Everything Good Will Come. Sefi Atta

to church.”

      It was morning. I scrambled out of my bed. I had not been to my mother’s church in years, but my memory of the place was clear: a white building with a dome. Behind it, there were banana and palm trees; behind them a stream. In the front yard there was red soil, and the walls of the building seemed to suck it up. People buried curses in that soil, tied their children to the palm trees and prayed for their spirits. They brought them in for cleansing. More than anything else, I was embarrassed my mother would belong to such a church— incense, white gowns, bare feet and drumming. People dipping themselves in a stream and drinking from it.

      Along the way, road blocks had been set up, as they always were after a military coup. Cars slowed as they approached them and pedestrians moved quietly. A truck load of soldiers drove past, sounding a siren. The soldiers jeered and lashed at cars with horsewhips. We pulled over to let them pass. A driver pulled over too late. Half the soldiers jumped down from the truck and dragged him out of his car. They started slapping him. The driver’s hands went up to plead for mercy. They flogged him with horsewhips and left him there, whimpering by the door of his car.

      At first the shouting scared me. I flinched from the first few slaps to the driver’s head, heard my mother whisper, “They’re going to kill him.” Then, I watched the beating feeling some assurance that our world was uniformly terrible. I remembered my own fate again, and Sheri’s, and became cross-eyed from that moment on. The driver blended in with the rest of the landscape: a row of rusty-roofed houses; old people with sparrow-like eyes; barefooted children; mothers with flaccid breasts; a bill board saying “Keep Lagos clean.” A breadfruit tree; a public tap; its base was embedded in a cement square.

      I had no idea what part of the city we were in.

      My mother’s priest was quiet as she explained what had happened. He had the same expression I remembered, his nose turned up as though he was sniffing something bad. She was to give me holy water to drink, since my father would not allow me to stay for cleansing. Then he produced a bottle of it, green and slimy. I recognized the spirogyra I’d seen in biology classes. I had to drink the water in the churchyard, and make myself sick afterward. None of it was to remain in me. Outside my mother handed the bottle to me. I gagged on every drop.

      “Stick your finger down your throat,” she said, when I finished.

      Two attempts brought the entire contents of my stomach onto the ground, but I continued to retch. My eyes filled with tears. Some of the water had come through my nose.

      “Good,” my mother said.

      I thought of stamping on her feet, squeezing her hand to regain my sense of balance.

      “You should never have followed that girl,” she said. “Look at me. If anything had happened to you, what would I have done? Look at me.”

      My gaze slipped from hers.

      “The bottle,” she said. “Give me the bottle, Enitan.”

      I handed it to her. It could have been a baton. My mother was hollow, I thought. There was nothing in her. Like a drum, she could seize my heart beat, but that was all. I would not say another word to her, only when I had to, and even then I would speak without feeling: “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good night.”

      We arrived home and I walked to the back yard, by the fence where the scarlet hibiscus grew. Sheri had gotten pregnant from the rape. Didn’t a womb know which baby to reject? And now that the baby had been forced out, how did it look? The color of the hibiscus? I placed one by my ear and listened.