2026 "London" Literary Prizes International Prose 1st Runner-Up

​$100 CAN prize

Excuse My Dust

by Daniel Echezonachi

​It has been 5 years since the man last came home. He steps into the compound this night with a mad throbbing in his heart. The air smells of too many burning things, and whorls of white dust rise into the night air even as the noise from the other end of the compound travels down his ears. The man clutches his bag to his chest and walks deep into the compound. He's come in from the back gate, unwilling to draw much attention to himself, and even now, as he walks towards the main building, he does so with the precise caution of a burglar attempting a break-in at a house. Harmattan. Starless night. This night preceding his father's 70th birthday. The man will look into the blank river of his father's eyes again today, and dare him to find his favourite son. In his mother's senescent face, he will trace the outline of all the soft places that once held love for him.
 
He tries to tame this wild beat of his heart; this thing fluttering about somewhere in his chest. But in recent days, the man's heart has been accustomed to tension. In the early days of his life, there had been love. Many nights of wondrous affection, before this night of unpredictable tightening. The man was the favourite child of parents who invested so much belief in his greatness. As far as his mother was concerned, the world stopped in its tracks for him. So his parents gave him all he wanted, hoping he would become the best possible thing. When you ask the man what first knowledge he has of love, he will probably tell you about his parents; how he first saw love in the palms of his father, first heard love in the wooly voice of his mother.
 
And it was the sweetest thing—being loved almost to the point of being envied. His sister thought it unfair that he had no chores in the house. His brothers gossiped into the cracks in the wall about how much of a crude, spoilt, disrespectful brat he was growing to be. In a sea of four brothers and a sister, he was the pearl, because somehow it was natural that the last child in an Igbo home was the ‘prize’. And because despite having more screen-time than his siblings, he aced his school exams, too. And despite the occasional beatings from his siblings when they could not put up with his exuberance, there was love, screaming from the corners of their hearts. Too loud to be ignored. He knew he was loved.
 
But love would not always be enough. There was the poverty, too. His father's business gradually lost weight as the boy grew. The family stood on one leg, at the bridge between poverty and a managed survival. All roads of expenses led to his mother's purse. She would weave her meagre income into a mat on which they all lay. Gradually a third meal of the day began to feel like an avoidable luxury, and the boy's father began to include this verse more often in their morning devotions: man shall not live by bread alone.
 
His father's eyes travelled deeper into his face, dried up so badly that it was difficult to find the love it once brandished. He was failing; because poverty is a subtle kind of death. At night, he sat on the corridor floor like a corpse rehearsing stillness. The boy's mother was like the grass that likes to think itself green even as it burns black, so she ran her hand behind her husband's back, planting a smoothness of spirit. It would be well again, she'd tell him. She wore it like a lanyard, this belief in a better future. It was evident in the force of her loud midnight prayers that stung the boy's ears and made it hard to ease into sleep. She never failed each night, sick or healthy, to soak the future of her half-dozen children in the blood of Jesus.
 
Alongside the prayers, there were the efforts. She worked multiple jobs, while retaining her teaching job in the secondary school. At the end of the month, she would split her earnings into four and send a part to each of the boy's brothers in their different universities. In some ways, the boy's mother found pleasure in her suffering; felt that it was more heroic to raise children in poverty than in abundance.
 
For every effort, there was an equal and opposite problem sprouting up somewhere. Until the burden outweighed the efforts, and the boy's mother's shoulders slacked, and his father watched with his sorry eyes and pockets that weighed less than a mustard seed. The boy's sister had gotten married before he entered the university, and two of his brothers had finished school with proud minds and jobless hands. New senescent features were beginning to show up on his parents’ skins. The wrinkles. The drooping forearms. The grey hairs. So as a university student, the boy was aware of the love, but also of the hunger. Each time he called home for money, all he got was just remember that we love you so much.
 
On one of those calls, his mother had tuned down her voice in understated accusation, and asked, “Are you not sorry for me?”
 
This night, the man will tell her that he was sorry for her, for his father, his brothers. Even for himself. That was why he never called home for money again unless they sent him some on their own. That was why, when he heard his classmates talking about the job, he'd made a mental note to meet the loudest of them afterwards and make enquiries. It didn't matter that they had spoken about it as a joke; he was going to ask. And he did. The job asked for so much, but gave so much too. It was the boy's final year, and he needed more money for his research projects than his parents could ever provide.
 
So he accepted the job, never mind how difficult it was to look himself in the mirror in the days afterwards. The first paycheck followed the first deal, then the second, and the third; for a while, all was well with his world.
 
Until it wasn't. The stares grew like weeds in every part of the city, and the man tried not to care. He did not mind when people stared at him in restaurants and malls; did not mind when friends from university called and said to him, hey, I saw something. He smiled into the camera when a woman walked up to him at the local stadium and asked for a picture; although he'd later marvelled at the shamelessness of her words: I am your fan. If she ever showed her friends the picture, the man wondered what she would tell them.
 
The man had managed to shut his ears against the world, because it could only be in dreams that his university degree could fetch him a job as well-paying as this. Then, one evening, his sister called, her anger bursting through his phone speaker.
 
He didn't ask how she found out. Nor did he ask his brothers when, later, they flooded his WhatsApp inbox with messages. Then the group call followed, each sibling taking time to rant about how he was going to waste his life.
 
—You can find yourself a decent job, you're just 23.
—I am ashamed. After mummy’s trainings?
—I would never think you could do these things.
—I wonder who made you so nearly damned.
—You don't plan on doing this forever, do you?
—Make sure I don't set my eyes on you, idiot!
 
To their sempiternal rage, all the man had were the words I'm Sorry, which was true, for he was indeed contrite. But the athlete in him was already far gone in its tracks to quit. His brothers were, by then, all leashed in white-collar jobs with barely-moderate salaries, and his sister deep in the business of birthing children for her husband. These were not people he could depend on even if he decided to begin scouting for a job until he found one.
 
The shame became louder than the love. His siblings anchored themselves on the other end of the chasm where it was impossible to reach them. None called. And he called no one. He could not deny the hurt of a love that was growing taut; still, he tried hard not to think of them.
 
One day, the man's next-door neighbour—a young lady about his age—showed up in his apartment, her phone screen turned to his face. In place of a stutter, there was a smile. He admitted that the person on the screen was him. For a few seconds, she looked him over and smiled back, a smile that said she understood him. The next evening, as he walked out of the compound, the girl's mother, who was making a crochet by her corridor, made a passing remark about people disgracing their families. The man heard the words clearly, and for days they sat in his heart, motionless. It was the first time he cried, thinking about his siblings. He avoided the girl, waited to hear more mouths swell with the news. He relocated to another part of the city within that month.
 
In all the years the man stayed away from home, he worried that his siblings had told his parents. And if they had, it would kill his mother faster than anything to set her eyes on him. So he leaned on self-disownment. It was a surprise that morning, eight days ago, when the man's phone rang and it was his mother's voice. “You have not visited for years now. Did we do anything to you? Are you not sorry for me?”
 
Her voice still sounded the same, still tickled the unnamed soft places in the man's heart. He had changed his phone lines; but because a mother's voice is an unstoppable force, the man did not ask how she got his new number. He simply agreed to come home for the ceremony of his father's birthday. No one had told him that his eldest brother had stumbled into some great fortune and was throwing a party in their parents’ honour.
 
It was his mother's voice that sat in his head as he packed his bags and boarded the bus. It was her voice in his head as he walked through the compound that was thick with ashen dust, with the noise of cooking women on the other end, and children running and tumbling over a heap of white sand.
 
His siblings know that he is coming today. They had found his number and made his mother call him. It is their plan to convince him to consider a new channel of livelihood. The man will learn later about the wives of his two oldest brothers, and how his sister narrowly escaped a road accident few months back.
 
The man's mother smiles as he steps into the living room. Her entire world is on her lips—songs, smile, laughter. Her hands are the fastest moving things. Touching his face, his back, hugging him, resting on his head. He looks at his brothers, the plastic, unreadable countenance they wear. Like mannequins. When they finally smile him welcome, it is easy to notice that indeed love once lived in their eyes.
 
His name is Osita—the one who upturns the night. He is the grandchild of the man's father's step-cousin. When Osita sees the man, he blinks countless times like he's seen a ghost, then he darts off to meet the other boys playing by the heap of sand. Osita cannot be more than fifteen, and the man hopes that this boy doesn't know him. But the man is wrong. It is Osita who tells the man's loud-mouthed aunt, bent washing countless basins of tomato and pepper. It is the man's aunt who comes first to peep at him from the corner of the wall as he sits in front of the house; and then runs off with a scream in her mouth, dropping a piece of the hot news in the ears of each woman cooking in the backyard.
 
The man's father is asleep. He sleeps at 8 each night. But the man's mother is not. Her ear is an early recipient of the news. Things are moving too fast. The man's name sits on every mouth in the compound, each syllable dragged in abhorrence. The air is increasingly hot, dust geysers higher to the night sky. The man walks into his room, his face in his cupped palms. Soon, there is his mother behind him, tears poised to fall from her canthus. She wants to know if it is true. The man says nothing. There is a gurgling sound in her throat, the man hears the first beat of cry as she darts off from his room.
 
His brothers shut themselves in their rooms. The compound is like a vein being flooded with so much blood. Long-eared villagers infiltrate the compound from their homes, asking which child?
 
The man's brother sends him a one-word SMS: Disgrace!
 
From his window, he watches the wildness growing in the compound. Women stomping their feet and spurting out songs with meaningless lyrics in a spasmodic manner born as a consequence of the ecstasy following unexpected news. The smell of burning things is now more prominent. The women have neglected their cooking. The crescent moon is getting fuller. The man's hands quiver as though they have a brain of their own. His phone rings and vibrates on his bed. He watches as the crowd grows by the minutes, trying to make out a figure of his mother. She is not there. He wonders where she is, what she is doing.
 
Osita and his friends are still by the heap of sand; they sit and look at him while he plays the raconteur, making passionate gesticulations.
 
None of the adults asks Osita how he knew. Or they would have found out that every night, he locks himself inside the compound pit latrine and drenches his mind with the pleasure of watching nude adults cruise into each other. Osita’s mother would have found out that on those nights he pretends to be constipated, he is locked in the toilet, his member in his hand, covered in slime, as he moans into his own ears. So often has he done this that he can recognize the faces that grace his screen each secret night. And so, he knows the man.
 
The man can hear his mother's voice, three rooms away from his. She is with his brothers. He can hear them telling her to calm down and get some rest. She is feral in her disappointment. She swears she will become a widow tomorrow. And even the man doubts his father will survive the next few minutes after he learns of all this.
 
The man does not hear his sister come in. It is she who has been calling his phone. He turns away from the window when she calls his name, fall back to the bed. She stands beside his bed, wordless. The man looks at her through his tears, as if to ask, Sister, you will leave too?
 
The noise outside is getting louder. His sister sits on the bed, beside him. She is almost too close; he can hear her heartbeat. She smells of something fruity, something beautifully warm. Or warmly beautiful. She hugs him. He hears his name low on her lips, although he is sure she is silent. He thinks she is crying, too.
 
The man eases his whole life into her arms, and in that embrace he is sure that even if the world is falling apart, there is still a little love left for him. Little, maybe; but tangible.

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​Daniel Echezonachi is a writer and student at the University of Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Afrocritik, ANMLY, Electric Literature, KokonutHead Media, PoetryColumn, Fahmidan Journal, Shallow Tales Review, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2026 Jacob Zilber Prize, twice shortlisted for the Brigitte Porison Literature Prize, and was the winner of the 2024 Ikenga Short Story Prize.