'Abiku' by Jumoke Verissimo is the best story on the Internet right now

Anu dragged her feet. She was burdened with a soccerball stomach and the jute bag in her right hand. From her position she saw the house; its lidded brown roof and jagged eaves.

Few more steps and she would face its unpainted breast of wall with plywood window louvres and a cubicle-balcony wedged into it. She wrung her nose and spat on the ground as she passed a small refuse dump, yet her eyes scanned the surrounding like that of a solitary traveller with no hint of rest in the distance.

She was one of those pregnant women who invoked pity because their stomachs appeared to double their lean frames.

Her thought went to how she would again return to her daily routine of domestic chores and making time to write and distribute letters to primary schools for a job as a junior class school teacher. She was far away in thought, until something feathery tickled her legs and sent her stomping wildly on the ground.

The earlier awkwardness of pushing her protruded stomach onward for a moment disappeared. She struggled to regain her breath, but followed with her eye, a cackling hen scamper from between her legs while its pursuer—a philandering all-white cock—persisted with its chase.

Anu soon reached the house. It was near quiet. It could have been quieter, but the noise of a barber’s generator carried a hum that sounded like remote traffic intruding a graveyard. Stoves, mops and some other objects that fulfilled domestic needs littered the passage and cast shadows about the corridor.

She thought of the horror movies she watched as a child, where a skeleton or some zombies popped up from nowhere to scare the hero into rendering a loud shriek. It was something she yearned to do just then, not from fear of thinking of those horror movies, but for the concurrent pain that shot from the depth of her abdomen as her foetus kicked hard as she placed her right feet on the platform.

She paused and let out a deep breath. She pitied herself as she took in the picture of her stomach beetled over the block, a make-shift step, she would climb to get to the patio. With some more heavy breathes she placed her legs one after another on the staircase: a move backwards to measure accurately where to place her feet while using the jute bag as a balance, she lifted herself onto the pedestal until she stood balanced on the terrace after two tries.

Her efforts were supported by a series of muffled breathes.

Anu placed her bag against the wall, and sat down on a wooden bench to steady her breath. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her heart which raced like one who just finished a 400m race. She remained like this for some minutes.

Her open eyes met a stray dog besides her. It licked its paws. Its brown coat glistened like it was oiled until she noticed a sore, shaped like Nigeria’s map, behind the dog’s left ear.

The congealed blood against its tawny coat irritated her. She tried to ignore it, by moving the bag to another side. When she could not take the dogs presence any longer, she rummaged hurriedly through her bag for the house keys: pushed deep, and then deeper, but only the jingle of metals reached her ears, the keys evaded her fingers.

She cursed under her brows and stopped to again lean against the wall before she straightened herself out to pour the contents of her bag unto the ground. The key wove its ring around a handkerchief that sat in a corner of the bag.

“Ha! Madam, you are back?” The animated voice of the landlord broke into her confused state.  As he reached her, his questions took a more personal note.

“Your husband said you were too sick. Very sick,” his voice rose, “How are you now?”

A voice in her head said she should ignore him, but she answered him in a low voice, but he appeared not to have heard her, because he walked away muttering how he was just asking about welfare and did not want anyone to treat him as a busybody.

His steps soon faded as he entered into the house. She felt bad with the way things turned out. He was one of the people she spoke with since she moved into the house with Akin. They were three of them: the landlord, his wife and her own husband.

When she first moved in, few women, wives to other tenants, tried to join conversations with her in the mornings as she fetched water at the public tap or cooked in the communal kitchen, asking for salt or lime or one inane thing or another.

She never spoke to them. She either extended their need to them or shook her head and remained silent when she did not have what they wanted. Soon, they passed her with a nod, then a grunt, but the days before she fell sick and left the house they were silent and straight-faced when they walked past her.

Anu got up from the bench and headed to the door, dragging the bag behind her. A hen walked on the cemented corridor of the house and skittered further as she walked to the room she shared with her husband: It was the fourth room downstairs in the building.

There were twelve rooms downstairs and fourteen upstairs, twenty-six in all.

She unlocked the door. She stopped as she thought she heard footfalls and lingered to see if someone was around. It was not like she cared, but the thought of other occupants in the house went to only three persons:  the three housewives upstairs who her husband, Akin, once said were a lousy lot, “Getting bloated with the fried meat they ate between watching Nollywood movies from morning to dusk and standing up grudgingly to buy food at a roadside for their children. Irresponsible women that don’t cook at home! Mscheew.”

Perhaps with the lack of power they were all on some compulsory siesta she concluded. In a way she was thankful. The quiet of the house met her mood. She wanted to be in the room before their TV bellowed loud screams from the Nollywood movies; where someone always seemed to scream or shout or cry like a dog howling over pain in the films, mixed with their shouts of shock or/and laughter.

She opened the door still thinking of the women. Anu remembered Akin mimicking the way they walked, their flesh vibrating as they moved down the stairs. Actually, the three women were “bloated” as Akin described, they were not fat. He said there was a difference between a fat woman and a bloated woman.

He had explained this to her when she began to eat heavily after she lost her job as a primary school teacher that she would become bloated. He then said between his famous calm smiles that eating to forget is an easy way to obstruct nature and become bloated. “Don’t you know that the fat woman had nature’s master plan, the bloated woman is the one who eats to rewrite nature’s plans by expanding her horizon forcefully?”

Those were the good days. When she went to work and his salary seemed enough, and though they were was not married, she slept over every other weekend. These times were when they talked about living together in a three-bedroom apartment with just two children – like Oyinbos – one boy and one girl. Finish.

The children would be like those white children with a room filled with toys.  They were going to save towards that life, but she lost her job and his salary wasn’t regular any longer and he needed to work more and he was never at home and she became pregnant. That was one of the reasons Akin could not come to bring her home with a taxi.

It was the end of the many days her husband explained to her that he needed to work some more because only few times were such work shifts available.

She did not remind him that it was the third week since he began making excuses of finding a shift to make more money.  She had continued to stay in her father’s house even after her health improved and her stomach grew rounder and tauter, so much that it readily invited sympathies and pities that made most people obligated to run errands for her. Worse still, she was constantly reminded of how she was not yet legally married to her man, and was an eyesore among the neighbours.

Staying in her father’s house came as an option when she became pregnant and yet sickly; her father invited her home against her mother’s wish. It seemed a good idea as Akin was never at home these days. He spent more time at work, trying to earn more money by covering shifts for absent workers at the factory.

Although she had hated the idea of returning home, she knew her younger ones would be of service to her and her father who was a nurse, would nurture her back to good health.  As she expected, her mother saw her as an unwelcomed rival in her unwed but pregnant state, not the seven months pregnant daughter carrying her grandchild.

Her mother called Akin her ‘son-in-law’ before she became pregnant; but he became “that boy that impregnated you,” after she raised the idea of a “proper” wedding with a deserving splendour, and Anu argued that would have to wait until the baby was delivered.

Her mother stopped talking to her directly and only sent messages through her younger ones; especially as the due date drew nearer.

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Jumoke Verissimois the author of I Am Memory. She lives in Ibadan.

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