Egedi had flown. Akoba knew from the way her arms stretched out, her palms aster wide against the ground. She had always wanted to fly, that woman. He knew she flew well because she couldn’t have done it any other way. You only flew once.

Akoba had told her only yesterday night about when the sun spoke to him. It was not God, he knew. It was something less, still, heaving. It was the sun, he knew. He had said it slowly, the words coaxed out of taut lips. He had told her because she was mad and it seemed simple and mangled in the way her madness would embrace. She had only looked at him, looked at him for a long time, her face a gathering of edges against the dull lantern glow. Hers wasn’t the haphazard sort of madness with everything writhing and spilling, motions drawn and jagged. No, his wife was not harrowed. Hers was the type you could burnish with cadence. It was the type that rose when they consummated their marriage in their small room in Abia, in the sounds she made, like cawing, strained and lifting from something wholly other. It peeped, just the month before, when she threw the pot of hot water at their son, and it might have been something beautiful, the water springing, lucid and in itself, if it hadn’t kissed him and kissed so fiercely. She had stood above him, unmoving, as though trying to decipher what wrung beneath her, only screaming when the delay had become something too cratered, rumpled. She had not known water too could take.

Akoba watched the blood that pooled around her head, undulated and still. It glistened under the sun. His sigh soaked into the dissonance about him and he craned his neck upward to where a man had said Egedi jumped from. He sighed again. He wished she had chosen a simpler way to fly.

He watched her for a long time. Soon, he would learn aloneness, its saccharine wisp that danced on some nights. He would teeter, for a long time, between engineering memories and trying not to forget.Two years later, he would learn the art of begging, in lessening the face’s contours. He would flatten because the rain and so many other things that smothered had a way of making you limp. But then he would gather, collect wicked pieces, house too many tastes in the warmness of his mouth. He would taper to the rusty smallness of Nsukka- some people were simply not born to matter. But he would be okay; the sun had seen him, had said something even.

Now, he lingered as the crowd lessened around the corpse and wondered, when the ground began to loom, whether she wished she hadn’t flown, whether she had tried to land without breaking everything.

​Paula Willie-Okafor is a student of the University of Nigeria. Her work has appeared in Praxis Magazine and The Muse (A Journal of Critical and Creative Writing), Nsukka. She enjoys photography, comics, social commentary and hanging out with her sisters. She hopes to be a teacher.