Adedayo Agarau

It was also the year of the flu. The Bakassi year of star apples

falling off udala trees like children off their mother’s backs

in the sun. Year of stillbirths, missing lizards, and market dancers 

declaring the scarcity of fireflies. On the radio, some policemen were pronounced dead. 

Something in the twitching that year. The air, still like a tired ghost. 

A morning arrived with a shudder, and my mother woke to a poultry of dead

birds and news of innocent men named shelters for bullets still breathing. 

My father walked home with our dead dog, Ray, who was hit with an iron pipe

and had been missing for days. We wept to bed, knowing sorrow is — in a dream,

I was in a barren field, and suddenly, my mother and I were turning

a pot of bone broth on an aluminum stove. That year, a dam collapsed in Gusau, and

scores drowned. On the morning of the eclipse, we were given paper-

folded-solar-eclipse glasses. We filed into the assembly and worshipped the Most

High. In the dark of the eclipse, a boy from the back of the line tried to kiss me.