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Sail Away
A shadowy figure cut through the darkness, her feet barely touching the earth as she moved noiselessly past rows of sleepy houses with their guiding spirits at weathered door posts, knee-deep in sawdust that was the earth on this side of the world.
The figure — a heavily pregnant girl in her late teens, gathered her wrapper about her heaving belly as she swallowed the sharp pain that came in periods threatening to turn her insides out. The contractions had begun much earlier but she’d braced herself waiting for the first signs of dawn before stealing out of the single room she shared with her maternal aunt. The Lagos lagoon faded into the blue greys of the waking skies as she headed for the shoreline in the company of her bewildered thoughts. A waning moon kept pace with her, hiding its face now and again behind the sharp silhouettes of the Okobaba lumber community.
‘Molara kept on walking towards her destination. She’d been there a few times over the past five months as her belly grew.
In the darkness, a large bird perched on a tangled mess of electric power lines above sat watching. Even though she couldn’t see its eyes in the darkness, she could feel it, piercing, in the waking gloom. This could be a bad omen, she thought as she cut a solitary path through a succession of boarding houses hewn from coarse timber and adorned with tin roofs, standing united in…
