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“How did you kill her?” I ask, my fingers shaking as I try to steady the pen over my unlined note.

Debo stares at me square in the face. His eyes are empty, soulless. I’ve never seen anything like this—a lack of regard for anything. It’s haunting.

I try not to squirm at his empty eyes, even though they crack me open on the inside, reaching to squeeze my intestines.

“I took her to the bathroom,” he replies, and his lips curve. A ghost smile passes over his face. “And I did what I had to do.”

The smile is no longer ephemeral. It stays on his face, etching into skin, pulling muscles apart. It’s a sickle.

“And what did you have to do?”

I want to get the information correctly. I shudder at the man in front of me. Remorseless. Murderer.

“I killed her, of course. I cut off her head.”

He makes a sawing motion with his hand, painting a grotesque picture in my mind. His fingers become paintbrushes, weaving blood in the air. I clamp my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming. His leg moves slightly, causing the polythene bag to crackle. I know what’s inside the bag without even having to reach forward. The stench is everywhere. It’s horrible, sickening. It’s in my mouth, my hair, my nostrils, my brain. The smell of rotten flesh.

My stomach rumbles. I push myself from the chair before the vomit reaches my tongue. It spills on the sand—yellow clumps of half-digested egusi and rice I had for breakfast. The small grains look like maggots, thick and ugly with shimmering bodies. They’re in the polythene bag, writhing underneath the skin of Soraya’s severed head.

I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. The taste of vomit is in my mouth, along with pieces of food stuck between my teeth. Debo’s laugh rouses me from the ground.

“What? Why are you vomiting?”

I’m still on the ground, my knees in the dirt. “You’re asking me that?”

“Ahan. It’s not like I did anything wrong. I just killed her. Simple.”

I bring myself to my feet. My hands shake. My teeth clench. My blood boils.

But I’m a journalist. My job is to record these events, to let the world know. It’s because of people like this that I hate my job. I—

“You don’t have to think too much,” he smiles.

It’s another soulless smile. One borne from a twisted sense of justice.

“I let myself be caught nau. If you think the police can catch me on their own, they’re joking. I gave myself up ni o. Because I did the right thing.”

“What do you mean that you did the right thing?” I ask, my pen in my hand once more.

Debo tilts his head and stares at me. This time, his eyes fill with life. He shakes his head once before looking at me.

“I did the right thing!” He screams at me. “Why should I be punished for it?”

I flinch, almost unable to keep still. My hand jumps, and the pen becomes a weapon. I brandish it, the nib poised and pregnant with ink.

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you. You’re not mine. Soraya was.”

Bile claws at my throat, and the taste of vomit becomes a constant, nauseating sensation at the back of my throat. I want to reach the bottle of water at my feet but I can’t. My body shivers. Not because I will it, but because it’s responding to the man before me. Keeping still becomes a Sisyphean task, a cycle of forcing myself to remain in my seat, shaking, and doing the same thing all over again.

Debo is at ease now, relaxed in the plastic chair. His handcuffs rattle. He looks bored.

“You’re not going to ask me questions?” He asks, his voice smug. “Well, if you won’t, I’ll speak by myself.”

“Why?” The words claw their way out of my mouth, my capering thoughts pirouetting in my skull; a roiling mass of words and thoughts and emotions. But, “why,” is all I can muster.

“She cheated on me,” he says after clearing his throat and spitting phlegm onto the sand. “I checked her Facebook. She was following one small boy like that. Raymond. Awon omo nna.”

I catch the tribal slur, feel it wash over my body like oil. My fingers tighten again. I force them to relax, subtly taking deep breaths.

“The boy wasn’t even fine. But he sent her money. Not once. Not even twice. I asked her why a random man was sending her money and she had the guts to tell me they were just friends.

“But he was fucking her jor. When a man starts sending your woman money like that, you just know what’s going on. Plus, her pussy was slack. I knew it wasn’t my size anymore.”

I always believed that I wasn’t capable of hate. I believed it was a feeling like love, almost impossible to conjure. But the visceral repulsion in my gut accompanied with rage told me otherwise. I know that I should be objective, but I find myself slipping into Soraya’s body, feeling her pain as he thrusts into her over and over with enough force to cause large tears in her vagina, pinning her to the sticky bathroom wall. I hear her screams as the cutlass hacks into her skin, her blood spurting on baby blue tiles. I see her blood coagulate and blacken, forming clumps on the floor and swept up by running water from a rusty tap into the drain to be forgotten. I feel her fear, hear her pain, the touch of his body, her resistance, her demise.

I feel her body hovering over me, tickling the back of my neck. I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts or spirits, but I’m sure Soraya would roam around the world without rest.

I thought of all the ways I could jab the pen into Debo’s body. Maybe I’d go for his eyes first. The pen would dig into the vitreous humor, splashing fluid onto my fingers. He’d scream, but I know it won’t be enough. Nothing will be enough. Or I’d jab it into the pulsing vein in his neck, watch the blood spurt on his shirt, and soak through his trousers. Maybe it —

“Igbo boy wan thief my babe,” he smirks. “Well, none of us can have her now. Soraya will always be for me.”

“For you?” I ask.

“She is my property. My babe. She was fucking Raymond, and I knew. She no longer fucked me good. I could tell she was tired of me already. And the girl I love was a sex goddess who never got tired.

“She used to ride me good sha. I’ll miss that. But her WhatsApp messages said otherwise o. She was fucking Raymond, too. And good. That bastard sent his penis pictures to her. Can you imagine? It was big, and that’s what made her pussy slack. Igbo penis. Can you see what he did to me? What she did? I just couldn’t take it anymore. Soraya had to go.”

I always believed a person’s soul was weightless. That it was not bound, and it could float. But Debo’s was made of iron, which has succumbed to rust.

“I sha made sure to fuck her one last time sha before I killed her in the bathroom. And damn, she was sweet. She even cried sef. Stupid girl.”

When I finally found the courage to speak, my voice was brittle. The words had crawled back into my gut and shattered my heart.

“You killed her because she was seeing someone else.”

Debo nods. “She broke up with me sef. For her mind. After I’d caught her red-handed exchanging nudes with Raymond. She now said she wasn’t doing again. Nonsense. She came to pack her things,” he says and laughs. “She didn’t know she’d go out inside the same bag.”

Words clog my tear ducts and stick to my throat. I want to desperately say something, to show my hate. But all I feel is pity. For Soraya. For all the women who’d gone through this.

This is the twelfth case in four months. Femicide. No wonder women didn’t want to have first dates in people’s houses, to stay over, to take walks at night. First, it was Osunde, killed by her boyfriend for rituals. Then it was Rita whose parts they found dumped on the expressway. Funke, raped brutally by Mike and his friends for three days till she died. Deborah, killed in Sokoto for blasphemy. Simi, another rape victim whose name would soon be forgotten except by her loved ones. Teju, also killed by her boyfriend for money to enhance his yahoo business. Shade, abused and beaten until her skull cracked and she bled to death. Ife, her breasts-less corpse found in the house of her youth pastor.

The names of these women bleed into my heart, letter by letter, their stories fully formed from desecrated, mangled bodies and rotting flesh. All of them killed by men who saw them as properties. Men with sickeningly fragile egos who killed women on whims. Men who want everything handed to them on a platter, including their meals brought on well-balanced knees. Men who stalk women at night on the streets to press their breasts and buttocks. Men who rub their penises against women on bikes for the pleasure of ejaculation. Men who love the idea of femininity; who love women who fit into the fold of gracefulness and slenderness to the point of being gaunt, so they could trample on them and break them like porcelain dolls. Men who gang-rape their girlfriends because said girls want an out from the possessive and abusive relationship. Men who slutshame and go as far as beating women who do not dignify their horrible sexual catcalls with responses. Men who shoot women because they seek divorces from abusive relationships. Men who rape women because they want to ‘clear their heads’ and don’t stop even when she cries and begs him to. Men who kill because they couldn’t handle another man being with their ‘property’.

Twelve cases like this in four months. And these are only the reported ones. I think about the women whose deaths would be forever unreported, whose bodies would go missing forever, lost in the bowels of time. Women whose bodies would be battered by their husbands, buried in shallow graves. I think of sex workers who will be killed after sex for asking for their payments, who will enter cars and never return.

I think of David, who has been pestering me for a date at his place. I’ll block him now. It’s a risk I can no longer take. Women are no longer safe. I’m no longer safe.

A raw sob cracks from my throat. It is dry and feral, without tears. I’d cried all of my tears, and all that remains is dust.

“You’ll rot in jail,” I say, closing my empty note. “You didn’t deserve Soraya, you bastard. You’ll never touch another woman again.”

He laughs and lunges forward, pushing the polythene bag out of the way. My thoughts scramble around in my head, consumed by panic. I fall back to the floor, right into my drying vomit. Debo’s hands graze my thighs, but I scramble back, the wetness of my vomit sticking to my skin.

“I touched you now, didn’t I?” he smiles. His eyes shimmer, unstable.

Soraya’s severed head rolls a few inches out of the bag, and gathers dust with every roll until her lifeless, milky eyes land on mine. The skin has festered with decay, the rotting tissue missing in a lot of places and replaced with maggots. Their lurid yellow bodies eat their way through the flesh, and I see pieces of bone picked clean.

Tears spring into my eyes, finally finding their way out. Her hair frames her face, dense and spongy. It is natural hair, untouched by Western chemicals. Lustrous, beautiful. But she doesn’t need the hair anymore. She will never need it. Because she’s dead.

I dust myself from the floor and call the police to take Debo away. I watch as they lead him away, pushing him with the barrels of their guns.

When he’s finally out of sight, I sink to the plastic chair and cry, rubbing my thighs off his touch until they inflame.