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The stars put out their lamps 

And the night wailed

When my prize was stolen

#

The chilly harmattan air slapped my face as my eyes fluttered open. For a few seconds, my mind struggled to make sense of where I was. The sour, earthy smell of local fermented brew, burukutu, filled my nostrils, settling like a stone in my throat. Oddly distant voices drifted to me. The idle chatter of people drinking. People laughing.

I looked down. A milky once-white singlet clung to my chest, while a brown towel was knotted at my waist. Dust clung to my bare feet. My heart tightened in alarm. Where was I? Why was I dressed like this? Who were these people? A faint memory flickered in quick shots. Shadows in a room. A woman’s voice calling my name. Then a scream tore through the air.

Iyuana!

My twin sister’s voice. In an instant, it all came back. I staggered to my feet and rushed towards the traditional maternity clinic. Ngukulen, her closest friend, stood by the doorway, the lines on her face seemed deeper than yesterday.

“Why are you out here?” I asked, breathless.

“Where did you go to?” she said, her voice dull with exhaustion. She looked past me briefly, then away. 

“Don’t worry. She doesn’t need me,” she said, bitterness cutting through. “She—”

I ran past her into the compound. A small crowd had gathered in the courtyard between the large hut and the smaller birthing room. I seized the arm of a frail-looking man.

“Where is Iyuana?”

He pointed to the smaller hut. My heart hammered like a drum.  Inside, the room was empty. I found her lying on a mat in the cool shade behind the hut. An old woman stood by her, murmured a greeting, and slipped away.

“Hey,” Iyuana said softly. She lifted her hand and tried a smile.

I knelt and took her hand. My mind wandered to the poems she used to write when words alone would not do. Some of our friends had called her lines too cryptic, like Okigbo or Soyinka or early Servio Gbadamosi. I always thought they were more like Niyi Osundare, Hyginus Ekwuazi, Romeo Oriogun, or Agema, easy to take in without losing their beauty. I was more prose and CNF, letting the poetry slip in if needed, like rice and beans. But, there was more on my mind at that moment as I stared at my sister. I could see the pain shining clearly in her eyes. The question of why she had chosen to keep the baby despite everything lodged in my mind.

“Don’t speak,” I said softly.

But she did.

“I told them… I told them there was no need to be kept inside,” she said in a thin voice.

Then my eyes caught the red stain on her wrapper. My throat dried, the world tilted. I felt myself leaning over her, lowering her head onto my lap, stroking her hair with a shaky hand. 

Was the baby dead? Had she forgiven me? Could she? My eyes burned as tears gathered. Somewhere beneath the surface, memories stirred. The smell of palm wine. A curtain swaying in lamplight. I pushed it down, but it came up forcefully.

~

He wakes slowly in the early morning to find himself lying in the sitting room. He does not sleep there. He never has. But it is not the place that unsettles him, it is the way he finds himself.

The events of the night before creep back in fragments. Out with friends. Their teasing. How long will you pretend you don’t drink? No parents around to see. Palm wine is not real alcohol, he told himself. Just one calabash.

It became many.

He made it home somehow, too tired to reach his room. 

But waking now, he feels strangely spent. His trousers are unbuttoned, his private part exposed. He hurriedly adjusts himself, glancing around to be sure no one has seen him like this.

That is when he notices her.

Iyuana. Curled in the corner, shoulders trembling.

“Iyuana, what is it?”

She wails in reply and forcefully pushes his hands away when he rushes to her side to try to comfort her. Later, she leaves for Ngukulen’s. She will not speak to him, no matter how often he visits. When at last she does, she says two men came that night with machetes, dragged her from her room into the sitting room, and took turns with her.

The story feels disturbingly familiar, though he tells himself it is only his imagination. The way she chooses her words tells him there is more, but she will not say it.

It is Ngukulen who fills in the rest: how the men ignored him as he stumbled in; how she called to him; how he stood swaying; how he unzipped, touched himself, and spent himself at the sight of everything, before collapsing.

~

“What happened?” I asked the old woman at the maternity home.

“The baby came, but your sister lost a lot of blood,” she said, shaking her head. “Small girl like that… in our days, we were stronger. You children of nowadays—”

I turned away before she could finish.

When I went back, Iyuana was cradling the baby. Dark skin against her lighter tone, tiny limbs held in arms lined with strain. She was still smiling. Weakly. This time, proud and pained in the same breath. 

My throat burned. I realised, with a horror too neat to be reasonable, that I had no space left for grief. I had spent it all fearing this moment. I hated the little thing in her arms. I hated our parents for casting her out. And I hated myself most of all.

I had come to the village after weeks of searching. It had taken longer than it should have, not because the road was far, but because shame is a slow traveller. When I finally found her, I did what I could: bought food, fetched water, paid for little things that added up to almost nothing in the face of her condition. She spoke little to me, as if each word had to be sifted through memory first. I had decided to visit the burukutu hut to keep my sanity and that is where I had found myself that morning after passing out.

When Iyuana had smiled at me earlier that day, I thought, foolishly, that something had shifted. But I wasn’t so sure anymore. Hardly anything made sense.

“Take care of our child for me,” she said suddenly, holding the baby out.

The words jarred me.

I took the baby without thinking, keeping my eyes on her face. She was watching me with a look I could not read. And then, her expression froze.

A sound rose from deep inside me, a long, raw howl I could not control.

Behind me, sobs broke. I turned to see Ngukulen, her hands covering her face. When I looked back at Iyuana, she was still, her features softening in a way that almost looked like peace.

I wiped my eyes with the hem of my singlet, then looked down at the baby. The child’s tiny face scrunched in a yawn. If I had the power to burn with my eyes, she would not have drawn another breath. I thrust the baby into Ngukulen’s arms, who sank to the ground, still crying. My mind was already working, with the beginnings of a plan forming like a shadow under a closed door.

~

Grief slowed the air, thickened it, and made each hour crawl. The days dragged like years.

How could I care for the child of a useless robber? The thought became a constant, pounding like a drum in my skull. Every time the baby cried, I heard my sister in two different periods. The first, of her calling my name as if from the drunken night, and the second a silent echo of her last charge.

I decided I would not.

One afternoon, I went to Ngukulen’s hut. She stepped out to fetch something, leaving me with the sleeping baby, her tiny fist curled under her cheek. I reached into my pocket and brought out the twist of paper I had been carrying for some time. The powder inside was fine, almost innocent-looking.

I mixed it with water in a small cup. My hands felt steady, too steady. I raised the cup, tilted it towards the baby’s lips.

She opened her eyes.

Even at that age, the resemblance was plain. The line of the nose, the curve of the brow. Blood calling blood. My mind flickered to a thought I tried to crush at once: perhaps this was my new twin.

The door creaked.

Ngukulen stepped back in. I set the cup down without a word.

“I’m leaving for the city,” I said. “To tell our parents what they have done.”

She hesitated. “We can go together in two days’ time.”

“I need to get there now,” I replied. “Perhaps they’ll be happy to hear the news.”

She didn’t argue. Instead, she reached into the folds of her wrapper and drew out a note.

“She told me to give this to you… if anything happened.”

I opened it. Her handwriting stared back at me. Lines, always lines, when it mattered most.

It was titled ‘The One Man Who Did.’ The words were easy to understand, her usual way when the message was too heavy to be hidden. I read slowly, each line hammering the truth I had been avoiding.

When I reached the last line, the room swayed. My knees gave way.

Not two, but one.

The paper slipped from my hands and landed on the floor, light as ash.

I sat there, the world around me blurred, my body folding in on itself as if trying to hide from what it had just learned. My ears rang. The hut felt smaller, the air thick.

The baby made a small sound, and I looked at her. She stared back at me with a gaze too direct for her size, as though she knew what I had read, what I had done, what I had not done. My chest tightened until it hurt. The truth had not crept into me; it had torn its way in. The faces of those two imagined men dissolved, and there was only mine.