After a decade and a half, it is difficult to tell why his mother sent him on an errand to a place he used to only go on the sly.
His mother: African, two closed ear piercings and about four years before her first gripe of rheumatism. What she has on possibly smells faintly singed. A fabric that has evaded two housefires during the Sharia Riots in the 2000s.
There is a high likelihood she was wearing a wrapper that is pretty much a wax-print fabric with blue stars in different sizes on a vibrant yellow background. This is one among the cheapest textiles she must’ve grudgingly picked from her collection in an age-worn, navy blue portmanteau. ‘Grudgingly’, because these camphor-scented lace fabrics and ankara are hand-me-downs from her late mother. Keepsakes of sorts.
Place her outdoors sitting at the front of our neighbor’s house across from hers. The door with a vantablack twenty-five litter gallon beside a plastic basin full of kerosene measuring containers. You cannot ask why she sits there. It’s her favorite spot. For fresh air, she has said and wouldn’t mind saying it for the umpteenth time.
Place her left leg across the right. Tickle her soles till she jiggles them. Mistranslate the rhythmic, low-frequency hum of houseflies as they manifest a toe laceration.
Place a lime green plastic tray on her lap to shell melon seeds in. Thread her short hair after the portrait of Abiodun Kumuyi. Then wind it around with a black velvet turban.
Beside the rear legs of the white plastic chair, place a small radio as old as the evening broadcast of General Sani Abacha’s death in ‘98. Turn the tuning knob so that it hisses with interference. Or turn down its volume so that a neighbor’s greeting from a distance drifts within earshot. It’s safe to assume this is the fiftieth and a half person she’s exchanged pleasantries with in twenty minutes.
Her son: the boy is still a few inches shy of the mark on the wooden shelf he uses to track his height. He has her wide nasal base nose, her steel sponge hair, her downcast eyes and soft palms he’d grow up to be shamed for, living mildly repulsed by handshakes.
He has just finished bathing. Coming out to play, she has likely sent him a pair of times to go apply more Baby Care petroleum jelly on his ashy face till she could see the tiny beauty mark somewhere below her lower lip. Or her mother’s face staring sullenly behind hers.
The place: an orchard. It is a thriving good chain and ecosystem for trees, birds, bats, snakes, insects, feral cats, bush babies, child abductors, and tree spirits located down a long, sloping path winding through the water border that splits Ungwan Boro and Jan Ruwa.
Possible reasons for her errand: she’s craving kerosene mangoes because she is pregnant with her fifth child. Or he has finished all his house chores like an obedient child and might as well do one more thing to appease her for coming last in his class.
The woman is my mother. I am her son. Her first son. We call the orchard lambu.
∆
I set forth for the grove, holding a threadbare black Bagco super sack. I walked the tipper-truck rutted pathway sloped like the spine of a sitting cat. This is Moroa street.
Due to the absence of drainages, it has deep wounds gushing terracotta colored rainwater. On some of them, you could possibly find whitish ruins of paper boats my friends and I sailed in our micro desalinated Libyan Sea.
Between my mother’s right flipflop and the foot of the kerosene mango tree is a distance the length of about five football fields cut by a blue skyline.
There were a couple of houses on both sides of the street. Some were newly completed, others still unfinished but already inhabited by new families.
The swamp signals the presence of the body-hungry Firoro river. Most people call it by that name, but given how narrow and far-removed this water is from the actual river that widens into a resort and a sanctuary for many, I’d rather it be nameless, or be simply referred to as a crossing.
Across its makeshift bridge that is the long trunk of a felled palm tree, I transgress the territory of diurnal creatures. Disputing my kinship with nature, I interrupt with a stone, the antiphony of village weavers, northern red bishops, African grey hornbills, and the piapiacs. Sadly, this makes me no different from the men who would draw the curtain on everything in a few years. End it just when I find a place for my voice among them.
At the foot of my mother’s desired tree species, I began to look for bitten windfalls or stones to pelt ripe mangoes with. And just then, found a grey-feathered bird lying face down on the damp loam. Stalling for time, I nudged its weightless body over with a foot, and recognized it at once what it was: an owl. The very bird from an illustration plate in my father’s unbound dictionary.
More than any curio I found worthy enough to clutter my father’s drawer, this was one I was beside myself with joy seeing. How beyond belief it felt would only be plausible to claim it fell out between the foxing pages of my father’s dictionary. I was finally encountering the last boss of superstition, the very symbol of an undesirable omen in the flesh, and it looked all wrapped in enigma—the crossbreed between a feral cat and a sage that lives on the nightward half of the moon.
Brimming with astonishment, I hurriedly put it in my bag and headed home, sprinting toward my mother who was still sitting where I left her.
“Mummy, mummy!” I called from a hop, skip, and jump away.
“I wan show you something!” I said eagerly, opening the bag.
If at all there was curiosity spelled across her face, it was overwritten with the pressing question: “Where di mango wey I send you?”
“I get wetin better pass mango” I vaunted, dipping my hand inside the bag, bringing out the carcass whose sight was met with a face contorted so that it mirrored acid rain clouds. What followed after was an ear splitting “Blood of Jesus!” and a wild chase on barefoot down four blocks till she stubbed her toe against an iron rod jutting from a broken culvert.
I didn’t know what I was expecting led blind by wonder. I really didn’t. In my few years of being a boy, I had never known adults to be truly happy, but most especially about anything that fluttered in the small hands of children. Not our grasshoppers, butterflies and dragonflies that got smothered in the eyes of Brother Miri. Not the music box, a friend, Joboy, found in a dumping ground before the eyes of his Uncle, Akpan. Not the winged termites that swarmed the yellow exterior lightbulb of Uncle Kunle whenever his generator came on. Not the flapping tails and fins of tilapia or catfish in our buckets before the eyes of my father. Nothing to remember of their faces or names isn’t tied to persecution for a glimmer of delight. Lamentably, my mother was one of them. Even if I’d seen her be just a girl sometimes. Even if I’d seen her be just a girl sometimes.
She hobbled along through a few neighbors who had laughed and cheered me to pick up the pace. Watching from a safe distance, a smile tugged wryly at my lips as I realized I was—as my mother would put it—in hot soup.
Seething with a holy rage through the people who watched, I could almost hear her tell them, “If you see wetin dey inside that boy bag, una go help me catch am, make I flog am well well.” Her words made no difference on them. Their identification with the villain was stronger than reason. No one cared to ask what my offense was, even if the incriminating evidence was right there in my possession. An ‘agent of darkness’ who could be blamed for the death of anyone who is coincidentally within the radius of its presence.
From where she stood, she hollered out “Better trowey that rubbish and bring my mango or no enter my house.” After which, she limped away. I was sorry for her, but sorrier for myself if my father shared the same old wives’ tale. Or worse—the health risk involved in touching a dead animal with my bare hands. Knowing who he was, he’ll burn the bag and never let me touch anything of his for as long as I lived under his rusty corrugated roof, so that I could begin to entertain the temptation of cutting them off with his hacksaw.
I dug a hole, laid the poor bird face up in it, covered it up with the dust that had settled and stabbed a small handwoven crucifix in it.
The next morning, I found its grave unearthed. The owl’s feathers were scattered around a red-painted kiosk balanced on four huge rocks, leaving enough space beneath it to shelter my neighbor’s pregnant dog, Usher.
Soon after, Usher dropped off the face of the earth, and I was left to wonder what to think. Even when every finger secretly pointed to one man, something in me fiercely wanted to be to blame for it.
∆
All I know about raccoons, I learned mostly from people who utterly despise them on the internet. But I began to catch on to the fact that it wasn’t that they were loathed solely for existing with the aura of waste bins, but that they’re abhorred because of the problems they cause around homes. Problems such as trash raiding, spreading diseases, attacking pets and damaging properties.
A far cry from what I felt about owls, I had no real intrigue for them except that they made the funniest memes, cartoon characters and GIFs. With their black-masked eyes and small, primate-like hands clutching their food as they ate, I couldn’t see them beyond their unpopular cuteness, if not sentient, when you stared intensely into their beady, dark eyes.
I had also come across a good many YouTube shorts of them that didn’t report them getting shooed off properties, but also videos of folk in their messy attempts to domesticate them. Among them is a sad but hilarious viral video where a raccoon tries to wash a cotton candy in a bowl of water and when it vanishes, appears to be genuinely in a fog.
Rogers, my friend from church, once asked me to guess what his spirit animal would be if he had one. When I said a raccoon, he laughed sourly and asked why I thought so. I startled myself by how swiftly I came up with something about raccoons representing cleverness, quick-thinking or problem solving. He seemed less scathed by whatever I unconsciously insinuated. I believed he was, until he was rummaging through a mountain of clutter at the backseat of his car to give me a water bottle I’d mislayed, looked me in the eye and said, “I feel like a raccoon doing this”. I didn’t know how it would have helped to tell him I feel like a goat when I chew sugarcane. It made no sense whatsoever. He is American. Americans do not chew sugar cane. I fought off the urge. We looked at each other from both rear doors of his car for a brief second. He got the distant allusion. I joined him and said, “makes two of us” laughing until I touched something viscid.
One evening, out for a stroll on Spottswood Ave, a foul smell filled my nose just as I was leaving the parking lot of my block. When I traced the Ariadne’s thread of the odor to its source, I found a raccoon lying motionless at the foot of an algae-covered wayside tree.
“It’s dead,” an old, white man on the sidewalk said to me as he passed by.
The next morning, I steeled myself up against the expected stench to give it a proper look in the sun, but couldn’t find it: hands, fur and smell. Gone.
∆
Thanks to my father’s obsessive replays of the same ole cassettes in his Sony radio, my ears grew fatigued listening to Nigerian highlife. What I found particularly unforgettable were the nights he would internally agonize in a way that spilled something soulful from the corner of his eyes. It happened whenever Rex Jim Lawson yodeled gloomy lyrics from the speakers. On other occasions, he would laugh in a track or two, but only the way that made you feel some vague heaviness inside. It rang surreal in my ears, and my puzzlement only grew more profound when he admitted he didn’t even know what language the musician sang in. Still, he would sing along, saying a few words he could barely pronounce, and punctuate the tracks with his sighs, or the names of his dead. It was an identical ritual playing Jim Reeves as well. He would tell me about the singer’s tragic death in a plane crash, describing it as if he were present in the flight, falling from the sky where Reeves’s pianist sat.
He never played Fela, but often quoted, or frequently misquoted him in meetings to bring a bit of levity. Never with his church members, though. Any music or figure that wasn’t gospel or in the Lord’s army was worldly. Whenever Fela did play on the FM radio, he called me from wherever I was and told me who it was that sang till I knew his sound better than he did to tell it apart from Femi Kuti’s, Antibalas’ or Lágbájá’s.
However, when it came to Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, Okpan Aribho or Oliver De Coque, he let loose. This happened usually after he had had dinner. His favourite: steaming boiled yams cut into chunks in a ceramic dish, palm oil, crayfish, crushed roasted catfish, and ground fresh pepper, all mixed in an evwere at a rolling boil.
Tall as a tree, hairy as a wooly mammoth, and ironwood-muscled, his friend, Samkot, always teased him about becoming a wrestler. I had to admit there was truth in what he said. While he danced, you could hear the sound of water mix with the oil in his stomach. You could hear it slosh against the dark walls of his pauched belly. He sweated buckets while riding the groove, and sometimes would close my books, grab me by the wrist of my small hands and pull me to his small dance floor. Without his knowing, I lowered the volume bit by bit until he didn’t notice when the music began to lose its hold on him.
One of those songs I had grown tone deaf to, reclaimed their place in my head as the latest earworms. I gave in to their nostalgic insistence and played them on the night of the first day of May in 2020.
Even though I had lapsed in my faith, I only still listened to devotional Christian music. In some, I found a soporific alternative to Enya, Kenny G or Yanni. Bethel Music for a good night’s rest; Hillsongs for day time vibes. But it grew impossible to resist this. I downloaded all the songs from a piracy app I could find that reminded me of his private whimsies.
I played each track and choreographed his graceless moves. I would reduce the volume and hear the water move in my belly just like his. I laughed at myself. I felt like I was making a fool of myself. I have to admit it felt freeing. It was the only time I ever felt beautiful playing someone else that wasn’t Michael Jackson.
The next morning, I shuffled Fela’s “Water No Get Enemy”, “Shakara (Oloje)”, “Shuffering and Shmiling” and “Zombie” till my landlady asked me to turn down the volume of my portable speaker. I guess he was too raw for her ears. I kept the volume up. I had brought out three empty plastic buckets, a sachet of Ariel detergent, and my clothes to wash at my doorstep. I then stepped out to fetch water from a tap running at a nearby mosque. By the time I returned, the music had stopped playing. I checked my phone and saw that I had missed six calls. They were all from a new number.
The number called back. “Is this Martins?” the voice asked. It was a man’s. It was hoarse, and sounded as if his larynx was abraded with sandpaper. The voice was slightly familiar even as the noise in the background and the poor network made it indistinct.
“Yes,” I answered, “Who am I speaking with, please?” I asked, trying to mask my impatience.
“Your father is in a critical condition and has been taken to the hospital,” the voice replied.
“Wrong number,” I responded, and ended the call.
I began to wash my clothes after replaying a song, but the call interrupted it again. Twice this time. I picked it up.
“Hello, Martins,” he said, his voice straining against the noise around him.
“My name Pastor Adesina,” he said, “Your father is dead. We have taken his corpse to the mortuary. Come back home now!” And ended the call.
My hands trembled like a dozen electric eels swam in my veins, my phone almost loosened from my grip.
When my younger brother, Lawrence, called, I picked up. He didn’t sound unsettled. If at all he was, it was imperceptible. Before I could ask him to confirm the news I had just received, he blurted out, “Martins, una popsy don die o. Daddy don die”.
This happened during the first two-week COVID-19 lockdown in Nigeria. I was languishing in a small room in Samaru, Zaria, while most students left for home. My excuse for staying back was that I needed time to read or that my friends weren’t in town to bother going back to Kaduna.
I hurriedly went to get a haircut at a barbershop a stone throw away from the mosque. While the barber cut my hair, my eyes glistened and leaked lukewarm tears. He gave me tissues to wipe them with and asked what was wrong. I told him the news and he sighed. But it was language enough to translate into condolence. He turned off the music he was playing and cut my hair in silence.
When he was done, he declined accepting payment from me, crumpled a thousand naira note in my hand and wrapped it with my fingers into a fist. It was the exact amount I needed to return home. I thanked him and left.
When I got to the house where my family lived in Ungwan Boro, mourners had gathered sympathizing with my mother. They were women I recognized from over three Deeper Life districts.
The street was packed with people I hadn’t seen in years. Their faces were frozen in disbelief. It must’ve stemmed from the realization that a man so larger than life, whose laughter that seemed destined to echo endlessly, had abruptly stopped.
While I embraced my mother who was wailing on the floor, I was gently called away by Pastor Adesina, a leggy, talkative man. He called me to his church member’s car and drove my brother, Stanley, and I to St. Gerard’s morgue. Even though I was still sore about the way he broke the news of my father’s death to me, I could tell he was a kind and a mild-mannered man. I excused him, telling myself that was simply the way he spoke. His intention earned him my grace.
While the pastor stood outside the morgue and waited, Stanley followed me into the mortician’s office. We walked behind the man who made us enter our identification in a register. He joked about my minimalist signature and patted me on the back in a way I found strangely reassuring.
He led us through a strip curtain, to the end of the big hall where my father laid, uncovered a thick dirty shroud over his body and left us alone. He was in the altogether.
The half-lit hall looked like we had walked into a mixed hostel at 2:00 a.m. Everyone looked fast asleep. There were many bodies lying on wooden bunks. Some, like his, were covered with dirty palls, while most were uncovered.
Except for the rancid odor of formalin and the ventilator that spun with a mournful whirr, the morgue reminded me of being in the sculpture garden of my school. It felt less unsettling.
I looked at the naked body of my father. There was a postmortem incision in his upper left thigh. He had a yellowish drop of fluid below his left eye. His body had withered. He looked just as he did when he slept, snoring in a way that made you think of a blunt chainsaw cutting through a tree. His mouth was slightly open as if he had just spoken the last syllable in the last words he told me.
His last words to me…
For the three years I studied at Ahmadu Bello University, my father never phoned. Not once. I never called either. In 2017, he washed his hands off my schooling. It was his wish for me to work like every other boy my age in Ungwan Boro. He would harshly compare me to a few of them and punish my refusal by burning whatever books I had left in the house. I knew how to read already, he’d say. What point was there in furthering? And literally, washed his hands in a yellow bowl in my presence and threw the water away.
It wasn’t as though he had ever helped with my fees before, it was just the residue of the son left in me invoking fatherhood from him.
When he did call me and I saw Daddy appear on my screen, I sat up from my bed, wondering whether to pick up the call or decline it.
I did the former. It was my mother’s voice.
She never called me, either. I had kept track. The last time I spoke to her was eight months prior to the call. I promised not to be the one always reaching out and quit. The radio silence was loud.
When I expressed my shock to her, she laughed. I asked her why she didn’t call me with her line and she said she had no credit. It was her usual alibi.
She confessed it was my father’s idea to reach out. Said he wouldn’t stop bothering her about it. When I told her I could tell, she asked me how. I said I could hear his voice in the background.
She was parroting him. She didn’t know what to say after eight months of not reaching out to her son. I tried not to make it awkward and made our conversation light-hearted. I asked her to pass him the phone. I heard her tell him in Urhobo that I wanted to talk to him directly. I could swear he must’ve hesitated and regretted the idea for a few tense seconds before finally speaking: Genero mavo?
We chatted like two friends who were out of sight for ages. We bantered about Nigerian politics, about COVID-19 and how the government lied to the world about the death toll of the pandemic. He told me he was bored to tears. That movement was highly restricted in Kaduna and it was difficult to buy foodstuffs. He figured that since it was only two weeks, he might as well use it to sleep. He said my mother misses me and promised me a bottle of Pepsi if I look in on them.
We spoke for about five minutes and said our goodnights. This was on Thursday, April 30, 2020. His last word to me was goodnight.
He died two days later. It was on a Saturday morning after complaining to my younger brothers about a sharp pain in his chest. The postmortem report confirmed the cause of his death was a heart attack.
The first time I would see my father as a friend in my adult life. The first time he would give me his word to share a quiet indulgence with his prodigal son. A bottle of soda. A drink more priced than a king’s ransom remains eternally a promise.
As Stanley stood behind me like the tail between my hind legs, he began to weep. I led him out of the morgue to Pastor Adesina who was waiting for us by the car with a bottle of cheap Arabian Oud.
After two spritzes of the perfume on my shirt, I briefly forgot the smell of rot.
Martins Deep is a poet, photographer, and digital artist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma Poetry, The Minnesota Review, FIYAH, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2025 Furious Flower Poetry Prize, selected by aracelis girmay, and a finalist for the 2025 Porter House Review Editor’s Prize. Find him on X at @martinsdeep1.