run to begin his career guide talk when Obiora said he was confused about making the right decision for himself. Papa would compile a list of different occupations that were science-focused, engineering and medicine topping his list, reminding him that he was a brilliant student, and that he shouldn’t allow all those As he had garnered in his WAEC to be for nothing.
Meanwhile, Obiora wasn’t confused in deciding the course that was best for him, maybe not in the way Papa had imagined it. Yet, he enjoyed those moments, loved the wind whispering in his ears, the cold crawling into his sweater, unsettling his resolve to brave it, causing his teeth to grate. He loved listening to Papa’s voice, low but striking, as he thrilled him with stories on politics, religion, and health.
It had been the earnest wish of his parents, especially his father, for him to become a doctor or an engineer, because Papa had wanted to become a doctor, but fate had decided otherwise when he scored below the cut-off point in his JAMB examination. Instead, one Saturday evening, after his return from Mass servers’ rehearsals, he told them that he had changed his mind about studying medicine. Rather, he would become a priest. He thought that through the priesthood, by being deep-rooted in the Catholic faith, he could finally parry his desire, his love for men, which was inordinate before God.
He’s still staring at the portrait when Mama strolls into the living room, clears her throat, and says, “Ọ gịni ka ị ne le? Is that the first time you’re seeing his picture?”
Sliding the rag on the table, he turns around to greet her, ignoring the edge in her voice.
She sighs and says, “Morning,” her voice slightly hoarse.
He watches her strut away, plopping on the sofa, backing him. She picks up the remote control from the table and flips through the channels. This is the right moment, he thinks, swallowing a deep breath and sitting across from her. Stroking his hand on his thighs, he follows her gaze and doesn’t know if it’s on the muted screen or somewhere else.
He marvels at her mannerisms, the way she cups a part of her chin with one hand and slips the other into her wrapper around her waist, which are well preserved, untainted by time, although the lines are slowly shrivelling her face, her hair flecked with grey. Noting the marks stretched across the flat bridge of her nose, he wonders what she’s been feasting her ageing eyes on.
Perhaps, with her glasses on, she had been reading through her old lesson notes and big textbooks, trying to reconnect with memory, to declutter the years she had spent as a diligent teacher at the Government Science Secondary School, Ogaminana, with its ramshackle classrooms and lean salaries. Those years, like a worm, had burrowed into her, devouring the light in her eyes, so that each day, she returned home a shade angrier and sadder than the previous one, tossing her further away from his reach.
“Mum, I’ve something to tell you,” he says now, feeling the knot of anxiety in his chest, his heart slowly sinking in his stomach.
She doesn’t look at him. He calls out again.
“Obiora, kedu ihe ọ bụ?” she growls. “Biko, it’s too early for whatever you want to say.”
She appears like a vicious snake about to pounce on him, her eyes laced with scorn. She lets out a sigh and he can sniff the finality in it.
But he isn’t going to cower into silence. “Mum, I’ve something to say. And even if you don’t want to have this conversation, you need to listen to me. I may not understand how much pain and humiliation I’ve brought upon you by renouncing the priesthood, but you need to hear me out. I’ve got a reason for…”
She springs to her feet, folding the edge of her wrapper under her armpit. “Obiora, what reason do you have? Tell me. So, you understand that your action has caused me pain and humiliation, and yet, you went ahead with it?” She’s flailing her hands. “You threw ten years of celibacy away for what? What rubbish reason do you have?”
In a voice stricken with rage and sadness, he shouts, “I’m gay, Mama. I’m gay.”
His hands are shaking, his teeth clattering as though he’s caught a cold. He watches her quivering lips, her eyes wide with shock. She makes a U-turn, slowly, towards the dining room and lingers at the kitchen door post, before heading up the stairs. His hands are no longer trembling as he glances at them and moves them around as though they belong to another person.
The tears crawl down his face, although he doesn’t know why he’s crying. Still, he cries.
…
Chetachi is opening and closing her mouth, searching for air. The curtains are fully drawn and the fans are swirling about, still she feels her lungs caving in, webbed by something she couldn’t comprehend. She sees the fear in its true form. Perhaps, this is the reason for her hesitation in the first place. The silence is taunting her, despite the talking TV. And she realises her mistake, the silence she had maintained in front of him even as he spoke to her. Perhaps, it was the reason he had dragged his bags out of the house.
The kettle gives a long hiss, and she staggers to her feet, wobbling towards the kitchen, where she clicks off the switch and pulls out the wire. She tugs a cup from the chest of drawers on the wall above her and empties half the contents of the kettle into the cup. She leaves the cup on the counter and shuffles back into the living room, glancing at the portrait on the wall above the TV. She and Nedu, her husband, flank Obiora, smiling Obiora, newly ordained in his white vestment. She recalls that day at St Mary Cathedral, Ibadan, the women from St Philip rushing to hug them after Mass, her joy bursting forth like an offering as they called her Mama Father.
And with the same precision, she remembers Nedu’s death. It was on Sunday. They were preparing for Mass when he screamed, and she jumped into the bathroom, her face smudged with makeup, the gele clambering down from her head as she held his still body, begging him to wake up. The doctors called it cardiac arrest. Nedu had been fine the previous night. In fact, he had joked about making love to her like never before, as he stripped down to his briefs, and she chuckled, saying, “O yea. We shall see,” her body splayed out on the bed. But halfway into foreplay, he burnt out and began to snore, his chest lifting and falling sporadically.
Weeks later, after Nedu was buried, she couldn’t believe the transience of things and people, how one moment someone could be bubbling with so much energy, and the next minute, they become still and cold. Maybe if he were alive, he would be able to speak to Obiora in a tone devoid of rage and sadness. He would have done things differently. It didn’t bother her that he was their son’s favourite. On the contrary, it gave her priceless joy to find Obiora always around him, set on his lap, both of them skimming through pages of newspapers, Obiora always pestering him with questions.
But now, she wishes she had been like Nedu, a little more open to Obiora, to his questions and curiosities. Perhaps, if she hadn’t always been strict with him, turning her back against him when he drew closer, he would have learned to confide in her, to trust her with his struggles.
Yet, she wonders if he told Nedu everything, if Nedu knew this side of their son and decided it was best to keep it from her, taking it to his grave.
Her phone rings, jerking her from her thoughts, and quickly she checks it, hoping it’s from Obiora. But it’s Mrs Esther, the CWO secretary. She allows the phone to ring out. Minutes ago, his line had been unreachable when she dialled it. She hears the honking of a car and thinks it’s coming from her gate. She bolts to the window, then withdraws from it, realising it’s not hers. She should have given anything but her silence. But she was hurt. She couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t settle down one day with a woman and allow her to hold small replicas of him, watching them scamper around the house.
In the beginning, it was difficult for her to accept his decision to become a priest. It had stifled something in her, yet she wore a faux courage, even though Nedu stopped eating her food for some days as if she had been responsible for it, the silence between them, until she started to visit the Blessed Sacrament every evening, fasting and praying to God to change Obiora’s mind, reminding God that he was her only child. Didn’t he know that he had closed her womb at forty after conceiving Obiora many years ago, following successive miscarriages? Isn’t he aware of the elasticity of her being, how she had endured her mother-in-law’s pestering for a second wife, her own mother’s words and faltering smiles that failed to invigorate her, to smoothen the creases in her life, and Nedu’s silence following her around like a hand reaching for her neck until Obiora was born and his face split open with a smile, as though she should be grateful he didn’t take a drastic decision?
When she finally gets through to him, she goes silent, while he calls to her, his voice soft and pleading on the phone, and then she hangs up and begins to cry.
…
It was the sadness he had glimpsed moments later in her eyes that drove him out of the house. It prised him open, wilted him, and made him doubt her love for him. Even now, at a moderately lit bar, capped with a thatched roof, somewhere around Gwarinpa in Abuja, he sees the sadness in her eyes, the way they examine him, like something broken, and wonders if he could have said something else, something capable of sweeping the glum from her face. But he had only told her the truth, this secret that had haunted him for as long as he could remember. This truth that has flung him many times into the shadows as he struggled to rebound to the light, unable to reconcile the versions of himself — first, the one he shared with the parishioners on the pulpit, preaching things he didn’t completely agree with, and the other parts of him, broken and needy, he shared with young men, parts they gnawed at and remoulded at the same time.
He sips his bottle of Smirnoff and checks his phone, waiting for Daniel, his friend from the seminary. John Legend’s ‘All of Me’ comes from nearby speakers. A voice calls to the bartender, and Obiora turns around, distracted from his thoughts.
A man sits across from a woman, probably his wife, and a boy, probably his child, who tugs at the man’s shirt, saying, “Daddy, I want Fanta, not Mirinda.”
“You don’t want Mirinda again?” the father asks the boy, leaning in, and the woman narrows her eyes at the boy, telling him to behave himself. But the boy shakes his head, pouting his mouth, and his father wraps him in a bear hug.
At once, Obiora smiles, remembering the time he broke a jar and his mother shouted at him, threatening to whip him with the belt in her hand, but Papa came rescuing him from her rage, pulling him into himself and telling her that it was just a mere glass that could be replaced, but a son can’t be replaced. Papa’s love for him had left a sharp hint of possessiveness that made him wonder if he would have been loved this way with another sibling in the picture.
He smiles again, blinking back tears. He wants his father. He would give anything to have him back.
He had been unable to bring himself to think properly the day Papa died, beyond the shawl of grief. That morning in his room, after Mass, after the monsignor had patted his back, reminding him that all would be well, that God gives and takes, he kept drifting in and out of slumber, his head filled with memories of his father now blurred by grief.
He called his mother often to ask if his father was truly dead, begging her to tell him that she was only playing a prank on him. Yet, despite his closeness to his father, there were certain things Obiora never shared with him, couldn’t share with him. But now, he pictures a different scenario. What if he had first told his father? What if he had moved past his fears and assumptions that Papa couldn’t handle the truth? What if he had stopped imagining the worst, that his coming out would eventually erode the familiarity between them, erecting a chasm not even his love could seal?
Obiora sighs as he checks the time on his phone. 9:00. Two hours past the agreed 7:00. It surprises him that after all these years, Daniel hasn’t grown out of his lateness to things. He thinks he should head back to the hotel where he has lodged for two nights.
He chugs what’s left of his drink and, in a bid to turn and leave, Daniel struts into the bar, arms spread out, saying, “I’m here now. I’m here. Sorry for the delay.”
Obiora studies the smile on Daniel’s face, his neatly trimmed beard, the flannel shirt billowing above a pair of loose pants, his sandaled feet showing long, clean nails, and realises how time has only brightened him up from a boy with athletic legs, who scaled the school fence to spend his siesta at some pepper soup joint across the road, to a man in his mid-thirties still clinging to the faded garment of his youth.
Obiora rolls his eyes as Daniel hugs him, catching the whiff of cocoa butter and something foreign steaming off his body.
“I’m sorry. I was held up in traffic.”
“Which traffic? Are you kidding me? Traffic in Gwarinpa, by this time?”
Daniel chuckles, throwing a hand to his lips. “My bad.” Both hands wedged on his waist, he adds, “Hmm… How long has it been, Obiora Nworie?”
Obiora smiles. “Five years, I guess.” He recalls his trip to Abuja for a conference on media and journalism, and the shock on Daniel’s face when he stumbled into him at a corner of that auditorium.
“Five years, huh? That’s a long time,” Daniel says, then asks him what he’s drinking, and adds, “Boring. I need something stronger,” before waving the bartender over.
“What about your guy, that chief you said was into oil and gas?” Obiora says in a low voice. He is twirling a finger around the table while the bartender takes their order — a bottle of Heineken for Daniel, and another bottle of Smirnoff for him.
“That one. I became tired of him, of his possessiveness, as though I were some item.” Daniel’s voice is a little raised.
Obiora looks around, eyes turned to them. He’s trying to decode their message.
Perhaps, Daniel has noticed Obiora’s discomfort, the way he shifts continuously and lowers his gaze, and so he says, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Obiora smiles as their drinks arrive.
But Daniel continues to raise his voice, taking Obiora through the dusty terrain of memory, unwrapping their years of truancy and adventure spent at the seminary. And, within an instance, Obiora sees something else in Daniel’s eyes, something fully formed, a presence certain of its power.
When Daniel stops talking, Obiora takes advantage of the silence between them to say, “I came out to Mama. And she was heartbroken. I saw the sadness in her eyes.”
Daniel looks him over, and Obiora can’t decipher the thing in his eyes. “What?” he snarls.
“Nothing. I’m just thinking. You know, you were brave. It takes so much guts to come out of the closet.”
“But you did too. You also came out of hiding.” He sips his drink. A soft breeze caresses his face, while Banner’s ‘There Goes My Girl’ comes on.
“Yeah. But mine was different. I was very young. My father was dead at the time I was born. And my mother, God bless her soul,” he says, making the sign of the cross on his head, “was so sweet and kind. She accepted me when I came out to her. What I’m saying is that not every parent would accept that their son is gay. Even when I left the seminary because I was tired of all that bullshit about chastity, my mother didn’t throw me away.”
After a moment of silence, Daniel asks, “So, what’s up? What are your plans henceforth, since you’re no longer a priest of the Most High God? Forgive me.”
He chuckles, and Obiora smiles, uncertain of any concrete plan.
“Nothing. I’m just looking for a house to buy. And then, let’s see where life takes me.”
“Look no further. You’ve found the right man. I’ve many agents. I’ll connect you to one of them.”
Obiora looks away, past the couple kissing and fondling each other, towards the lone star in that darkness, and thinks of Mama, alone, in that house.
Daniel reaches for his hand, pushing him from his thoughts. “What’s the matter? You seem distant.”
He shakes his head, but Daniel insists.
“Maybe, you’re thinking if coming here was worth it, if leaving the priesthood was the right thing to do. I understand. I’ve also felt that way a couple of times. But one thing I do is remind myself of how beautiful and powerful I am. This beauty,” Daniel says, leaning backwards and spreading his arms, “is all that matters. I matter, girl.”
Obiora chuckles.
“This place is too dry, too dull for my patience,” Daniel says.
And, almost immediately, Phyno’s ‘Highway’ booms from the speakers, as though prompted by his words. Obiora nods and smiles as Daniel sways in his seat.
“What’s the essence of beauty?” Daniel is saying now, after chugging his drink, and Obiora doesn’t know if he needs to respond to that. “What’s the essence of carrying so much beauty in you if it doesn’t burn? Let it burn, jare. Allow its brightness to consume everything.” ♦
Gerald Onyebuchi Ewa is a storyteller from southeastern Nigeria. A graduate of microbiology from the University of Ibadan, he’s interested in stories interspersed with themes such as feminism, queerness, and religion. In 2022, he was longlisted for the Kendeka Prize for African Literature, and in 2023, he was shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Prize and Anthology. He’s working on his debut novel.
