Anjorin

The Basement Office

By Feyisayo Anjorin

Content warnings: Clergy abuse; Sexual assault; Self-harm

I clenched my fists, exhaled deeply, and suppressed the compelling urge to punch my Mum’s face when she wiped a tear from the corner of her puffy eye and talked about Fola Banre being at home in heaven with the angels of the Lord.

I heard her say it that moonless, cold and wet night a few days ago when the news of Banre’s death was still fresh and shocking. At that time I could easily keep the words that almost escaped from the depths of my soul. I knew the heaven thing was something Mum needed to say, something she needed to believe, to help her get through the shock of knowing she would only ever see Fola Banre alive in video clips.

She said the annoying words again the following morning, and then the following afternoon just as I was humming a happy tune at the dining table, about to have my lunch, egg-and-onion sandwich.

She made me lose my appetite even though I had prepared the lunch snack as a celebratory meal.

When Mum got to know I had lost my appetite because of what she said, she was like a housefly buzzing near my ear, preaching to me about hope in the Lord and urging me to eat because nothing we do will ever bring him back.

“The youths locked themselves up with the corpse for twelve hours and prayed for him to come back,” she said. “But he’s gone. He has finally been taken to the mortuary.”

As I stood beside the fridge, facing the honesty of my Mum’s feelings for the deceased, wondering how long I would have to hide my feelings, and the inevitability of confronting the confidence she had in the purity of Fola Banre’s work in the church, all I could do was say a brief prayer.

This talk about Banre in the company of an angelic host got me feeling like a full kettle at boiling point, I wanted to spill hot stuff.

I wanted to sit Mum down and make her listen without interruption.

I would wade through my vocabulary of pain and talk about the man who would speak as if he wanted people to keep their vessels pure; and his hands, his fingers, their work like claws, and how he would remove my underwear as if he were tearing a piece of paper from a jotter.

“Labake, why are you looking at me like that?” Mum asked.

“Like how?”

“I hope you are OK? I mean, aside pastor’s death.”

I folded my arms. “I am in fact delighted by pastor’s death.”

I felt the rush of cool breeze from the windows behind the fridge; the blue curtains had been folded at the two edges of the iron bars of the window to give room for the brightness of the sun. It felt so good to take this carefree step; this reckless plunge into disclosure; this first step to a rude awakening I had in mind for people like the woman in front of me who narrowed her eyes and had her hands on her hips.

“Delighted?”

I met her gaze. “He can rot in hell for all I care.”

She opened her mouth and kept her eyes on me the way Yoruba mothers do when they think you are losing it.

“Labake, what is wrong with you? All this while I thought you were mourning like the rest of us!”

I snorted. “Mourn? Me? Mourn Banre?”

I saw her index finger close to my face before I heard the words of command: “Labake, I resist that evil spirit speaking through you in Jesus’ name!”

“Amen.” I said with a sneer, opened the fridge and took a soft drink from it; I was on my way back to the bedroom.

There was so much to say, but it was my story, it was my right to choose whom to tell and when to tell it, even though it was for the world. I was sure about this.

If indeed the Judeo-Christian God of the bible was who he seemed to be, I was sure Fola Banre would be in hell, screaming for relief and getting nothing, rather than being venerated in heaven.

I didn’t wake up that morning with a firm decision to annoy my Mum, I was just determined to resist anything or anyone that could make me doubt the reality of my experience, and understandably so; but on two different occasions I had marked the back of my palms with a razor, that Astra razor I bought and kept in my purse and went with me anytime I see Banre alone in the basement office. I wrote the story of his finger, of an extension from his pubic region, digging through the soft and wet places in my body. For the art my blood was the ink, my body was the canvas.

The first time I cut myself at the basement office, sweaty and sated Banre had hurried into the bathroom of the office to get dressed after he had let out the final intense moan of pleasure. He left me in bed to clean myself with the tissue paper on the bedside stool.

He was alarmed when he came back in his long-sleeved shirt and trousers, looking like a gentleman. He didn’t like the sight of blood.

“What happened? Why are you bleeding?”

I ignored him.

“What were you doing with a blade?”

I looked him in the eye; I was sure I just heard a silly question, I never made that clear with words, my respect for him kept slipping through my fingers like fine grains of sand.

Then he took my arm, looked carefully at the back of the left palm, and raised his brows. “This is a clean cut. You did this deliberately.”

He was deeply concerned. He wanted to drive me to a pharmacy; he thought we needed methylated spirit and cotton wool. Probably a few tablets for the pain.

“I’m fine.”

He wanted to know what could be wrong, why I would do such a thing to myself.

I didn’t know what to tell him. There was something cruel about the question in the way it revealed the audacity of an expert deceiver to pretend that the answers to the question were mysteries to him.

“What kind of thing could make you put that much pain on yourself?”

“Why do you act as if the things we do together are normal? You don’t think about your wife, do you?”

“That is what I was talking about. You are deliberately cutting yourself with razor. You are making a big deal out of normal human frailties. God knows our weaknesses and he is always eager to forgive us.”

“So this is the lie you tell yourself?”

“Labake, read it in the bible, if you confess, the Lord says he will forgive.”

My mother’s words came again like a vicious punch. “Labake, you are smoking that thing again?”

I had not opened the can of soft drink I got from the fridge because my Mum was still following me as I walked to the room. I felt her like a cloud covering the sun at a time of longing for the sun’s warmth.

A voice in my head said to go straight for the gun under my mattress, the one Tope my best friend kept with me; the one Tope sneaked out of her grandfather’s house after he died and hid in her flat for years and wanted to keep safe from her thug boyfriend of six months who regularly had rough sex with her in her room.

“You are really losing it!” Mum insisted, as if I had been arguing my sanity with her. “Why do you hate the people of God so much? Despite pastor’s labours over your soul, you are still this twisted?”

Go for the gun! the voice said to me once again. Tope’s grandfather left two bullets in the gun sixteen years ago and Tope had never fired it. One bullet in the right direction would be enough.

“Mum, please don’t get me started on that man today.”

“The entire nation knows about pastor’s integrity. That is the kind of man we want our men to become. The fact that you think otherwise shows how twisted you are, saying you were delighted by his death.”

Her eyes were like bullets; if eyes could kill I would have been dead. I could tell she was hoping I would fall on my knees and tell her and God how wrong I had been for saying this silliness about the anointed one; but I was the one living in the awareness of the world that had shaped my words. I didn’t care if my Mum got shit-faced for my sake.

“My God will heal you,” she said finally. Her shoulders sagged as she walked out of the room; I avoided the glassy sheen of her eyes.

I felt sorry for my Mum, but not as sorry as I had felt for myself when it finally dawned on me months ago that I was dealing with a master of deception. My heart could scream like a loudspeaker; marks of my skin could walk me once again through slippery slopes of many dark nights, yet to the living who never saw beyond the public face, the dead man’s mask may stay there.

Punching my Mum’s face and watching her nose bleed; stabbing her in the neck with a kitchen knife and staging a break-in to make it look like an intruder’s attack; hitting her head with a stone and making it look like she drowned in the bathtub; shooting her with Tope’s gun under the mattress; I could do any of these things. In this failed and failing country of police officers obsessed with getting their slice of the national cake rather than painstaking investigation of crimes, no one needed to be an expert to get away with murder.
But I will never become a murderer.

I am as human as cold-blooded killers. I see my hurts as good enough justification for the crookedness in me; but I am also as human as the ones who have been stabbed in the back in the places they believed to be home and were still willing and ready to believe in love.

I bought sniper for the insects and rodents who would sometimes move here and there around the house like co-tenants. I got two 100ml bottles for them; I heard it could work on humans too. I planned a conference in my head; there would be a podium for all the voices to speak freely, I would give many hours of patience, then I would consider the bottles and decide.

Eleven months ago when I came back to the country after my years in Oxford, my Mum wanted me to meet the pastor of her new church, a man she had talked about a couple of times, a man who had been pleasing the Lord by taking care of widows, even the widows who were not members of his church. She told me about the twenty-thousand-naira food bonus the women got every month, and the medical bills paid to take care of them, and the scholarship scheme for children who lost their parents in their pre-teen years. Pastor Fola Banre worked with his wife and five children from the hilly town of Idanre. You would see them on the glossy pamphlets of their church; they were the heroes of love.

The Banres were like a hit show on YouTube and on Facebook. There wasn’t much on the church’s website aside the easily accessible information about the man, his family and his work, confirmed in carefully curated pretty pictures. He had some of his sermons on YouTube with interesting titles like:

Overcoming The Powers of Seduction
Satanic Scams
The Economy of Zion
Overcoming The Rod of the Wicked
Bombs of Prayer
Satan: Sleek-looking Slumlord

“Listen to me, people,” he barked in one of the videos. “The Lord is saying, keep your vessel pure! Keep your vessel pure!” The cameraman zoomed in on his face and it was wet with sweat, which he tried to contain with a thick white handkerchief. His rosy cheeks moved in righteous anger.

He had dozens of well-tailored suits; he had them in many shades and in different colours. The man could easily be that model on the front page of GQ; you would look at his lips and feel like hearing him burst out in songs. He was not much of a singer. He was just fresh, and sweet, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom.

I was soon on another video, The Economy of Zion, the most-watched sermon on his YouTube channel. Like the earlier ones I didn’t start from the beginning, and I wasn’t planning to sit through it for the sake of insight. I just wanted to get the idea behind his messages.

“Look, covenant wealth is a divine right.” He walked to one of the men who sat at the front seats. I was impressed by the man’s composure when Banre shouted at him and into the mic, and on the faces of every viewer because the production team gave him a close-up shot for the intensity of drama: “If you love the Lord, it will show in your dollar. You will bring all the tithes into his house without grumbling, can I have somebody say amen?”

That day when I heard him talk about dollars in a country where naira is spent I had to stop with the videos. I felt Sunday was a few hours away, and there were other things calling for my attention after being away from the country for ten years.

Yemi, my cousin, was preparing for her wedding the following day and one of her rich friends, a billionaire heiress who loved to wear clothes of dull colours and shiny earrings and necklace, organized a pre-wedding party for Yemi at St Jacobs.

I got a brown knee-length leather skirt and a figure-hugging white blouse that showed some silky smooth skin.

I got my black Christian Louboutin heels.

I got cheers like a superstar when I walked under the chandelier through the lobby of the hotel. The girls, in all-white dresses, took pictures near the water fountain, they moved for the camera; their lips parted for their pearly white teeth and I was invited to bless the shots with my awesomeness. The billionaire heiress wanted to know where I got my shoes.

I asked for her phone number and sent her the number of the online store on Whatsapp.

I was glad to be back. Most of the girls at the party were like me, born into old money, feeding on the freebies the nation had for the few who care for competence. To our parents, money meant the best of the education available among the elite class of 21st century civilization; so they had postgraduate degrees and shelves full of books. We were all back from our sojourn in the cities and varsities of North America and Europe and South Africa; we were all obviously thoroughly Nigerian in looks and root, except Yemi who did not have our chocolate black skin and our wooly kind of hair that we would expertly cover with shiny weave-on caps.

Yemi’s Mum was German, but she spoke Yoruba and wore African bright prints like an Oyo woman.

We ate fried rice, drank zobo, and ate catfish pepper soup. I was the only one who took a bottle of stout I had brought and had kept in my bag for the right time.

My cousin would never serve beer on any occasion. She would not touch alcohol let alone drink it, she would not stay near anyone letting smoke out of the lips; she would never miss church on Sundays and Wednesdays, she was a member of the choir in the churches she attended in Nigeria and in Germany, but when I mentioned Mum’s new love for Banre’s church she rolled her eyes and called him a crook.

We flooded social media with our glamorous pictures.

The following Sunday, many hours after the pre-wedding party and after my cousin’s wedding ceremony on Saturday, I met Fola Banre for the first time at about a quarter past eight in the morning, before the church service started. I was at the reception of the church office with my Mum when Banre came down from the prayer room on the top floor where he would be, according to his manner of preparation, from Saturday night. Banre smiled at me even before Mum said:

“Sir, this is my girl. The one who just came back from the UK.”

He lifted his hand slightly.

“God bless you.”

“Amen.” I bended my knees slightly, he beamed. I thought I had been wrong about the way he looked at me, the way that got me wondering how this man had been taking care of the widows who depended on his church.

His wife, who was just about an inch shorter than him, came down the stairs a few seconds after her husband left me and my enchanted Mum, who had been pleased by pastor’s invitation.

“Make sure you see me,” Pastor had said when I gave a seemingly unsatisfactory answer to his question, “Do you speak in tongues?”

Mrs. Banre wore a white skirt suit, black hat, black shoes and no earrings; she embraced me after my Mum’s introduction.

“I like this your skirt o.”

“Thank you,” I said, certain she didn’t like my skirt because of the way it molded my buttocks into perfect roundness. I felt like a temptress she would want to keep away from her husband. I had seen the way some women in the church looked at me as I walked. The words of hatred in their hearts were like mirrors on their faces, expressed by their hats and colourful flowing gowns and practiced prudishness.

I did not give much thought to the pastor who wanted me to speak in tongues; whatever he meant didn’t interest me. I was never the kind to be impressed by church stuff.

I was a child of the world, overwhelmed by my Mum’s overbearing effort to make sure I turn out right. I was the one who smoked cigarettes and wouldn’t turn away weed; I was one of those who would hold disposable red cups in any of those night parties where young people let their hair down and move their heads and bodies energetically to uncomfortably loud hip hop tunes.

The vision of Banre’s hairy hands the first time they held my waist, and the look on his face when he emptied himself in me and relaxed his muscles, made him like one of the silly men I’ve dated; except for the fact that I had never dated a man who would hold the microphone and look stern like an offended soldier and talk about keeping your vessel holy. The silly men in my past didn’t pretend to be sitting on a higher moral seat, competent enough to pontificate on matters of personal choices.

My Dad died when I was two, so I didn’t know much about him, apart from the big bookshelves he left behind, and hundreds of books, fiction and non-fiction. We had a couple of pictures at home of him in Afro with Mum and friends, seated around tables filled with green bottles of beer.

In one of the pictures he was dancing with a white woman and Mum was seated near him, laughing with her friends.

I must have got my love for parties from my Dad, and my disinterest in religion, and my anger, which typically burns underneath, sometimes giving no clue till it announces itself in grand style. After the 1983 national elections I was told by my uncle—Yemi’s Dad—that my Dad got angry with the stupid electorate for ignoring a brilliant mind like Awolowo and voting in Shagari once again. I was told that when my mother brought his meal later that day he shoved the food from the table, stomped for his room and locked himself in. Dad woke up the following morning, and climbed a hill in Idanre while Mum and I were still sleeping. He got to the steep edge uphill, and jumped to his death.

If I didn’t mention it no one would ever know that Fola Banre had opened the small back gate of the church complex for me on a couple of nights. Maybe I wasn’t even the only one he had sneaked to the basement office for sweet stolen pleasure.

When the revered pastor, another man behind his mask, became free of his mask and became—to me—an amusing actor of bible stories, I would think about his wife and her shy smile, and her professed love for my skirt on our first encounter. I tried but could not place her in the world of extramarital conflict. I could not guess what she would do; how she would take it if she ever got to know that her husband had been under my control in secret sensual meetings.

I began to see the woman’s love for me on her face, in the brightness of her countenance when she saw me, in the way she would call my name and hold my hand and tell me to take good care of my Mum because she’s all I’ve got. She seemed like a noble lover.

That was why I got the razor, my perfect punishment for sharing her husband with her. For betraying the trust of a lover with a lover.

I was soon done with the soft drink and I had tossed empty can in the the trashcan in the corner of my room when my Mum came back to me, dressed in green adire attire and a head tie of the same material. The smell of her perfume got to me before she opened the door. I knew she was coming to tell me of her impending outing.

“Labake, why will you be doing this kind of evil thing at a time like this?”

I looked up from my iPad; I was not expecting this sort of stinging statement to come with such fresh energy.

I had been taking notes on the feasibility report a client had written on a business I was planning to launch nationally in the next couple of months.

“Mum, please, I’m in the process of getting my own place in a few days. I want to live the rest of my days here in peace. I’m working, as you can see.”

“You can’t have peace o.” I saw a taut vein on her neck. “Ko possible! You can’t! Not when you spoil the name of the man of God.”

“What is my concern about the name of the man of God? I don’t give a damn about him.”

“Are you not the one who posted the same nonsense you said to me this morning on Twitter? Pastor is in hell because he raped you?”

“Mummy, I beg you, please, don’t make me say or do something I will later regret. I’m not even on Twitter, even though I know for sure that pastor is in hell by now.”

“Don’t judge. Labake, the bible says don’t judge.”

“Wait a minute. Is it really on Twitter?”

Mum placed her phone close to my face and I saw screenshots of a Twitter thread; downloaded from the church’s Whatsapp group, a girl, username honeydropsthelaw, who accused Fola Banre of rape, claiming he set her back with his fraudulent affection, almost ruining her life.

“Labake, this man gave so much of his life for the cause of the gospel!”

My Mum’s fierce eyeballs rested on me and warmed my skin. She seemed firm in her belief that I was the one who got this on social media. There were four screenshots of the Twitter thread; the girl online had detailed her encounter with the deceased preacher.

I snorted and smiled, actually pleased but also trying to avoid being slapped by my Mum, who seemed very much upset: “Mum, I did not post this. I swear.”

She searched my face for evidence of sincerity. I actually got more joy from this Twitter storm bothering the church administration than from the news of Banre’s death.

“The burial service starts at 12 noon and I’m already late,” Mum said and left the room.

I was on Twitter even before I heard the whine of the gate outside, a sign that Mum had opened it to go out and had closed it behind her.

The girl on Twitter did the storytelling thing quite well, taking us from her earliest encounter with the pastor in the church auditorium during a midweek service on her second day in the city. She tweeted about pastor’s warmth, and his fatherly counsel on her best move after her degree in geophysics, and his interest in getting her to speak in tongues.

He was glad to know that she was not living with her parents like some of the new girls he had met in the course of the evening. It pleased him that she could stay out late at night, because the impartation of the spirit worked better during the prayer watches of the night at 9am, 12am, and 3am.

He invited her to meet him at the office the following night and got her suspicious by the way he licked his pink lips when he said, “We will be here together, passionately exploring his presence.”

She also mentioned the small gate at the back of the church; the small gate with a rusted padlock one would never think could be opened.

She was 18 and he was 50; she was a virgin, just like the mother of Jesus.

He wanted her to surrender to the lord; that was the only way she could leave with the lord’s touch; she froze when he began to touch her.

She didn’t want to piss the “lord” off when he started; time worked on her, as on a ship on the sea, slowing succumbing to cracks. She considered her voice; she was just too weak to tell him to stop when she knew where this was going.

He didn’t slow down for her pain and the sight of blood; he had started the evening by giving her a drink that burned her mouth and made her giddy. He seemed certain she would handle the pain.

She sneaked in at night through that back gate every week for six months and dropped out of school before the end of her first year. She got pregnant. He made her take a pill and drink a concoction.

She would have died. She couldn’t tell anyone because Pastor Banre’s giant billboard could be seen beside the broadest road in the city and the local press would quote the man declaring doom on shady politicians and men who let other men shove their thing in their anuses.

The tweets had a few pictures of the basement; pictures of legs and disheveled dresses. No faces. I could tell from the pictures that the hairy legs were the pastor’s.

I celebrated the funeral service at home by smoking a blunt under the shade of the mango tree behind the house before my friend and her boyfriend joined me there and shared a bigger blunt with me. They were on their way to a date at the cinema, which was a ten-minute walk from my Mum’s place. They left before my Mum came home with four morose-looking church elders: three men and a woman.

My Mum was sober when she came to my room to summon me to the sitting room. Hers was a kind of knowing soberness, which got me curious; made me eager to know the words that had been traded in my absence.

Two of the elders sat on the two-seater sofa on the left of the TV while the two others sat on the right of it; the woman was the one nearest to me, she gazed into my eyes and wanted to know if pastor ever raped me.

He didn’t rape me. He wanted me to speak in tongues; he changed tactics when he realized I wasn’t keen on that religious gibberish. I was not interested in becoming a sister. Sisters were the ones who would hold their thick bibles close to their chests and jot down pastor’s words like dictations from God; sisters were the ones who were always coming to pastor to open up the secrets of their lives. I didn’t need him; he seemed like a good man and I was a confident bad girl.

He saw me at the mall two weeks after our first meeting in church. He was pushing a trolley that was almost full of groceries; I was holding a shopping basket, looking for my favourite granola brand. We were between packs of cereals and packs of milk, two colourful shelves that were like walls behind us as we talked; we made space for other shoppers to pass.

He thought I needed some counsel, some guidance, some mentoring, something he could only do one-on-one with me without distraction at a dedicated time, preferably at night when the spirit would be more receptive, of course if I was keen and ready.

“Young woman, do you know why the lord wept over Jerusalem?”

I didn’t, so I told him.

“Jerusalem missed her time of visitation.” He licked his lips. “Sister Labake, there is something the Lord wants to do in you through his grace upon my life. I’m not the kind of man that tries to draw people to myself. This is about you. Look, some things are gathered, but some things are given by the men God has placed over your life. You need to be ready to receive because I am ready to give you something.”

The man I had seen on the YouTube videos seemed dedicated to a course; there was just something I couldn’t place about him. I was curious. I expected an unraveling; I could learn a couple of things if I played along.

The first day we met at the basement office I was on my way from my friend’s place where we had shared a bottle of Four Cousins and three fat blunts; my friend, her boyfriend and me.

I began to see signs that my friend and her thug lover needed some time alone after the last of the blunt had been crushed in an ashtray and the bottle of wine had gone. It was their way. First they get high, then the wild sex.

I got past the gate of Tope’s flat into the street and heard my phone ring in my bag. The name on the screen got my heart pounding in my chest.

“Hello sir.” I looked around to be sure the caller was not looking at me from somewhere near. The timing of the call gave me that feeling of being watched. The man at the other end repeated his offer like the devil.

I thought about my outfit and said to myself, “This shouldn’t be a problem for a man who has been preaching about clean vessels.”

Soon I took my seat on the sofa in the basement office, admiring the minimalist furniture and the 3D wallpaper design that would make you think you were in a wooded forest, and the white and blue lights from above.

“Would you like something to eat, or drink?” Fola Banre asked. He was beside me, but he looked very much like a gentleman.

I crossed my legs, and wondered if the mint I had sucked while waiting for him beside the small gate had done what I wanted it to do.

“You wouldn’t be able to give what I really feel like taking,” I said with a pout.

I felt the softness of his palm on my lap. He must have been doing this for a very long time because it was so natural. “You can’t be too sure,” he said.

“You have a beer here?”

He smiled. “Labake, beer is not good for you.”

He was like a puzzle, he was like a snake, he was like a dove; he was like a player and I was keen on whatever was his game.

“I can give you wine. Not beer,” he said finally.

The next time he placed his hand on my lap after commending the smoothness of my skin, attributing it to good genes, good food and the UK weather, he didn’t stop. I was ready to confirm what I had already unreasonably suspected about this man. I would have been glad to be wrong about him.

It is what it is.

He didn’t rape me. The elders hesitated when I told them. I could tell they had expected something else.

The woman exhaled deeply. “There is nothing to gain for exposing the dead to ridicule. Any attack on him now is an attack on the church since he can neither be arrested nor prosecuted at this point.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“Weren’t you the one who posted on Facebook?”

“Twitter. Not me.” I got on my feet. “Can I go back to my work now? Please, I still have a very busy day ahead.”

“It’s fine if you are not the one,” one of the men said and turned to Mum and the other guests who nodded their approval.

The last time I heard Fola Banre’s voice and saw him alive I was faking a sleep on the sofa in his basement office after he had exhausted me with his weird demands, most likely fuelled by a concoction he drank that night before pulling me to himself.

From the time he got the bottle of concoction from under the table and filled his stomach with it and smacked his lips, I had been expectant.

I had stopped cutting myself when I got to know the man better. I stopped punishing myself for betraying his wife. It wasn’t my cross to bear, so I laid it on the lamb worthy of it and made plans to get him to his Golgotha.

He was having a phone conversation with a widow who had called him to find out about some money he promised her.

“You see me first, then you get the money. That is how it works. Why are you dodging me? Are you the only woman with toto? I said you should see me, you are playing games.”

I raised my brows when I heard the way he spoke about the woman’s thing like a piece of meat in his plate; he avoided my eyes, I was just a toto to him too.

I must have slept for some time after listening to the man’s side of that revealing conversation because I did not know when he fell and how long he had been on the floor before I woke up.

He was like cold stone when I touched him; his hands were at his sides, his legs apart.

I knew he was dead when my eyes took in the shape a few inches away from my face. I felt an unusual tightness in my chest. My palms got sweaty and my heart pounded. I looked around and grabbed my bag and my shoes; there was no CCTV camera in sight.

I scanned the view behind the curtain before opening the door like a thief, I walked barefoot into the night, avoiding the security lights on my way to the back gate. I promised myself that the man would not drag me to his grave with his troubles.

Then I waited for the news.

Feyisayo Anjorin is a screenwriter, songwriter and short story writer whose writings have appeared in Litro, African Writer, Brittle Paper, Bella Naija, and Kalahari Review.

He lives in Akure, Nigeria.