Malia

by Hannah Olabosibe Eko | Nov 13, 2023 | flash fiction

One day Neela will run inside and steal me away.

The other wigs roll their eyes. They smell the hope on me—a sticky sweet decay like garbage abandoned in the sun. They believe in Second Girls, not fairy tales.

They did not hear the story I did: how one of us (miracle of miracles!) was returned to her rightful owner and her still warm scalp. My heart recycles the same fantasy like a mad carousel: reunion, coconut oil, the nape of Neela’s slender neck.

The glittering tingle of entry sings a new arrival, and I meet the new customer.

This girl is black, curves of breasts and hips where Neela was one straight line.

Her hair strangled tight into a ponytail under a baseball cap pulled low.

She darts towards the back wall, littered with barrettes and scrunchies.

The owner of the store yells at her back.

All purses to the front!

The girl surely saw the many signs, fat black marker on discarded cardboard.

I know just enough English to understand:

No Returns. No Loud Talking. No Big Bags.

No Children. No Exchanges. No Gum.

The owners of Beauty 123 may as well as next write: No You.

The girl makes her way to the register, a tornado.

Brown eyes flash, shoulders set in proud perches.

Only skin color connects Neela and this girl: darkest of brown like pregnant soil or the cave of a womb. Neela was gifted an inconspicuous nose, hazel eyes, and me dripping down her back in thick ropes of shine. Her skin; her main demerit. She dreamed of Fair & Lovely lotion raining from the sky. She dreamed of different parents and baths of bleach.

This girl holds her darkness with something close to pride.

She dumps her bag onto the counter, and the owner stuffs it underneath alongside leftover receipts, rolls of pennies, inventory slips gone bad.

Her jaw juts upward, and the diamond stud beneath her lower lip shines like an angel wing,

I am not a thief, she says.

They christened me Malia in an Italian warehouse.

Dyed me a milky purple and sewed me to gauze.

In this store, we are all renamed with tropical breeziness.

Leeana. Cristina. Kaylani and Jade.

Sweet names that kiss the edge of tongues.

These names betray us, here we are: dying under the dead glare of fluorescent light and Cellophane.

No one cares for the names we left behind.

I am the chosen one with heat-pliable waves lifted high onto a peeling Styrofoam head. Center stage. No customer fails to notice my beauty.

They gaze at me with longing, run their hands over my curves when the owner glances away. They pant like children after a lolly. I sense their desire the minute they enter. Then they learn of my price, sulk away as if duped.

No money, no honey, I would say if I had a mouth they could hear.

People think we are free for their taking.

I am even on television now, a black and white recording of the shop’s every move.

Neela would be proud.

She wanted to be an actress, practiced flipping me so I fell in one shy curtain over one eye, but her father laughed.

They are no better than prostitutes, he said, and besides, look in the mirror.

What kind of actress does not shine?

Beauty 123 has four monitors watching the store. As if one day the aisles of hair dyes, shampoos, and paddle brushes will descend from their shelves and flee.

The owner’s eyes track the girl’s every movement with the searing eyes of a hunter.

Even the owner’s hair, a short black bob streaked with grey, is alert.

Like a bodyguard wishing for near-death and glory.

I wonder why this girl, now pondering a wall of relaxers, has not looked at me, not even once. Is she selectively blind? Deliberately stupid?

How can she not desire to know my new name?

Days ago, one tiny girl tried to slip a butterfly barrette into her panties.

Her mother protested the charge, but the owner rewound the tape.

Finally, the girl pushed the yellow plastic forward onto the counter.

The owner used an envelope to skate the butterfly into a trash can, took out her camera as the

girl stood silent. The mother quieted.

The shame, thick as cooking oil.

Outside the door, the mother yanked the barrette girl along.

The owner retold the story to her own daughter, pantomined the barrette girl’s hiding place, the mother’s dramatic arguing.

Her own daughter, a timid thing with bitten-down fingernails, was busily stocking nail polishes on the front counter.

Tiny prizes like keychains and toy-sized lotions arranged to flirt with impulse buyer whims.

The daughter sighed.

C’mon, mom. A barrette? she said before turning back to her task.

The owner jabbed at her daughter’s shoulder.

The surprise of the stab made a polish fall to the floor and shatter in a blue blob of glass.

I understand little of their language, but every lace knows a mother’s disappointment, weighty like a rain-soaked roof.

We all had a First Girl who had a mother.

The owner pointed to the floor, brushed by her daughter so that the girl flinched.

Do you know the sorrow of hair that wishes to cry and cannot?

A sob of fury shoved into each lock?

Some women, like the owner, are just born that way.

The daughter knelt, rubbed at the polish already congealing like a crater.

There is still a stain there, an aftermath of blue.

Barrette girl’s photograph has joined the other shoplifters on a blank space of wall near the entrance. The picture is blurry. She is looking down, the baubles in her hair heavy like anchors.

I try not to feel sorry for her. Fail, try again.

She would learn the lesson elsewhere, probably more harshly.

A girl should never desire more than what she has.

Longing on the Journey to Proxima B

by Amina Kayani | Nov 9, 2023 | flash fiction

The traveler isn’t lonely. The ghosts of dead oceans joined the ship soon after the first onion sprouted in the tin of soil the traveler built in their quarters. The ghosts of dead oceans tell the traveler things like, “That light is giving me a headache,” and “Is it the onions making you cry?” and  “You’re so boring, lost in the past. Bring us the old future.”

The ghosts of the oceans never want to talk about heartbreak. It was too often on their minds. They floated with each other, remembering the feeling of mollusks on their floor, of smooth skin displacing their salt, their first caresses. When the oceans sing, the traveler goes into their room and shuts the door. That kind of longing can be unbearable.

The thing about a voyage to Proxima B is that it will take them 6,500 years. The thing about Proxima B is that only one person is making the voyage. This means that their lover no longer visits them in the evening, but the traveler likes to put their tongue beneath her imagined jaw—the place she directed them on the first night spent.

Even so, they are no good at calculating time zones and often neglect calculating the distance between galaxies. There’s never a good time to call and mend.

“Relationships are all about timing,” the dead oceans tell them, wistful for their old planets. The traveler looks in the mirror at an unaging face. Lost love is more haunting than the ghosts.

In space, stars still look distant. In space, the traveler still extends their fingertips as though they might touch one.  In space, stars still look distant. In space, the traveler still extends their fingertips as though they might touch one. The dead oceans tell them, “It’s too late to retrieve the other timeline. Even we are seeking water on this ship.”

The traveler realized too late that when physicists said time was an illusion, they just thought it was interesting to talk about. None of them really believed one could perceive it differently. The traveler felt fooled. They thought, with the right angle on the universe, they might crack open their past from any point in the future, like roots under a sidewalk, rebirthing ancestral seeds.

But they couldn’t crack anything open, not during this drift.

There was a day when the traveler woke up in her bed and kissed her before breakfast. They sang Barry White in the kitchen over pancakes. The day was gray but mostly green.

Looking out the window at Proxima B’s already dead light, the traveler reached out to the ghosts, and for once, the ghosts didn’t say anything. When the star flared, the traveler could have sworn they felt, finally, the moisture of her sigh as they kissed her neck. Her coarse curls against their ears.

Gentlemen Callers

by Avitus B. Carle | Nov 6, 2023 | flash fiction

I find my boyfriend’s car parked in front of the Hillside Motel and consider shattering the windows or, at least, peeing on the windshield. But that’s bad for business. Not my business because, technically, he’s my ex-boyfriend and, fortunately, it’s my grandmother’s 80th birthday.

She deserves a granddaughter who can behave, who can do as she’s told, even though I’m neither of those things. Instead of being here at 5 pm like she asked, I’m in front of her usual room at 4.

Instead of Carrot Cake in a white box, I have a Red Velvet in a pink box because I don’t like Carrot Cake, and she knows I don’t, just like she probably knows that my ex shouldn’t be one of her gentlemen callers.

That’s what my mother calls them. Ever since “sperm donor” was revealed to be an inappropriate way for me to introduce my grandfather to my second-grade class.

Her gentlemen callers used to come to the house until my 12-year-old self caught one climbing through my window. My grandmother would later describe him as a man who had “a thing for breaking and entering,” with a wink that haunts me to this day. Then came the motels, though she’s settled on room 28 at the Hillside Motel 5 miles from our house.

I told my ex all this in the car that’s now parked outside my grandmother’s room. Same car he parked outside of our house, when he first met my mother and Ethel. I didn’t feel anything when my grandmother and him talked about football all night, him sitting next to her and across from me at dinner. Her reapplying her lipstick in the mirror, him licking his lips and talking about her delicious pie. How excited he was to dive in, to taste, already ready for seconds and thirds.

I didn’t start feeling anything until I walked him back to his car, expecting to be invited somewhere, but he starts talking about my grandma and how she “gets” him like I don’t, but, just in case, I tell him I do. I do get him, and he says something about needing space and things will be better this way and something about meeting someone else.

“Oh,” and this he says after braking too hard, after I start thinking he’s changed his mind, “let Ethel know, if she needs anyone to taste test her pies, I’m free.”

Maybe this shit-covered bench and melting Red Velvet cake and I all deserve each other. A man, not my ex, walks out of room 28. Between him zipping his pants and the cool air that escapes from the room, I can see my grandmother’s legs rocking. The mole on my ex’s ass like a dab of ink.

“Oh,” the man stares at me. His lip twitches as the door closes. “You must be—”

“Don’t.” It’s weird when they acknowledge me. Worse when they say I look just like Ethel, them smelling like Vicks, my grandmother’s cure-all.

I’m not sure how much time passes. Only that I can see my grandmother’s hand between the curtains. The fog of her breath. She’s really into whatever my ex is doing to her, and I try not to be jealous, but Ethel doesn’t work up a fog for just anyone, and I can’t help but wonder why he never did anything, like he’s doing to her, to me.

A jeep pulls into the lot and parks in front of my grandmother’s room. A not hideous guy with red curls and freckles crossing his crooked nose almost falls out, pauses, and climbs back in to turn off the engine. He almost trips as he walks over, eyes the empty spot next to me on the bench before passing. I watch him, because my viewing options are limited, trace the numbers on the doors.

“Good day for 22,” he says, and, at first, I don’t realize he’s talking to me. Why would he? All any guy around here wants is Ethel. Until he’s sitting next to me, our knees touching, and he makes the same comment again.

“We don’t have to talk.”

His thumbs go to war with each other. “You here to see Ethel too?”

Gross.

But maybe it’s because he knows my grandmother’s name instead of asking for mine or saying we look alike, or I remind him of her, or that he moves slightly closer for my answer like he’s interested in what I have to say that I cough and almost drop the red velvet cake and sputter,

“No—yes, it’s not—”

“Are you okay?”

He takes the cake because I’m choking on my spit. He pats my back, and I shake my head, which he must think means no, no, I’m not okay, which is true because my ex, the suppose to marry and have kids with ex, is one of my grandmother’s gentlemen callers.

“I should ruin his car.”

“Seems like a waste of cake.” The red-haired guy smiles, stretching his freckles and it’s almost sweet that he thinks I mean to use the cake as my weapon of destruction.

And, rather than think about how unfair all this is, I remove the lid from the cake. I sink my hand into its center and am surprised that the guy remains still, balancing the cake on his lap.

And I eat. I shovel red velvet chunks into my mouth until it’s full. Until I’m pushing red velvet chunks into his mouth, and he’s shy at first, pulling away until he tastes my fingers and begs for more. His face and neck turn red with cake, or blush, I don’t know, and I don’t care because, on that shit-covered bench, we feed each other and lick the leftovers from each other’s fingers, and through it all, I can see his lips move, and the sound of a door opening escapes and someone asks, “How does it taste?”

“Delicious.”

First Impressions

by Nico M. | Nov 2, 2023 | flash fiction

Step into the Mexican restaurant together, you beautiful protagonists. Shake the drops off your umbrellas.

Wouldn’t’ve guessed it from the Spanish-mission-style façade, but it’s a sprawling interior.

Though it looks like you’re the only patrons there tonight.

The white lights are hospital-bright.

There’s no mariachi music. No burble of conversation. No crunching of tortilla chips.

Just the weather outside.

A lank older woman with a chic black pixie cut asks if you two cutie pies have a seating preference?

Look at each other, at the expanse of empty tables, at each other again. Shrug.

Secretly, sure, you’d both prefer a booth. Cozy, private, off to the side. But you don’t want to assert such a trivial preference on a first date.

No, show that you’re low maintenance. Like it says in your dating profiles. You’ll take whatever.

She has a very special table for Mr. and Mrs. Follow her.

Ha, no, not Mrs., just Ms., you’ve really only just met and—

¡Ay, qué lindo! Young love. She was in love once, too.

Well, um, you’re not in love, ha, you just met on the apps, but—

Oh? Lust, then? Dios mio.

She makes the sign of the cross and seats you at a four-top high-top in the middle of the dining room, smack dab. Here are your menus—bam, bam—Rico’s your waiter, he’ll be with you shortly. Cuties.

She winks, walks back to the host stand.

Your table is directly beneath a papier-mâché catfish, dachshund-sized, with googly eyes and a wispy Fu Manchu that appears to be made of real hair? The thing is suspended by nylon fishing line looped over a ceiling hook.

Don’t say you hate it. Be positive. Smile at each other. Pick up the menus. Hear nothing but the muffled storm.

Would you like tequila?

Who said that?

Look around. Look up.

It’s the ugly catfish.

He seems bigger somehow. Not dachshund but maybe dalmatian-sized now?

His piscine countenance nevertheless betrays his impatience.

Would you like tequila please?

Look at each other. Hope the other will answer first.

Um, sure? Yeah. What does Rico recommend?

Rico recommends the Clase Azul Reposado.

Uh, that sounds good to you, you guess, right? Right. Not that either of you knows shit about tequila. You’ll take two shots of that, please.

Rico thanks you, closes his googly eyes and continues to hang overhead.

Look at each other. Wonder how this works. Like, is Rico going to go and get you the shots somehow or…?

A flash outside and then thunder.

And then, here inside, there’s a sound like something stretching. It seems to be coming from above. Look up. Rico seems to have ballooned to the size of a Rottweiler.

Look over at the host stand. Your hostess is just smiling out at the glass entrance doors, spackled and blurred with droplets.

The ceiling is starting to crack where the hook is anchored.

Scoot your chairs back a bit. You can guess what’s coming.

Boom!

Rico, now the size of a mastiff, has fallen onto your table in a shower of plaster.

You’ve inhaled some dust, gotten some in your eyes.

Cough it out, wave it away, wipe your eyes.

Rico is moaning as he flops and thrashes on the table. His wispy ‘stache is filled with bits of rubble and dust.

¡Ay, pinche…!

Wonder if he’s real enough to ask him if he’s okay, is there anything you two can do to help?

He continues to flop, to gasp, to swear in Spanish.

Look to the oblivious hostess again. Try to flag her down.

No luck.

Get up off your asses, walk over there, tap her on the shoulder.

Yes? Can she help you?

Hi, yes, um, Rico—

She looks over at where she’d seated you two cutie pies. Rico has flopped himself onto the floor now.

Ay, pinche pez.

For a moment, she closes her eyes, bites her lips. Then she crosses herself, opens her eyes.

There’s a tall stack of plastic red buckets by the host stand. She grabs the top two and hands one to each of you. Here, hold these, please. She pulls out a box of latex gloves, tugs one over each of her hands with a stretch and a rubbery slap. She takes a deep breath, grabs a colorful stick that’s leaning against the wall, and leads you back to your table.

The three of you stand around poor Rico as he coughs and struggles on the tile.

The hostess makes the sign of the cross again, raises the stick over her head, and then begins to smash it down on Rico’s bloated belly.

¡Deténgase, por favor!

But she continues. Bam, bam, bam.

¡No, señora, por favor!

She continues until the light goes out from Rico’s googly eyes and his side splits open and it’s quiet and still again, except for the storm outside.

Look on, both of you, in complicit horror as the deed is done. Look on at what you didn’t prevent. Look on at what—it could be argued—you have caused. Realize how tightly you’re holding the handles of your buckets.

The hostess kneels down on the hard floor, grabs each side of the gash in Rico’s flank.

Watch the muscles on her thin arms tense and contract beneath her loose skin as she tears Rico in two with a loud r-r-r-r-rip. Watch a hundred tiny paper fishes spill from his belly onto the floor and begin to flop around. It sounds a little like the rain.

And aren’t you supposed to be the protagonists? Aren’t you supposed to be driving the story instead of watching it? Why are you just standing there, holding those buckets as the hostess scoops up and dumps squirming handfuls of paper into them? Can your consciences hide behind the anonymity of plurality?

The hostess grumbles as her latex hands corral and capture the slippery paper fish.

Ay, so many. Go get her another couple of buckets, cuties. You saw where they’re stacked, yes?

Blooming

by Lucy Zhang | Oct 30, 2023 | flash fiction

Mei turns into a flower whenever we touch. Her pupils blossom into glossy hibiscuses—hues of red and peach and white. They grow from her pores and eat through her skin, treating her flesh as the soil that nourishes them. We tried different things: kissing, hugging, hand-holding. Now, we avoid most skin-to-skin contact because I fear Mei will become a silent flower-doll-corpse rooted in the earth.

Mei wants to have sex, though. She likes the feeling of me running my fingers over her sides until flowers begin blooming along her rib cage. She likes when I touch my mouth to hers until my tongue no longer feels the tight muscle of her tongue but rather the bitter yet fragrant taste of petals choking me. The flowers grow faster the longer I touch her, filling her mouth until she can no longer breathe, although I suspect that in this state, she has no need to. Several minutes later, she reverts to her original self and asks why I don’t stroke her for longer periods of time. She hasn’t seen herself in the mirror. You can’t make love with a person sprouting flowers out of their eye sockets, mouth, limbs, and who-knows-where-else. I’m not even sure Mei is capable of having sex, her body a hibiscus harvesting ground.

“Will you at least hold me then?” Mei asks, turning to the other side so she doesn’t face me on the bed. I indulge her request briefly since I feel bad saying no to everything else. I hold Mei in my arms until the first flower blossoms completely. She cries when I carry her to her bed and close the door as I leave so the flowers can wither away properly.

I don’t crave touch like Mei does. Supposedly when I was born, I wouldn’t stop crying until my mother put me down and took several steps back with her hands raised as though to promise she’d do no harm. It creeps me out a bit: someone’s hands clammy and tight over your limbs, suffocating your skin. Skin is meant to breathe, lined with pores that resemble pathways to the outside.

Whenever I stroke Mei, she purrs while I shut my eyes and try not to focus on her limbs. The moment I stop feeling the slick sweat, my fingers slightly moist as they flow from uneven patches of flakey skin to silky petals erupting over her body, I retract my hand. I would rather touch the flowers, honestly—they’re softer, more delicate, like clouds cushioning the pads of my fingers instead of the skin and flesh dragging them down. I tell Mei that making love resembles drowning and that she wouldn’t like it at all.

“Do you think this happens because I’m actually the descendant of some god?” Mei asks, gesturing to the half of her face that has been overrun by the roots and tiny buds yet to bloom. “I’m just built differently and will probably outlive a regular human. Like a god, you think?”

I look Mei in the eyes even though all I see are flower pistols and the bulge where their ovaries grow. She insists we make eye contact when we’re intimate, but when I look away, she rarely notices. I suspect she can no longer see when the plants overrun her pupils.

“You’re probably closer to a god than anything else I’ve seen,” I say.

“Really? Do you mean that?” Mei places her hands on her cheeks to feel the petals and plucks one straight from her eye socket. “It doesn’t hurt at all. This has got to be nature’s way of protecting me.”

“From what?”

“Everything, I guess. The world is always out to get you, you know. ”

Mei likes to speak in ambiguities. She can’t even explain to me what she wants from the grocery store—“something sweet” or “something that makes me feel like using three spoons with two hands”—so I’ve learned to translate her needs over the years. It’s not an exact science though, and sometimes I misinterpret her words and think she wants to sleep when really she wants to paraglide, or that she wants feta cheese instead of kimchi. I used to think Mei didn’t know what she wanted, but her furrowed eyebrows and slumped figure whenever I got it “wrong” meant a “right” and “wrong” existed. She wouldn’t say it out loud—only sigh and grumble and collapse into herself like a crushed foil sculpture.

“But I’m here to protect you.” I swing my arms around Mei, wrapping her so her back is flushed against my chest. The flowers grow from beneath her bra strap, forcing their way over the elastic until my body is what’s crushing them rather than the spandex. It’s a light touch, almost unnoticeable with how thin and delicate each growth is, but they tickle my stomach and spill over our sides, growing larger with vines winding along our arms and wrapping around my wrist.

“Do you know what kind of flower these are?” I wonder.

Mei twists her head over even though she can’t see in her state. She can’t even speak anymore, her mouth stuffed with petals and hairy stalks.

I withdraw, pushing her to the side of the bed so she has a chance to let the flowers wither off and her organs regenerate the gaps filled by hibiscuses. For a moment, my hand slides through her ribs where a bouquet has now shriveled, leaving caved-out organs and half-decayed lungs, more shell than flesh. I scoop away the wilted plants, holding them delicately in case they can still feel, in case the pleasure Mei desires carries over to her remains, alive and thriving like tiny gods in my palm

At World’s End

by Vincent Anioke | Oct 26, 2023 | flash fiction

I’m giving Kayode Last-Name-Pending a pretty accomplished blowjob in the back of my rented Subaru when Jesus Christ returns. He’s a theatrical man (Jesus, I mean; Kayode, I met minutes ago at a bar), announcing the onset of rapture in a whirl of lightning and wind. No trumpets, though, so Ma was only half-right. Rapture lasts five seconds. We are flanked by mangroves in a deserted stretch of the woods, so we miss the immediate consequences of sudden vanishing. Driverless cars mowing pedestrians, leashed dogs barking at empty air, spines crushed by panicked feet. As the skies calm, we separate, our faces alarmed in the moonlight. We do not know yet that we have been left behind.

**

Kayode says that one hundred years ago, a flutist moved to his father’s village. By day, the flutist was a nuisance preaching about the One True God, delegating Amadioha, Agwu, even child-gifting Ala to the realm of horseshit. By night, though, he played his flute at the square, finely carved wood bewitching every woman and child to dance. Soon after, verdant rows of maize blackened overnight. Livestock collapsed and rotted. After the streams turned a foul red, swallowing swimming children, a flock of famished men encircled the flutist. No villager intervened. Perhaps they wanted to see if his special New God offered protection. They watched as his flute shattered beneath boots, as snot bubbles popped above his pleading lips, as the cutlass flashed. His body was plucked clean for meat until the blight subsided, but there remained–forever–a silence where his flute once sang.

**

Cars and keke napeps stretch backward into a smoke-plumed horizon. Cooking flesh reeks off a danfo bus burning on the median. Kayode disembarks from the Subaru, and there is no question that I must follow. The roadsides are clogged too. A gray-haired man drops to his knees, arms raised high. Were mu bikozie, he shrieks at the clouds. But they do not take him away. Morning light punches holes in the sky when we find the bungalow with shattered windows. The door is ajar. Kayode can’t move inside until he takes my hand. We find rectangular imprints on floral wallpapers where photos once hung. Empty closets and freezers too. A heat-charred pot remains. Shelves filled with books about the Biafran war. A pink bicycle slants lopsided against a pink door. And in the cobwebbed, unfurnished basement lies a motionless cat. Poison, Kayode thinks, bending to stroke its patchy fur. The words trapped in my throat tumble out as vomit. Kayode takes a step back.

**

Kayode, too, has wandered the lands searching for a nameless thing. Not family because he learned the worth of blood when his parents found his journal–those detailed sketches of men on men–and decided to send him to some camp. He emptied their safe of its naira stacks while they slept and vanished forever. Not intellectual fulfillment because he only lasted six months at the university in Kaduna. Not hedonism either. When the cruise boat left the shores, a handsome man on the deck bar introduced himself in a way that suggested he’d stick to Kayode’s side all week. Kayode jumped overboard, swimming and swimming until he was back on solid ground.

**

No new storms rip the skies apart. The bungalow owners do not return. Kayode prefers the floorboards to the bed, so we shift as one against the hardwood. Sleep is elusive, so we memorize the landscapes of our lips, which soon becomes the kind of mutual crying that persists until no tears are left. His breathing is ragged. I hold his air in my lungs. We take long walks to chase the setting sun. We return from scavenges with carts of canned tuna. We find barbershops turned churches, crowds overspilling onto several lanes of gravel. They sing with their whole bodies, sweating, wailing in tongues. Atop a bridge, four men link their arms and jump. In the splatter, it is impossible to discern what belonged to whom. We argue: friends or brothers? Maybe strangers. There is a video online of a famously antigay pastor vanishing mid-sermon with half his congregation. Turns out Ma was right about that too. Kayode turns off his phone and goes down on me, his motion surprising in its confidence.

**

I have fled men I loved, men who loved me, brothers, sisters, my own potential. I used to drive hundreds of kilometers to nowhere. On the plains of Sokoto, at the last full moon, I found a forest. There, I found a pit full of dead parakeets, but for one on the edge, still fluttering. When I clasped Ifesinachi in my palm, he flapped his wings as if trying to flee. I wiped his bloodied beak with the edge of my sleeve. On the drive to the nearest veterinarian, I thought of how discovery can be so particular as to feel predestined. How predestination can feel like purpose. This had to be mine–nursing Ifesinachi to full health, granting him new life within the remnants of my world. Miyetti Veterinary gleamed in the distance when Ifesinachi squawked one last time. Still, I went in, plopped his dead body on the desk of a stunned receptionist–he is my whole world; fix him now.

**

There are no stars tonight. We are swaying barefoot on a hammock in the backyard when I mention my renewed fear of dying. Kayode Salau floats a theory that has been on his mind for a while. Maybe each of us belongs to the domain of a certain force. Like the raptured souls belong to Jesus, but the rest of us belong elsewhere–isn’t that why we exist? To solve for x, even if the search destroys us, makes broth of our bones. I want to say we don’t exist for any reason, but my ear is pressed to Kayode’s chest, and beneath the skin, there is the unmistakable melody of a flutist’s song. We rise–me and him–and dance until our stone-pierced soles bleed.