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...
“Did you see the northern lights last night?” Captain Geiry asks. He smiles and tosses up his right hand, which is gloved by red insulated rubber, then shakes his head. “They were … amazing.”
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...
Moby-Dick is not about Moby-Dick. Not really. The white whale makes his appearance, of course. We have been promised that much. Moby-Dick emerges, finally, at the end of Melville’s great novel, in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.
Days later, not long after we left the convent, the war ended. I promised to take her directly to the train station, but the sight of her on the back seat scrambling out of that uniform,
The more they’ve been shrinking, the bigger it’s been getting, though maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The world’s great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand—and, on the other, the...
