Inyene Ekanem’s “Born of a Million Girls” was chosen by The Masters Review staff as an Honorable Mention in this year’s Novel Excerpt Contest. Set in Lagos, this coming-of-age story follows as the narrator and her friends observe a young woman’s sudden breast development and the social consequences of her womanhood. As the children who spy on Boma both want to look and look away, so does the reader.
1
Something sat on Boma’s chest. We were afraid to call it breast. At this time, we were between the ages of five and twelve, and in the presence of adults, we would not discuss breasts, bodies, or blood. We abominated these subjects, feigned unfamiliarity to their reference, and exhibited naivety. At the playground, though, we became astute, wise enough to dissect a woman’s body. Some argued babies emerged from a woman’s anus, a few believed babies were born out of a woman’s vagina, and an insignificant percent believed babies were thrown down from the sky at an odd hour of the day. The latter, myself included, could not agree to breaking out of a woman’s body or belonging in a woman’s body because we either could not imagine our mothers’ bodies busting open to release a human head, or we did not have a mother. Despite our different sentiments on this particular matter, we agreed on one thing: mothers had breasts, and girls had bare chests.
A woman’s breast was essential for survival in a community where starvation lingered. Mama John, a mother to a two-year-old baby, resided in a single-room apartment across the street from our building. John ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner from her chest. Mama Bumi, a braider with three children and a twin, was a mother to newborn Bumi. Baby Bumi and the twin depended solely on Mama Bumi’s breasts for sustenance. Ultimately, we all agreed that if a woman had large breasts, they were designed to feed babies. This was why we could not call the thing on Boma’s chest a breast. Boma was a girl with ample breasts that fed no one.
I heard about Boma’s breasts before I met her. It was the primary feature the adults discussed amongst themselves and in the presence of children. They talked about how the ‘girl with the breasts’ ought to avoid the boys from the street because the things on her chest were a lewd distraction for well-mannered boys. They said the ‘girl with the breast’ ambled like a boy, and it was an utterly misfit quality in a body that oozed intense femininity. They worried the ‘girl with the breast’ would suddenly become obese when her first baby arrived.
When I met Boma, she stood in a queue of uniformed children, waiting to purchase a bowl of rice from Mama Rice, my new host. Before arriving at Mama Rice’s home, I was a homeless kid sleeping on empty boxes on the concrete steps of a ticket office at the motor park. At night, my father would wrap my thin body in threadbare blankets to supervise my many feverish slumbers. At the elbow of the motor park, a flyover lay over the city at an intersection between the Lagos mainland and the island. The constant traffic was my torment, and our makeshift bedroom rested on its arms. Five out of seven nights, I’d wake with a start from nightmares of trailers crashing into our starved bodies, fully convinced that if the bridges themselves did not collapse on us, a vehicle would transform our bodies to sand dust. At daytime, when I conceived no thoughts of death or dying, the motor park swept fetid air down our nostrils, causing me to vomit in crammed gutters of rubbish and urine.
Mama Rice’s husband owned a small transportation company at the motor park, and one day, he’d offered my father an hourly ticketing job after considering that his living conditions were convenient for the job requirement. My father would sleep and rise at the motor park, be the first to access potential passengers, and earn an additional commission on ticket sales. The total compensation of approximately $25 a month was insufficient for an apartment in Lagos. It was 2002, and Lagos was rapidly becoming a marketplace for international realtors and investors. At the time, a single room could begin at $120 monthly in the mainland, occupied mainly by lower-middle income residents, and then move to $1200 on the Island, where corporate headquarters took residence. Seeing that my father brooded over these deficits, Mama Rice offered to spare a space on their floor in their home for my safety. I was guaranteed a roof over my head, even if it meant my father would remain an employed homeless man.
Mama Rice sold food to students every day of the week, and her husband managed the transportation company at the motor park. On my first day at the food stand, Mama Rice introduced me to the children in line. The kids chattered and extolled me, expecting their acceptance of the new kid to translate into an ample portion from the food seller. Those who had not met me at the playground mispronounced my name, and then, out of nowhere, someone in the queue called me Bassey. I sought her in the crowd and found her at the back of the queue with a bunch of brown notebooks piled haphazardly on her chest.
“You can call me Boma. Did I say your name right?” she asked.
“Yes. Thank you,” I agreed, grinning sheepishly.
“How do you like it here? Mama Rice said you arrived a few days back.”
“I think I am enjoying it. Thank you,” I drawled.
“Why is she in the queue, Mama Rice? Isn’t she one of your house’s children?” Boma interjected, and everyone turned to address her face. Although I had only been at the location for a few days, I knew it was uncommon for a child to interrogate an older woman or an Auntie. Left to us kids, we would have reviewed this question and explored possible responses, but the adult would not have heard of it.
“Boma,” Mama Rice laughed. “Yes, Bassey is one of the children from my house, but she pays for her food. Her father paid in advance. I need her in line to ensure she receives the appropriate portion assigned to other kids.”
“If all the children in your house pay for food at your table in the morning, does this mean they don’t eat lunch and dinner? I mean, you only sell in the morning.” Boma pressed further.
“No,” I said, “I eat lunch and dinner at home and join the line for breakfast.”
Boma shrugged, and the books on her chest tumbled to the floor. All eyes landed on her chest. When she picked up the last book and rose, our gazes devoured her chest, making her body recoil. Some boys smirked, some girls gossiped, and Boma’s confidence turned uneasy. She stepped out of the line and started to hike up the school’s trail.
“Boma, bring your plate,” Mama Rice called.
Boma hollered something about running out of time and needing to be in school before the schoolmistress, but Mama Rice insisted. Boma turned back and walked to the front, and the eyes followed her. We watched her unzip her backpack and draw out her lunch bowl. We scrutinized her arms as they stretched towards Mama Rice. We watched her fumble with her backpack nervously. We explored every move, all breath inhaled and exhaled, and all sentiments expressed or attempted to be concealed. When she strolled tactically into the street leading to her school, backpack on her back and books in her chest, we fed on her vanishing back and mumbled.
2
In December, Lagos was covered in harmattan and the fragrance of morning flurries and cheap perfumes. Festivity was dense in the atmosphere. Flowers bloomed in isolated walkways, defiled by roadside waste. Cloth and food vendors grinned at pedestrians, danced into the noon, and offered unsolicited hugs to little children. Pop-up amusement parks emerged at every corner of the streets with giant swings and roller coasters. Children filled them with early morning gaieties and late noon delights, and those without mothers or fathers wandered the streets with heartaches. Regardless of age and socio-economic status, everyone anticipated Christmas morning with long to-do lists, wish indexes, shopping inventories, and Thanksgiving checklists detailed on the back of old Bibles.
A Salvation Army church in the neighborhood broadcasted flyers for a free Christmas dress event for children whose parents couldn’t afford holiday shopping. The Salvation Army was one of the few churches in the community to organize sporadic donation programs for neighborhood kids. They were notable for an annual street parade where adults marched in white military uniforms and children delighted in brilliant white socks. One time at the motor park, on a rock-white Sunday morning, members paraded the streets with chants of victory, red and blue flags, tambourines with multicolor ribbons, and musicals so intensely deafening it seemingly jolted busted vehicles from the park. I’d thought that judgment day had come, as the adults speculated it would. In the congregation, there was a white person amongst multiple dark Nigerian bodies. I recalled encountering him in the crucifixion screening at church on the Friday before Easter the previous year, where his hair was draping loosely on thin, frail shoulders. His face was severely beaten up, viciously to the extent that one could not tell his mouth from his eyes, and the wreath of thorns around his head blasted blood from all around his face and head onto a white garment turned hematic. I was five years old when I met and wept for Jesus, and I wasn’t the only child seated in the children’s row of that Apostolic church with tears in shockingly endless streams.
At the motor park, I was baffled to then find Jesus marching with a flag high up in the sky as if he had not died, resurrected, and returned to heaven. My father, overly exhilarated by the parade, could not stop dancing and singing. When he did turn to catch the perplexity in my eyes as I hollered Jesus at the crowd, he explained that the Man was an Oyinbo, a European, not Jesus. And I should know, he stated, Jesus was neither European nor American. I instantly conceived a bucket of questions, but then my father started boasting about a time when he played in the Salvation Army’s band in his hometown. He had joined the parade and shimmered in their Army’s uniform and hat. He explained that the church also functioned as a charity and was founded by a William and Catherine Booth from England. England, he added, was also where the Queen resided. The Queen’s information and the Jesus explanation were all downright illogical. For one, I had not known the Queen lived in some place called England because, from what I’d gathered from eavesdropping on adult conversations, the Queen was too regal to belong anywhere temporal. What was this England, and what was the man who resembled the Jesus on the screen but wasn’t precisely Jesus?
On the donation day, when I stood at the Salvation Army church compound, wrapped up in the tantalizing aroma of jollof rice from a women’s cookout, I watched merry children chase floating balloons with stamps of contentment on their chubby faces. Craving their enjoyment, I whispered a silent prayer to Jesus to bless my father with an apartment so I’d eat jollof rice, chase colors, and wear uniforms with white socks to a parade. By the end of the donation event, all the children who had joined the queue from the beginning of the street to the church compound received a dress from a small woman in a soldier’s hat. Boma received a blue floral sleeveless dress, and I got a plaid pattern bow velvet dress.
3
The apartment was boisterous on Christmas morning with gospel vibrations, Christmas carols from blasting sound speakers, children’s giggles, and merriments. Mothers bent over rice cauldrons and chicken stew pots in an outdoor cookout. In the backyard, fathers hummed softly and held knives with silver shades to the necks of frightened chickens. The morning mist interlaced with the kitchen steam and amassed in the sky, inciting a fresh, feverish, festive aura. I lingered at the door, waiting for my father. I’d not seen him since I arrived at the new location. Mama Rice said he sent messages, but they often sounded like she generated them—an attempt to reassure me that my father was not yet dead. She must believe that homeless children who did not see their parents quite often would want more than anything else to know that they were not yet orphans.
“Your daddy won’t be visiting today, Bassey,” she called with a grin.
“Oh,” I bemoaned, acting surprised, although I had reckoned that to be the case.
“December is a busy month for motor businesses. Lagosians are traveling from down south to the east to visit their families.”
At that age, Mama Rice was one, if not the only, adult I had met who explained things in detail to children like she would to another adult. She was cooking with the other women and had spared a minute to acknowledge my perturbation.
Girls emerged from their parent rooms, elegant in the dresses from the Salvation Army. Their feet, strapped in worn sandals or dusty flip-flops, were a misfit for their dresses. Some harbored chicken thighs at the corner of their mouths, and a few fortunate ones gulped chilled Coca-Cola. I scrambled indoors to change into my bow velvet dress. Boma strolled out in her blue floral sleeveless dress, and Mama Boma, who had joined the other women in the cookout, blurted something that caught everyone’s attention.
“Mummy, this is my size. I stood in line for girls who are twelve,” Boma argued.
She was standing five feet from the women’s cookout in a dress that revealed a cleavage of trapped breasts.
“I will close my eyes. When I open it, I should not see you in that dress. If you don’t have another dress, wrap an Ankara around your waist and wear my shirt.”
“But Mummy, the other girls wear their dresses from the Salvation Army.”
“Are you the other girls, Boma? Do you look like the other girls?” Mama Boma
quarreled, and other mothers mumbled and nodded in agreement or beseeched Mama Boma to be gentle because it was not the girl’s fault that she carried oversized breasts despite her age.
“Boma, do you have another Christmas dress?” one of the mothers called out.
“No,” Boma snapped and grumbled indoors.
When Boma returned to the playground, she was covered in her mother’s Ankara wrap and a colossal T-shirt that concealed the edges of her breasts. She sat on her mother’s front steps, looking like somebody’s mother and begrudging the girls in the Salvation Army dresses.
4
When the National Common Entrance Examination results were released to anticipatory parents and guardians, word went out that the girl with the breast scored the highest in her cohort. Her mathematics points were remarkably high for a girl her age. The National Common Entrance Exam was Nigeria’s new requirement for admission into a junior secondary school. The news broke on a Tuesday morning and stretched into the days and weeks afterward. Mothers chattered in small and large gatherings on their way to the market. For the first time since identifying her as the girl with the breast, some women started to call her by her name. Back home, they taunted their children and compared their flawed conduct to Boma’s math accomplishment. If a child forgot to do the dishes, a mother would say, “You cannot wash plates. You cannot do simple math. Does Boma have two heads?” If a child left the door open for mosquitoes to infiltrate the living room, a mother would scream, “All you know is food and sleep. Why can’t you be like Boma?”
Mama Boma wore a fresh grin and waved to other mothers on her morning walks to her store. On Sundays, she entertained women with unlimited inquiries about Boma’s accomplishments. In the past, she’d left women’s meetings before she got into a fight with another mother for commenting on her daughter’s breast. After the news, she remained in meetings until they ended. In one of those meetings, she discussed Boma’s plans to become a medical doctor, adding that she’d decided to enroll Boma in one of the finest private schools in the neighborhood where boys and girls had separate lavatories, and janitors, not students, washed the toilets.
Boma’s victory reached the playground, and some girls started wiping the wooden bench that Boma frequented with their dresses to offer a regal treatment. When we first heard the news, we formed a circle around Boma with interlocked hands and played Who is in the Garden? a cultural playground frolic that celebrated and spotlighted a person in the middle of a circle. As we danced and chanted, “Who is in the garden?” from the top of our lungs, a shirtless eight-year-old boy in ripped jeans and a dark, enormous birthmark on his chest broke into the circle to join Boma.
“We hear you will become a doctor,” he shouted amidst our clamor.
Boma chuckled and lifted her countenance to the sky. Her tall shoulders dominated our smaller forms.
“When you become a doctor, will you treat my hair? Worms eat them.”
“Wash your hair every day. I don’t think a doctor treats hair,” Boma giggled.
“If you become a doctor and you cannot treat my hair, then you are a bad doctor,” the boy snapped.
We jeered at the boy’s audacity, and someone started to sing, “Krokro is on your hair.” A boy suggested he cut his hair Gorimapa because Boma was honorable, and doctors have more meaningful obligations like tending to pregnant women.
“What is pregnant?” I asked.
“Olodo. You are Mumu.” Someone in the group laughed.
“Pregnant means to carry belle,” Boma demonstrated with an inflated stomach, and everyone giggled.
“But I baff every day, I baff my hair. The worm still chops my hair?” the boy insisted.
“Okay, try it again for one month. Baff your hair and body with Dudu soap. If the worm still chops your hair, I will recommend another treatment.”
We all cheered Boma and returned to singing, “Who is in the garden?” The girls modified the original chorus of “A little fine girl” to “Doctor Boma is in the garden.”
When the game ended, Boma sat on the bench, scoured by many girls’ dresses, relishing her stardom. I squatted in front with a smirk.
“Do you have worms in your bum-bum?” she teased.
“My father is a doctor,” I boasted.
“Your father?” She sounded as if I had said I had met Jesus.
“Yes, he is a doctor.”
“I want to meet him. Can I meet your father? What hospital does he work at?”
“At the motor park,” I stated, and scampered merrily.
5
Months after Mama Boma registered Boma in a private school, Boma labored at her mother’s store and sold cups of rice and beans to pedestrians while other children sat in classrooms. When we saw Boma at her mother’s store without a school uniform and a backpack during school commencement hours, we thought that her private school offered lessons in the afternoon. Later, the kids who got home earlier than the others shared they’d not seen her in a uniform. Neighborhood mothers later confirmed that Mama Boma could not afford the private school tuition. Those who had awaited an opportunity to exhibit envy said they had been convinced the woman was insane to think that her child was any different from kids in public schools. Some generous mothers were delegated to speak logic into Mama Boma to move her to reconsider enrolling Boma into a public school, posing that a school where students sat on the floor to learn was better than no education. Later, the delegated mothers reported to the others that Mama Boma insisted on waiting for a miracle.
At her favorite bench, Boma studied math and literature from borrowed textbooks. After school hours, she tutored elementary school kids and taught them things they had yet to learn in their classrooms. Although we no longer assembled around her with songs of praise or wiped her bench with our dresses, some kids formed a queue at her bench to receive homework assistance.
On a Friday before the semester ended in a few weeks, we found a man in an immaculate blue shirt sitting in a conversation with Mama Boma. He was burly with an ample, dark and gray mustache, making his eyes petite and intensely intrusive. His voice was deep and exact, and as he talked, Mama Boma explored her feet. One kid recognized him as the principal from Boma’s private school. The kid said he smelled like rich people. Another kid called him Mumu, noting that rich people did not all smell the same because she had plenty of rich people in her church; some smelled like fresh butter, and a few carried the fragrance of birthday cakes.
The principal ate pounded yam and Afang soup from Mama Boma’s tray as they conversed. He peered through Boma’s essays and downed chilled Pepsi soda while we watched, salivated, and envied his privilege. Later that evening, Mama Boma told another mother that the principal had offered Boma a scholarship. The next day, at the playground, Boma said it wasn’t a scholarship.
“So why is your mother saying you got a scholarship?” I asked.
“The principal said I can take classes and pay later.”
“But your debt will be plenty if you keep going and don’t pay.”
“Yes, I know. My mother suggests we take it a day at a time.”
The following Monday, after the meeting, Boma was back in a school uniform with a backpack, strolling the route to her school with other fatigued children who had stayed up late tending to endless petty home chores or drawing water from the community well. When our groups broke up at the street intersection, someone started singing, “Who is in the garden?” My group hollered, “Doctor Boma is back in the garden.”
That night, as candlelight lit up many homes with a yellow glow and warmth, mothers prayed on their knees for their children to receive divine visitation like Boma—the type of favor that makes a private school principal abandon five hundred students in his school to pursue the chosen one.
6
I had just turned seven when the rumor broke on the day. It started with one woman claiming Boma had a boyfriend. Another woman picked it up, and it reached all the mothers. The news carried multiple versions, but the name of the teenage boy remained consistent. Victor was a seventeen-year-old boy who had dropped out of primary school to work at his uncle’s auto mechanic workshop at the start of the street. He came from a household of twelve cousins and three sisters who either attended public schools or roamed the streets with enormous trays of edibles on their heads. The first story claimed Boma and Victor were caught at the back of the mechanic store at 8pm on a Sunday, where Victor dabbed Boma’s face and lips with an elongated, damp tongue. The second narrative insisted that it was not a kiss but that Victor was pressing his full-sized body on Boma’s backside. The third account—the one that received the most attention and reached Mama Boma quicker than the other two—implied that Victor was fondling Boma’s breasts at 8pm on a Sunday. The latter met Mama Boma on her porch while she swept dust from her front. She left the broom at the door and bolted indoors to strike Boma’s face.
The next day, Mama Boma imposed a mandatory curfew. After 6pm, Boma was not to be seen anywhere outdoors. On errands and other trips that began at the start of the street, facing the auto mechanic store, Mama Boma chaperoned Boma and pulled on her ears when she thought Boma’s eyes wandered toward the store. After that, she updated Boma’s wardrobe from size medium to extra large, causing her body to vanish in thick textiles so that Boma became visible only through a melancholy face. Then, one slow Tuesday evening, when children played hide and seek outdoors and mothers made dinners on their decks, Mama Boma brought home a new mortar and a pestle and laid them on her deck.
7
“Your turn, Bassey. Sit on my neck,” Elijah whispered into my ears.
Elijah was an eleven-year-old boy, about five and three inches tall, with long, ashen hands. He was one of the kids from the playground and had once led the boys’ group to steal a basketball from an alcoholic widower’s compound. He volunteered to lift each kid to reach the window bars of Mama Boma’s bedroom, where we gathered in the backyard.
A week earlier at the playground, while we played the Suwe game with dusty thin legs and danced to Awilo Longomba’s Coupé Bibamba from a roadside cassette seller’s loudspeaker, one girl said something about craving pounded yam and Afang soup with spicy cow legs, particularly the one her mother made for her church members on the day her baby brother was dedicated to God. She said it tasted like something one would eat in heaven at Jesus’s table. Her description made our bellies growl. To make pounded yam, a mortar and a pestle were required, and the girl was upset that her mother’s mortar had fallen to the might of a million termites that crawled into their home from the backyard. When I mentioned that a new mortar and pestle rested in Mama Boma’s kitchen, a boy confirmed my recommendation. However, he was skeptical that Mama Boma would lend out a new item without first using it. Casting his mother as an example, the boy disclosed that whenever someone knocked on their door to lend a matchstick, his mother would ransack their kitchen for a used one—because no one, according to him, loaned out something in pristine condition.
Elijah suggested we launch a watch party and monitor the mortar and the pestle on Mama Boma’s deck for when it launches. After Mama Boma uses the mortar and pestle, the girl would inform her mother to borrow from Mama Boma. If and when her mother made another pounded yam and Afang soup with spicy cow legs, the girl would save us a portion, and however small, we would all share a bite. The girl was ecstatic, and there on that day, after a long morning of hopping boxes drawn on dry earth, the game of Suwe bore witness to a consensus.
At 6am on a Sunday in September, as I slumbered on Mama Rice’s living room concrete floor, a small girl with profound dimples ran into the room, sprinkling cold saliva on my face. She could barely breathe when she hoisted my hands and hurried outside to the group assembled at Mama Boma’s backyard bedroom window. Without uttering a word, I knew it was the mortar and pestle launch day.
“Bassey,” Elijah whispered into my ears again, “It’s your turn to see.”
The other kids had been lifted to the window to see what was cooking in Mama Boma’s bedroom. Midnight dew dropped from the aluminum roof and splashed on frightened faces. Infrequently, honks from distant traffic drifted into the space and uplifted the rising groans from Mama Boma’s bedroom. The girl elevated to see into the window before me had wept profusely on her way down. All the kids who climbed up Elijah’s neck did not return to the floor the same.
“If you don’t go now. I will call the next person,” Elijah warned.
I leaped on his neck and looked ahead.
In a bedroom littered with household objects, Boma stood topless in black underwear in the presence of two women and her mother. One woman pinned her in between the thighs for composure, and another one inspected her breasts, weighing their poundages with her palms and releasing them so that they dropped in a jiggle. In a corner, a lit stove released dark smoke to the charcoal-stained brown walls. The stove hosted the new pestle. The setting resembled a ritual scene from a Nollywood movie where one person is about to offer the other for a human sacrifice, and all the victim can hear and see is fire, smoke, and whispers. Mama Boma lifted the pestle from the top of the stove and held it to the fire, occasionally pausing to caress her hands to avoid a burn. She examined the pestle and tested the temperature with her forefinger. Boma shut her eyes, releasing a burst of wrinkles on her face as if expecting the object to electrocute her. Mama Boma moved the hot pestle to Boma’s chest and massaged it on the left breast. Boma lit the room in a blaze, in a piercing wail that struck the roof and bounced off the window, leaving an echo in our ears. As Boma threw long hands and legs in disarray, the woman who held her legs in between her thighs heightened her grip. Mama Boma went the second time, the third time, and the fourth time, Boma collapsed on the floor like a deflated balloon.
“Your time is up,” Elijah stated.
The woman who had examined the breasts ran a reevaluation. She reached for Boma’s right breast and measured the weight with her palm. The breasts dangled from the chest like a wind-beaten discolored pawpaw that has seen many seasons and may fall off to rot at any time. The woman smoothed each edge and delicately dropped them. She suggested a few more sessions to ensure a result. Mama Boma nodded in agreement and tied a wrap around Boma’s chest. Boma remained coiled up on the cold concrete floor, tears trickling down each eye and forming a dark, wet circle on the part that held her head.
8
We missed the second session because we were still in recovery mode, and our numbers had declined. The girl who fetched me on the launch of the mortar and pestle had turned ill. She was reportedly suffering from severe nightmares and a chronic headache that had lasted for grueling days and long, frantic nights. Her mother believed we did something to traumatize her. Some of us, she speculated, needed deliverance because we walked around with demons that caused blameless children like her child to suffer. Another group member had requested to be counted out of the window show and the pounded yam when and if it eventually happened. He said Mama Boma had ruined pounded yam for him. Whenever he sees a pestle, he’d always think of Boma’s sad breasts.
At the third session, a new visitor had joined the women who were present at the first session. It was another 6am, but a lagging Saturday that met most residents on their beds or sprawled out on cement floors listening to early morning radio news or hollering good mornings to outside neighbors. Everyone in the apartment building seemed to have been minding their business except for us, assembled at Mama Boma’s window, rubbing sleep off our eyes with dirty hands or half sleeping through the event. Mama Boma’s bedroom had been organized so that each object and presence became vivid, devoid of the last session’s rapidity and emotions. A worn mattress occupied half the room’s expanse, partly clad in deep blue silk sheets, with the other half accidentally revealing holes caused by insect infestation. A rocking wooden chair at the center of the room wobbled in response to a stroke or a gentle tap, and a warm glow settled on the four corners of the walls, poured out of the ceiling’s incandescent light bulb. The women sat on the mattress on the floor, except for Mama Boma, who walked in from outside, carrying a green lit kerosene stove on a mass of shabby, old bathroom towels. Boma followed behind, clinging the pestle to her chest. A towel was wrapped around her chest with no additional clothing. Her eyes were alert and puffy, presumably from previous sessions’ aches. When the stove was lowered to the front of the chair, the illumination rose to the ceiling light bulb and cast a brightness that hovered on humans and things—a radiance unmatched for the condition of the room.
Boma settled uneasily on the rocking chair, and the visitor moved towards her legs and began to fasten them to the stretchers with pieces of Ankara wraps. At the window, tension settled on our shoulders, and although no one mentioned it, we knew we should leave. We explored each other’s countenances, hoping someone would break the silence and insist we abort plans to engage. Later on, in my twenties, when I’d reflect on the rationale for bearing witness to this event, I’d resolve that we engaged in an attempt to help carry Boma’s grief so that she felt it less. Believing this made us return to the window on all five sessions, muttering the only prayer we knew to say under our breath. For Boma, “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow you.”
Inyene Ekanem is a New York-based Nigerian writer and a former nonprofit professional working at the intersection of literature, faith, and social impact. She is a Royal Commonwealth Associate Fellow, a Global Media Forum scholarship recipient at Deutsche Welle, an AWIEF award winner, an Internet Society Award winner, a Sojourner Truth Women and Gender Award winner, Muhlenberg Goodwill Award winner, the Jim Schneider Award for Social Justice award winner and the Edwin W. Miller Creative Writing Award recipient for Non-fiction. Her work has appeared in the Muhlenberg Weekly and print anthologies. Inyene earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Muhlenberg College.