Fiction

I want you to know that the first time I did anything, I just wanted them to suffer some easily remedied discomfort. I didn’t care that Tusker, too, would have to suffer for as long as the others did: a whole day before I recommended the...

Bill and Lyla had graduated, gotten married, and departed directly for Europe. Lyla’s parents had given them a thousand dollars to spend on a honeymoon, sowing the seeds for months of argument. Bill wanted an adventure, but Lyla, who had...

He woke me late last night. He sat on the edge of my bed with a bag in his lap. When I rolled over to turn the lamp on, he put the bag to my chest.

We need to go now, he said.

This time I didn’t question.

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone...

For twenty dollars, this dude named Byron promised to beat the crap out of you. That’s pretty much what the flyer said, and the flyer was all over the neighborhood. The first one we noticed was up high on the half-dead palm tree in front of...

“Can you believe it?” my brother said, talking more to the air than to me. “They’re leaving us without a soccer field.”

“What?” I said to myself and went up to the roof, my favorite place in the house for the last few months. It was 1979.

I needed to rest so I rented a big house near the coast, far away from the city. I was almost there, following a gravel road toward the sea, when the thick grass made it impossible to go on driving. The roof of the house could be seen in...