The sun over Lagos was showing its inhabitants its tyrannical side that day, as a madness-inducing heat pressed down upon the city's sprawling back.
Some people who were not used to such heat, made an effort to find shade while they carried out their activities. whether it was under an umbrella or a tree or even wearing a paper bag over their head. They all did their best to avoid the direct rays of the sun.
Well a few of them did.
Walking with a loose sway, a lean framed young man who was no stranger to Lagos heat, moved unaffected.
He walked through the streets, while cutting through the market crowds, easily as if he was swimming through the brass rivers.
It was hard to tell whether it was due to skills or the fact he was giving anyone who bothered to glance in his direction 'the look'.
The Hungry man look.
His stomach growled, loudly like an unfed animal and he couldn't help but pat it to calm its complaint.
"soon" He whispered to his hungry belly.
"soon"
He had been walking for 20 minutes, tracing the labyrinth-like path to find his destination was close enough to taste.
And oh, what a taste it would be.
The air thickened as he descended into the belly of the market. Here, the scents of the city was condensed into something almost solid.
With the sharp tang of diesel smoke, the sweet rot of overripe plantains, the earthy musk of yams piled high like sleeping children.
But beneath all of it, threading through the chaos like a golden needle, came the smell he had been wishing for since dawn. Sizzling meat. Caramelizing onions. The low, patient perfume of tomatoes and Scotch bonnets cooking down into something holy.
Auntie's jollof rice.
His bright brown eyes swept across the stalls with the keen attention. The market was like a beast. Breathing with the shouts of vendors and the clatter of pots. With something happening everywhere he looked.
A woman wearing a head wrap, that was the color of sunrise argued with a fish-seller over the price of tilapia. While a child sat cross-legged on a mat, licking the last of a puff-puff from his fingers.
Just as a man balanced a tower of tires on his head, threaded through the crowd with careful stride as if a king was processing to his throne. And there, in the distance, the wail of a siren, always the sirens, somewhere far off, singing its warning to no one in particular.
The young man paid it no mind. The siren was not for him. Nothing bad had ever truly found him since then that incident, and he had grown comfortable in that absence.
He turned a corner, and the sign appeared.
Auntie's Jollof Rice, painted in fading red letters on a sheet of plywood. His heart performed a small cartwheel in his chest.
He had been dreaming of this rice since yesterday, since before yesterday, since the moment he had swallowed the last grain of the last bowl. The hunger in him came with full force as he sighted his prize.
It also triggered old memories. The taste of his mother's own kitchen made jollof rice on Sundays, when the whole house would fill with steam and she would lift the lid from the pot slowly with such reverence. It was always funny how....
No, rice first, thoughts later.
"Auntie!" he called out, his voice bright.
"Your jollof rice is the best in all of Lagos! You hear me? All of Lagos!"
The woman behind the stall was broad and brown and looked unimpressed by the flattery, though the corners of her mouth betrayed her. She had been called the best a thousand times, by him.
She may act like it nothing but he was sure she knew she was the best.
She ladled a generous portion onto a white ceramic plate, the rice glowing orange-red, studded with peas and carrots, crowned with a single piece of fried plantain that curved like a crescent moon and held it out to him.
"Ah, you're too kind," she said, her voice as warm as the rice itself. "Come. Take a plate. Eat and don't think your words will make me forget you are oweing me from last week."
"Of course, I came prepared", he said tapping his pockets, with a toothy grin.
She gave him a look that she didn't quite believe him but smiled any way as she dropped the food and walked to attend to another customer.
The young man reached for the plate in anticipation. His fingers touching the warm ceramic. His mouth opened slightly , as he could already taste it.
Dudududud!!!
The sound of the generator failing, probably ran out of fuel. But again, something was strange about how this one was sounding.
It wasn't going down slowly. It was as if....
SHIEEK!
A grinding, metal-on-metal shriek that climbed the scales of sound until it became unbearable to the ears. Sparks erupted from the machine's side in a cascade of blue-white fire, like a nest of angry hornets made of lightning. The crowd around the stall lurched backward. Someone screamed. Someone else cursed.
But the young man did not move.
He was watching the pot.
The pot of jollof rice, that vessel of good food and love, tipped slowly, so terribly slowly, off its perch. It seemed to hang in the air for a breath, caught between gravity and the absurdity of the entire situation.
And then it fell.
It splashed across his chest first, soaking through his thin shirt as if the cloth were not there. Then across his arms, his hands, the fingers still reaching for the plate that would never reach his mouth.
Then the burning. O the burning.
The heat was madding. The rice clung to his skin, searing with unspeakable agony. It was unbearable, so unbearable, he couldn't help him self.
He screamed.
The sound came from somewhere deep, somewhere primal, somewhere he had never visited before. It tore through his throat and out into the market, and for a moment everything else went quiet. The vendors stopped shouting. The child stopped licking his fingers. Even the distant siren seemed to pause.
The plate shattered beneath him as he stumbled backward. He could not feel his legs. He could not feel anything except the burning, the terrible burning that was rewriting his body with a new sensation. He clutched at his chest, and his hands came away wet with things he did not want to identify.
The smell of burning rice filled the air, that familiar, beloved scent now twisted into something terrible. As it mixed with the sharper, sweeter stench of his own flesh cooking.
Hands reached for him. Voices called his name, though he had never told them his name. Auntie's face hovered above him, her eyes wide with a horror he had never seen on her before. Someone threw water on him. A bucket, a basin, he could not tell and the shock of it made him gasp. But the pain did not stop.
Why didn't it stop. Why. Why. WHY?
The pain began to take a new form and it felt like a river. A river he was drowning in.
The ground rose up to meet him. Or perhaps he fell. Either way, the world tilted, the colors of the market bleeding together into a smear of red and gold and black. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he saw something that was not there.
His mother's kitchen.
He was small again, nine years old, standing on a stool to reach the stove. His mother stood behind him, her hands over his, guiding the wooden spoon through the pot. "Stir from the bottom,that's where the flavor hides."
The vision faded. The market returned. The pain returned. And then the darkness.
---
The Void
---
He woke up to light.
But it wasn't the harsh, yellow light of Lagos afternoon, he expected. Nor the flickering blue light of a television static. This was something else entirely.
The strange light, was soft, cool and seemingly endless, like lying at the bottom of a clear river and looking up at the sun through a mile of water.
The young man blinked. Or tried to. He was not certain he still had eyelids.
"Where…" His voice came out strange, thin and distant, as if spoken by someone else in another room. "Where am I?"
The light did not answer. But something else did.
You are between worlds, Femi. Your life has ended.
Those words sounded strange and did not come from outside him. It was as if they bloomed inside his mind. With the meaning of those words unfurling one by one.
The voice was gentle while also seeming timeless. It was as if his grandmother was whispering to him while stroking his back.
Femi looked down at his hands. They were there, but they were different. Translucent as glass, shot through with the same strange light that surrounded him. He could see the bones beneath the skin, the veins like rivers on a map, but everything was fading at the edges, dissolving into the void like peek milk in tea.
"Ah," he said, and the sound was almost a laugh. "Femi. That's my name. I remember now." He pressed his ghostly fingers to his ghostly chest. "I'm really gone, aren't I?
The silence that followed filled him with dread. And slowly full realization of his loss came.
No more jollof rice.
The weight of it settled on him.
My life, my friends, my family...it's all over."
He thought of the plate he would never hold. The words he would never say. The person he would never become. And the promise he could not keep.
"Your life has ended."
"Yes," he whispered. "I know."
And in that moment of bottomless grief, something changed.
The light flickered.
Not much. Just a tremor at the edges of his vision, a subtle darkening that might have been his imagination. But Femi had grown up in a city of power outages and faulty generators.
Heck he died because of a faulty generator.
So he could tell the difference.
Something was wrong.
"Yes", came a new voice. "You will do nicely."
Those words wrapped around Femi, coiling into him and down his spine leaving a chill.
For some reason the first voice was gone, and In its place.... something malicious.
A laugh followed. It was cold and mirthless.
Femi's heart, if he still had a heart, lurched. "Who's there?" He spun in the void, searching for a source, but there was only the endless light and the growing shadows. "Show yourself!"
"Stay out of this."
The first voice returned, sharper now, edged with authority.
"You lied" hissed the second voice. "You all broke your promise." The voice slithered closer. Femi felt it pass by sending a shiver through him.
"So, I will break mine."
"He is not for you."
"Ha. He is for anyone who reaches him first."
The two presences pressed against each other in the void, and though Femi could see nothing, he felt the weight of their contest like tectonic plates grinding together. The light dimmed further. Shadows stretched from the corners of his vision, reaching toward him with fingers made of darkness.
"I have chosen," snarled the second voice. And then, a louder declaration that seemed to crack the air.
I HAVE CHOSEN!
Femi felt a strange sensation, as if he were being pulled apart and reassembled. His vision blurred, and his senses reeled, the world spinning around him. The light began to dim, replaced by shadows that stretched and twisted into strange, unfamiliar shapes.
"What's happening to me?" Femi cried out, his voice trembling with fear.
A voice filled with sorrow answered.
"Be brave, little soul. Be brave."
"what do you mean by that?"
But there was no reply. The voices faded, leaving him alone in the growing darkness. He felt himself falling, tumbling through the void, his mind a whirlwind of confusion and fear.
And then, there was nothing.