Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

She nodded. She could see the soldiers who’d beaten Ayodele standing all around her. She didn’t want to look into their guilty faces. Ayodele was gone. Ayodele was here. “Lagos will never be the same,” Adaora said.

Originally, he’d planned to present the one named Ayodele as he gave his speech, but she’d died. He didn’t understand what Adaora had said about inhaling her essence. That wasn’t important.

The Elders. They’d told him the waters off the coast hid aquatic forests. All the offshore drilling facilities would be destroyed by the people of the water. Even in the delta, all was lost. Oil could no longer be Nigeria’s top commodity. It could no longer be a commodity at all.

Everyone needed him to do this right. Everyone in Lagos. Everyone in Nigeria. Maybe everyone in the world. He worked best when people needed him. And as it always did, this knowledge calmed him down. Since taking office, he’d found himself powerless to fight against Nigeria’s soul-crushing corruption. Wherever he tried to make changes, people around him were always trying to drain some sort of shady profit from his efforts. If he tried to create a program to improve schools or hospitals, someone set up a fake contract that would bleed money from the program. When he tried to address unemployment, healthcare, inflation, electricity, education, agriculture, any time there was money to be spent, it was the same result: the vampires always came. This had worn him down. It had made him feel futile, useless. Now, for the first time, he felt like a president.

However, he didn’t say a word about the fact that despite it all, he still felt Agu, Adaora and Anthony were witches. Good witches, but witches nonetheless. Old outdated ways of thinking don’t die easily, and sometimes they don’t die at all.

“Listen to your own hearts and look around you,” he said. “We tore at our own flesh last night, as we have done many times in the past. Now, as we hurt from the pain and loss, let our minds clear. And see.”

In the background, Kola and Fred had asked when she was coming to be with them. “Soon,” she said, and she was telling the truth. But she wouldn’t be able to stay because she had things to do that went beyond motherhood. She would risk never returning to them, every time she explored the dangerous waters. She sighed. What kind of mother am I? And what kind of wife? “I am a marine witch,” she whispered.

“You’re a child,” his uncle said, irritably. “What can you know about devils except what those silly churches pound into your head?” He pounded his own head to illustrate his point. “What we just heard that normally brainless president say – that was the most wonderful thing I have heard any politician say in decades!”

she said that a road monster that called itself the Bone Collector had eaten her. “Your roads are safe now,” she said.

This time, it was an older Yoruba man with smooth onyx skin who said that he’d been inside the internet for hours and hours talking to Ijele.

After that another seven aliens came. What was attracting them to his mother’s house and why, he did not know. But something deep in him had broken open, leaving him warm and curious. He wanted to be a part of whatever was happening.

And there were some emails that accused Nigeria of being too backwards, undeserving of an alien visitation.

Then she swims away. South. She swims out to sea, to see what she can see.

I am Udide Okwanka.

I’ve knitted their stories and watched them knit their own crude webs.

Yes, you want to know. We all want to know things.

For the first time since the birth of Lagos, my glorious city, I will pause in my storytelling. I will leave my web. I become part of the story. I will join my people. And we spiders play dirty.