The Stars Yet Undiscovered

“Night Swim” by Sean Kang

For the evening of their three-month anniversary, Chibuike took his girlfriend Ginika to a restaurant on the city’s outskirts. It was a roadside shack of stylistic contradictions: low wooden stools beneath slick mahogany tables, insect-covered bulbs above glimmering menu screens. A curtain partition separated the dining area from the kitchen, thin smoke oozing through the fabric’s gaps. Chibuike found the resulting totality distracting until the first bite of their shared appetizer—isi ewu pepper soup—redirected his focus. He followed it with a sweet-sour sip of chilled palm wine.

“Oh my,” he said.

“Exquisite, right?” Ginika replied. She swirled her glass and looked around slowly as though memorizing the sycamores and distant lakes. Chibuike was used to this habit, her attempts at familiarizing the unknown. She was roughly as new to Port Harcourt as their relationship. On her twenty-fifth birthday, she’d fled an overbearing father eager to marry her off to a “carefully selected” suitor. Her first stop in the city had been the nightclub where Chibuike spotted her nervously thumbing at tequila shots. He’d sidled across the dim, sticky-floored room to say hello. To his surprise, she’d responded with an outstretched hand and a full-toothed smile.

“I could drink this forever,” she said now, opening her eyes, waving away a small tornado of gnats. “Too bad tomorrow’s a workday.”

He groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

“I thought you loved the company of your students.”

“Well, this morning, one of them clogged the senior bathroom. It was out of toilet paper, so they used a T-shirt. Graduation’s only a few weeks away, you know? They do well on my Calculus midterms and make me think they’re ready for university, then this.”

Ginika reminded him that he wouldn’t have to deal with such infantile nonsense at Wazobia, the school he soon planned to build, a school where the quantum physicists doubled as poets.

“Madam Angelina keeps saying that she can’t run Rivers Transit without me, though,” he said. Behind Ginika, the waitress drew close with their mains.

Ginika scoffed. “Madam Angelina will manage.”

Chibuike’s dish was a spicy yam porridge with chunks of fried fish; Ginika leaned into the restaurant’s foreign sensibilities with a double cheeseburger.

“Your ancestors would be disappointed,” Chibuike said, sticking his tongue out.

“My ancestors thought birthing twins was a sign of satanic witchcraft. I’ll be happy to disappoint them.” 

Chibuike thought: here it comes. A moment later, right on cue, Ginika laughed. They’d spent enough time together that he now possessed an internal blueprint of her many characteristics. She made fun of her ancestors. She liked her fiction full of robot-paved boulevards and Igbo slang and floating skyscrapers, so he bought her West African sci-fi novels when book-hunting. She often spoke with her jaw angled high but glanced downward whenever thanking him for a new necklace or a Silverbird movie ticket, as if she found an unnamed shame in his provisions. 

Still, there was a different kind of knowing, wasn’t there? Not of wants and tics, but of pain, memory. Ginika scarcely existed before Port Harcourt. She only mentioned her father on the rare nights she allowed herself a few strong drinks and often in the same reminiscing loops. His proclivity for Russian cigars. The hand-crafted dresses he’d contracted a village tailor to make her each month, most of them abandoned in her escape. His claim that he could see her even if they were rivers apart, his loving eyes on every cloud she glimpsed.

If Chibuike probed further into Ginika’s past, she insisted they remain in the present. She had other strange insistences—like saying that they could only meet in public spaces: cafes and museums and parks, but never his penthouse in Pitawka Estates or her dingy apartment across the bakery where she worked. Despite Chibuike’s easy acceptance of this arrangement, she often apologized for it. She said their restraint would give meaning to their first time alone together, but in her words, he sensed her father’s background presence.

The past’s weight mattered little tonight, though. As they ate, Ginika stole forkfuls of Chibuike’s porridge or leaned across the table to kiss him or laughingly wiped a smudge of beef off the side of her mouth. Each time, a warm wave surged in his chest. He recalled the small hill glimpsed on the taxi ride over, surely no farther than a twenty-minute walk. An intoxicating image came to mind: them on its summit, washed in starlight, “I love you” professed for the first time. 

After dinner, when he suggested the walk, Ginika rubbed her stomach.

“Yes, please.”

The darkened sky was dotted with gold. A warm breeze rustled the leaves of road-flanking treetops. At this time, the universe possessed a gentle solitude: the occasional passing car, the harmony of crickets unseen, him, her, their hands interlocked. She talked about all the items on the restaurant’s menu she’d considered getting, and his mind slipped elsewhere, played with variations:

All my worries, they seem so small in your presence.

We are two heartbeats, one soul.

Ginika stopped abruptly. It took Chibuike a second to realize that someone had just jumped out of a bushy dirt path snaking off the main road: a boy, twelve or thirteen, bare-chested, a backpack clinging onto his shoulders. His cheekbones were taut, his eyes red from tears or exhaustion, and in his hand, he held a meat cleaver, moonlight glinting off the steel blade.

Chibuike’s legs shivered. Their chill spread to the rest of his body, and when he opened his mouth to speak, no sound emerged. Ginika’s grip on his hand tightened so badly it hurt.

The boy scanned them from head to foot. He pointed his weapon at Chibuike, barked: “Oga, remove your watch. Put it on the ground. Your phone. Wallet too.” Then at Ginika: “Your purse, madam. Phone. And that necklace.”

Chibuike unstrapped his watch unsteadily, lowered it next to his phone and wallet. Ginika did not move.

The boy’s voice rose, his blade slashing air. “Madam. You too.” 

Ginika finally complied, slowly setting her belongings next to Chibuike’s. A car roared past, and Chibuike thought of calling out, but the thought never morphed into motion. The orange trail of the Volvo’s taillights lingered mockingly and then disappeared. The boy ordered them a few steps back; he scooped their things into his bag and retreated backward into the bushy dirt path from which he’d emerged. He was soon out of sight.

Chibuike inhaled deeply, each lungful of air vibrating in his throat. Ginika fell to her knees. When he reached for her, she shrank back.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, tears running down her face. “Don’t touch me, you coward.”

Chibuike felt it then, the disintegrating of a thousand tiny daydreams.

***

They backtracked to the restaurant in silence. Ginika shakily relayed to their waitress what had just happened, giving no indication of the thief’s age. The waitress disappeared behind the curtain and returned minutes later with a middle-aged man, tribal marks sunken in his cheeks. He shook his head apologetically and stepped outside to flag a taxi on their behalf.

He was gone for almost ten minutes. Chibuike stared at Ginika, searching for the smallest word of consolation to offer. On finding none, he stared at the customers around them, tucked in the safety of their bubbles. A man sat by himself, dunking balls of fufu in peanut soup. Two women shared a large foil of peppered kilishi, one of them uproariously thumping the other’s shoulder. To think laughter had come easily mere minutes ago.

The taxi driver made three stops. The first was at a nearby police station. An officer grudgingly took their statements between glances at his bowl of amala. He handed them supplementary forms to fill out and return at their earliest convenience. Chibuike knew not to bother. Next, the taxi driver dropped Chibuike off at Pitawka Estates, a set of enormous apartment buildings surrounded by bougainvillea, neatly trimmed hedges, and water fountains. Before Chibuike stepped out, he leaned toward Ginika; she pushed herself against the side of her door.

“I just need time,” she said. “Maybe we can meet tomorrow evening at seven. Our usual spot. Is that okay?”

Chibuike managed a nod. He waited until the taxi rounded a corner before starting in the opposite direction. He pushed away from the sharp cones of street lights, the gentle drones of gas-powered generators. A half-hour later, he was in a smaller, darker neighborhood. His apartment building loomed ahead, candles stirring from behind shuttered windows. The five flights of stairs up to his suite had never seemed so endless, his misshapen shadow twisting along the walls. His roommate Fikayo responded to his knocks almost immediately. Behind Fikayo, a table lantern threw shadows around the kitchen. A charred pot of fried rice steamed on the stove, Afrobeats blaring from Fikayo’s static-prone speaker.

“What happened to your key?” Fikayo asked.

Chibuike shouldered past him and into his windowless shoebox of a room. Fikayo followed, lingered by the door.

“Bro,” he said. “What happened?”

Chibuike settled into bed and said nothing until Fikayo scoffed and walked away. He rolled to face the wall, closed his eyes tight against the rush of inner voices. In a former time, he would have told Fikayo everything. They had been close friends at the University of Benin, where Chibuike had studied Economics, Fikayo International Relations. After graduating with first-class honors, they had moved to Port Harcourt together, reiterating their biggest dreams on the smooth ride over. Five years had passed. Fikayo never saw past the doors of the city’s United Nations office, settling temporarily, and then permanently, into cashiering a supermarket. Chibuike’s seed loan requests for starting a selective private school gathered cobwebs in the cabinets of various banks. Their three-months-at-the-max apartment, with its cigarette-drenched corridors and sparse electricity, never morphed into a penthouse atop Pitawka Estates. Fikayo no longer cared to indulge Chibuike’s conversational ventures into the coming decades. Chibuike would start: “A new bank opened on Dhamijah; I want to make a revised pitch to their investment analyst.” Fikayo would smile, look elsewhere, ask how work at school had gone as if the present was all that would ever exist.

Their conversations withered into minutiae: the day’s rain, the month’s rent. Chibuike stuffed his stapled sheets of handwritten pitches in the luggage bag beneath his bed. He passed endless nights in Bonny Club, losing track of the naira spent from long-held savings—the “quantum physicists’ account” as he’d once thought of it—on beer cans and bourbon, making passes at random women in solitary corners. Invariably, they turned away. Until Ginika. That first night, they drank till closing, then walked to Boro Park where the night’s wind and his grand stories sobered her up. Convinced that she would be gone come sunrise, he pulled his tales from the life never lived. He taught math at a prestigious secondary school and was on the verge of running his own. He overlooked the city’s river ports from a penthouse balcony. Every December, he traveled to a distant new country. Enthralled, she asked if they could meet again the next day, perhaps right there at the park.

They met many days at the park, at restaurants with crystal chandeliers, in the VIP sections of neon-lit cinemas featuring Nollywood’s latest blockbusters. He funded their outings via the quantum physicists’ account. In her presence, he rediscovered his capacity for soul-stirring conversation, and even when he returned home alone, that gulf between present self and future possibility remained minuscule. Late at night, over candlelight, he fell into old habits. He reworked Wazobia’s payment models and advanced curricula, introducing derivative equations one class earlier and adding a section for European languages (surely, someone in Nigeria spoke fluent German). He looked up various funding contests, with grants up to ten million naira, and printed the applications in Madam Angelina’s office when she was away. After work, he walked to the post office whistling P-Square jams, his shoulders squared high.

At night, in the rare moments that electricity flooded his room, he could suddenly see things for what they were, the ordinary portending the extraordinary. The bedside fan that hardly ever spun was really an air-conditioner set into painted walls. He lived in a mansion with parapets and long-stretching driveways, its marble staircases shaped like spirals. His lamp’s glow was sunlight streaming past floor-to-ceiling windows and tugging him awake. On his ocean of a mattress, Ginika lay pressed beside him, tucked safely in his arms. She smiled in her sleep, her face free of lines. She baked his skin with her love and therefore made him worth loving.

Even now, as he listened to the shuffle of Fikayo’s footsteps, he held onto that smile, how it reached and softened her eyes. Outside, the uneven crooning of lovers on Fikayo’s speakers stuttered into silence from a dead battery. A plate clattered in the sink, where it would sit atop a stack of other crust-covered plates for days. A door slammed. Then there was silence, and against it, the gathering of thoughts Chibuike had strained to keep at bay. The look on Ginika’s face earlier tonight, as if glimpsing a diseased thing. “Coward” shrieking through the void. The boy with the cleaver. A fluttering terror gripped Chibuike. He was back on that road, frozen in hellish time, wondering if this was it. If all his daydreams and longings, all the stars yet undiscovered, could be undone at the whim of a child.

For hours, sleep evaded him.

***

He dreamed briefly of lightning, a night sky with fevered white cracks, and awoke in a sweat puddle. It was nearly seven a.m., which gave him just over an hour to prepare for work. He showered quickly with icy water and shoveled two hardened slices of bread in his mouth. Next, he foraged beneath his mattress and within his drawers for all the cash he could find. The notes totaled nearly seven thousand naira, enough for a cheap new phone and a few bus fares. He took the first bus to Fidelity Bank. There was only one other customer around, a short man with patches of gray hair.

A bespectacled teller shook her head as Chibuike recounted last night’s robbery.

“Port Harcourt,” she said. “My sad and sickened Port Harcourt. We are losing our state to common hoodlums, you know? God will punish our useless governor. Six months in office with nothing to show for it. I’m so sorry, my dear. Did you cancel your debit card?” 

“That’s what I’m here to do. And get a new one too. Jesus, I have so much shit to replace.”

“Language, young man.” She typed, the edges of floral-painted nails clacking on her keyboard. “Last name, first name, date of birth, please. Digits of your debit card if you recall them.” She typed some more as he replied. She frowned.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Why didn’t you cancel this card last night? We offer online—”

“My phone was stolen!”

“What was your last transaction?”

“Dinner with my girlfriend yesterday. About fifteen thousand naira.”

“Sir, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing in your account. There are two ATM transactions here following this dinner, one last night for 180,000 naira, which is the daily withdrawal limit at all our machines. Another from this morning for the rest of it...22,000 naira and change.”

Chibuike blinked. “You’re joking.”

“Sir—”

“How is that possible? I didn’t give him my PIN.”

“Did you write it down, maybe on a piece of paper tucked in your wallet?”

“No!”

“Sir, calm down, please. I am here to help. He took your ID, yes? So, he knew your birthday. Was your pin created from those digits?”

To admit this seemed like defeat, a cruel loophole the bank could turn on him.

“I don’t see how that matters,” he said. “I did not make those transactions. I did not. Cancel them and give me my money.”

“The money has been withdrawn, sir. There is nothing to give right now.”

“What the fuck?” Chibuike said. The gray-haired man turned in their direction.

“Language.”

“Just cancel my account,” Chibuike said. “Now, please.”

“Sir?”

“If you can’t offer basic protection to your customers, I’ll find another bank to work with. So, I would like to close my account. Thank you very much.”

Before she returned focus to her screen, the teller gave him a final look. Her eyes hovered above the thick squares of her lenses, and he hated the shape they held, a pitiful softness far worse than anger or contempt.      

***

Outside the bank, sunlight scorched his neck. Too much life thrummed around him. Motorcyclists twisted their handles and weaved through the maze of growing traffic. School children in blue uniforms and long socks ran along sidewalks, their bags skipping on their backs. Nearby, a line of yellow buses waited. He stepped onto one bus, paused, and stepped down. 

The walk to Rivers Transit Secondary School was thirty minutes. He’d be slightly late, but his chaotic thoughts needed more space than the confines of an overcrowded bus. Yet, when he arrived and greeted Madam Angelina and took his position behind the monitor in a corner of her office, a strange calm engulfed him.

He sent out the usual weekly reminders to the parents’ mailing list. Midterms were fast approaching, and students who performed badly risked spending the mid-year break taking remedial classes. Sign-ups for the inter-class sports tournament were still ongoing. The school was accepting donations for its new state-of-the-art library. 

Ordinarily, the monotony of his secretarial duties wore him down, the days painfully measured in milliseconds. But here, now, was a world with definition, with event flyers to design, meetings to accept and decline, emails to categorize and reply and forward. Here was a semblance of routine, and it gave shape to the remaining hours. He’d have too-salty lunch at the school cafeteria and make small talk with the handful of teachers that cared to indulge him. The school bell would ring a final time, and then a hundred feet would march out, followed by Boro Park, his wrapping of tired arms around Ginika on a patch of grass flanked by sky-scraping trees. 

He whistled as he worked, buoyed by a sudden cheery energy. At ten a.m., Madam Angelina stepped out for her usual round of class inspections, and fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Esther Ukwu walked in. She’d co-led a few PTA meetings in the past, and her daughter, Nneka, was one of the school’s star pupils.

Mrs. Ukwu glanced at Madam Angelina’s empty chair. “Where is she?”

“She will be back soon, ma. Should I leave her a message?”

Mrs. Ukwu sat on a row of plush stools along one wall. “No. I can wait.” From her purse, she withdrew a novel, The Requiem of Amadioha, and flipped toward the end. Chibuike pretended to work, looked up at her occasionally. Her presence always seemed to clog the air until he was conscious of every breath he took. He didn’t know if it was the rarity of her appearance, marked by giant loops of starry scarves and sleek patterned dresses, or the sophisticated way she carried herself, the soft tapping of her heels on linoleum, her beautiful head held high. But she was the kind of woman who could overlook Pitawka Estates from the heights of her balcony, who could take vacations in white-sand cities a thousand miles away. And she reminded him that power wasn’t merely a state of having, but a way of being, its ripples palpable in every room you entered. 

He thought of himself and Ginika and Mrs. Ukwu and a dozen men and women like Mrs. Ukwu in a soft-lit room, scattered around a long table covered in white linen and hourglass wine cups. They were cheering, laughing at something funny Ginika had said. 

Chibuike cleared his throat and said, “That book—I read it a few years ago. It is amazing.”

She looked up at him, said nothing, looked back down.

“Did you read the last book he wrote?” Chibuike started again. “Willows of The Old Ikeja—it trapped a special kind of sad in me. Unforgettable.”

Mrs. Ukwu sighed, reached into her glittering purse. She took out a pair of earphones, and stuck them in, left then right, and returned to her book, flipped a page. Chibuike stared at her. Watched her scan one line and another until she was flipping a page again. And he remembered.

That he’d always hated Mrs. Ukwu, how her perfume, sickly-sweet, overwrought, stained the air, how she moved so slowly, as if the bones in her legs were congealed mud, how she spoke to him without ever meeting his eyes, and how her speaking sometimes resembled a barking. He remembered that he’d always hated this job. In the dreams of night, there was no corner desk in another’s office, no small intonations of sir and ma. He remembered days like today, when the millions of seconds spent in this room seemed to coalesce into a single wave and descend on him at odd hours, bringing forth an urge to pull air into his chest and fill his lungs and scream until every student and every teacher were crowded outside the door, wanting to see what the fuss was all about. And he remembered the ending—how, with all those eyes on him, he packed his bag and shifted backward on his chair and rose, stepped out into the sunlight, beyond soccer fields and cracked driveways, beyond the confines of this damned school.

But there was no screaming to be had.

Not today.

He stared at his screen, the words like a new language. Ten minutes later, Madam Angelina returned. She hugged Mrs. Ukwu and they laughed over a joke unheard and Madam Angelina asked how her husband was doing and Mrs. Ukwu laughed again.

“He’s fine,” she said, her gold-hoop earrings dangling. “So very fine.”

***

Chibuike’s mind belted a litany of to-dos in a headache-inducing loop. The phone to replace. IDs too, including his driver’s license for a car that did not yet exist. His next monthly paycheck was three weeks away, and for that, he needed a new account in a new bank. But when the day’s last bell clanged, the corridor outside abuzz with youthful chatter and pattering feet, Chibuike found no desire for any of those tasks.

He barely registered when Madam Angelina wished him a happy weekend, her eyes on her phone. Outside, he stood for a moment, watching fathers and mothers compress their children with hugs, lead them into Volvos and Hondas and Toyotas idling on the school parking lot. Although it was too early, he headed for Boro Park.

Its steep and rolling lawns were filled with the proceedings of family picnics—knives spreading butter on soft white bread, juice boxes punctured by straws, the wind-swept scent of sticky mangoes. Couples flocked to a nearby bridge. A heartbroken woman had flung herself over it years ago, inviting a still-growing mysticism. Love from her shattered heart, the legend went, clung onto the railings. 

“That is preposterous,” Ginika had said on their fourth date here, pushing a palm against her mouth to suppress the giggles.

“Or maybe there are things in the air our eyes cannot see,” he’d replied, picking up a stone. On the railings, he’d carved their initials in crooked lines: CA + GS. He found the marks now, unblemished by time, traced the angular curves of G and S.

It was just past seven when Ginika appeared; the sun was sinking, the outlines of slow-moving clouds tinged a fiery pink. With most of the kids gone, the remaining adults—mostly students from a nearby university—had started cracking open beer cans and lighting their cigarettes. Ginika walked around the maze of their bodies, moving slowly, and he hurried toward her. The hug she pulled him into had never felt so frail. They sat on the grass, and he realized her right hand was bunched into a fist.

“Good to see you,” she said, unsmiling. “Did you go to work today?”

Chibuike kept his voice steady.

“I did! Went to the bank first, though, canceled my cards, made sure my money’s all there. Poets and physicists don’t grow on trees, you know?” He chuckled, scratched his shoulder. “But yeah, it’s all good. I told my students what happened. They laughed, little rascals, promised to help me find the crook. But that’s life, right? Shit happens. We move on. How are you?”

“I’m...not good. My money is around, thankfully, and I replaced my phone with some ancient Nokia from GSM Village this afternoon. But my heart hasn’t stopped pounding. I see that boy’s face everywhere. And I keep hearing myself, the cruel things I said to you.”

“Babe, you were shaken.” Chibuike reached for her cheek, brushed it with a thumb. “So was I. It’s okay.”

“I want to get this right, so please listen. Just listen. This crazy fear I’m feeling now, it’s familiar. Felt it the day I left Pa, a man that loved me more than life itself, in his own crazy way. That morning, I couldn’t get myself to move until I made a list. Reminded myself what I was running to.” She relaxed her fist into a palm, revealing a crumpled brown paper. Chibuike took it, smoothed it out. With the day’s waning light, he made out the untidy loops of Ginika’s handwriting:

Get a temp job. Cashier. Janitor. Anything. Just a week or two while you get settled. Apply to accounting firms in the city. Get your own apartment. Bisi seems nice, and her place doesn’t look like a dumpster, but she’s still a stranger from the internet. Save 3000 naira a month. 1500 if it’s too tight. Learn to drive. Ideally, manual. Treat yourself to a trip to Ghana from your new savings account. Day journey to Ma’s grave at Aboki; remind yourself she’s more than a cross in the soil. Solo road trip across the country, from Sokoto to Akwa-Ibom. A week. A month? Taste a few lips. Get yourself a present for leaving home. And then another each time you do something on this list. Could be a pack of gum. Or a massage. From you to you. Make another list when this one is done.  Never let fear paralyze you again. 

Forgive Pa.

Chibuike read and re-read the list, searching for where he fit.

Ginika continued speaking, her eyes on the grass, each word slow and measured.

“Writing my hopes down helped a bit, got me moving. But then I got here, this city full of strangers, and all that fear rushed back in.”

“But you’re still here. You’re still here.”

“That first night at the club, I was getting ready to leave. Figured after a drink or two, I could face calling Pa. I could apologize. Tell him I would see him soon. But you showed up like something out of a fairytale. And that instinct Pa put inside me all my life—to feel safe and protected, to be another’s—came back so quickly. In a different way, but there all the same. In a week, I didn’t need the scary list, didn’t need to quit my job at Agege Cafe, didn’t need anything but you. And last night, terrified as I was, I wanted to fight. Or run. Anything but freeze again. I didn’t move because I had you.”

“I should have tried harder, I know—”

“Listen. These last few months, I’ve been in awe of you. Your accomplishments, your ambitions, and the incredible kindness you’ve always shown me. It’s far more than I deserve, but it’s also made me forget. I close my eyes at night, and I dream of shiny white walls around some of the smartest kids in the country. Your kids. But I still don’t know what my dreams are, my limits, just mine, just the shape of me. It’s why I left Pa. And it’s why I have to leave you.”

A cold spell tinged the tips of Chibuike’s fingers, and it scared him, how he could burn and freeze all at once.

“Babe—”

Ginika started to rise, and Chibuike saw in her motion the last seed of his possibility. He laid flat on his stomach, the ground’s bladed tufts prickly on his neck. His arms twisted around her ankles, and he opened his mouth to say that he was lost too, afraid too, all the time. He was nothing and no one.

Instead, he whispered, “You’re all I have. Only you. Please. Babe. Please. Please.”

Ginika’s eyes widened. She wriggled her legs, bent low to pry his grip loose. Once free, she half-jogged out of the park, never stopping to look back.

***

For hours afterward, Chibuike remained cross-legged on the ground. In small circles, he ran his palms over coal-colored pebbles. The distant bobbing lights of cellphones and cameras soon vanished so that it was dark when he rose, darker still when he finally started moving. He walked out of Boro Park, as he had a dozen times before, but always with Ginika in lockstep, Ginika standing so close that strands of her hair tickled his nose when she looked up to marvel at the sky. How gold seemed to drip off it and over all else—the stars winking at every intersection, golden fireflies with vivid and swollen tails, haloed street lights.

Chibuike didn’t realize where he was headed until he came across a familiar billboard. It loomed over moonlit brambles on a sidewalk, a PDP presidential candidate pointing out of his rectangular confines as if to say, “I’m here for you.” Not long after that, Chibuike walked onto a paved and snaking boulevard. An hour ago, it would have crawled with buses ferrying home fishermen and weary market women. Now, it belonged to the pedestrians. A handful of them ventured into the street’s zinc-roofed superstores or patioed bars. Most, however, made their way to the road’s end where Bonny Club stood.

The same bouncer nodded at Chibuike, not bothering to ask for an ID, and the same albino bartender took his first order, a glass of tequila on the rocks, and the same strobe lights pulsed to the blare of Tiwa Savage’s vocals. The same acrid, face-screwing taste on the swallow. The same heat as the liquor traveled down his throat. Even the same legs twisting on the raised platform in the middle of the dance floor.

Chibuike downed a second glass of tequila. Then a third. He counted the money remaining in his pockets, all the money he owned now. He watched the club slowly fill until it stank of sweat. The room spun in circles, and yet every woman’s face here seemed crystalline, the tiniest mole magnified beneath disco lighting. There were women grinding on men, women twerking against women, women squatting low in backless blouses, women laughing, singing along, chewing gum, women swiping across their phones in the corners where the light barely reached.

Chibuike didn’t know how he would know, only that he would, that this communion of heat and bodies and thumping vibration would offer relief from the gnawing in his chest, the gnawing that couldn’t exist if he paid no attention to it. He added a thousand-naira tip to his fifth order, and the uncertainty on the bartender’s face vanished after that. But it wasn’t until the seventh glass that he spotted her.

It was just past midnight, and his remaining cash was down to three digits. Across the bar counter, a thin, mousy woman—likely in her early twenties—leaned against a pillar. She was overdressed, sweating beneath a University of Port Harcourt jacket, idly watching the room’s frenetic motions as if uncertain of her place in it. Her left foot started to tap to the beat. Then it stopped. Started again. Occasionally, she raised an orange juice cocktail to her mouth, sipped, grimaced slightly. 

Chibuike watched how she held the glass cup against her stomach. A tenderness that seemed like instinct. As he lumbered unsteadily toward her to say hello, at one point grasping the back of a barstool for support, he noticed the tiny curl of her lips. Half a smile. He knew it reached her eyes. Knew that in a few years, they would sit side-by-side on the summit of that restaurant-side hill. There would be no chase, no school, no money, no penthouse apartments. No little boys with giant cleavers. There would only be him and her and the sleepy little town sloped beneath them—rooftops with satellite dishes, truck smoke, a shadowy church. And when the vast unvarnished sky opened into a storm, she would take his hand, tenderly too, and follow him home. Up the darkened stairs. Into his small and windowless bedroom. The mattress would creak beneath their tangled bodies, his head weightless on her chest. In the blissful dark, every sound would assert itself. The loop of her breathing. Fikayo’s snores drifting across from the other room, dispossessed of urgency. The rain pattering outside, nothing more than rain. 

About the Author

Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google. He was born and raised in Nigeria but now lives in Canada. His short stories are in/forthcoming to Passages North, Fractured Lit, Split Lip Magazine, Carve, and Pithead Chapel, among others. He is the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize Winner and was also shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Find him on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.

about the artist

Sean Kang is a sixteen-year-old sophomore attending Korean International School in Seoul, S. Korea. His hobbies are indulging himself in any creative and artistic way. He is currently putting together his portfolio for university.