Fiction

He woke me late last night. He sat on the edge of my bed with a bag in his lap. When I rolled over to turn the lamp on, he put the bag to my chest.

We need to go now, he said.

This time I didn’t question.

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone...

For twenty dollars, this dude named Byron promised to beat the crap out of you. That’s pretty much what the flyer said, and the flyer was all over the neighborhood. The first one we noticed was up high on the half-dead palm tree in front of...

“Can you believe it?” my brother said, talking more to the air than to me. “They’re leaving us without a soccer field.”

“What?” I said to myself and went up to the roof, my favorite place in the house for the last few months. It was 1979.

Buck season opened—still does—on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener’s at 4 a.m. to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in...

I needed to rest so I rented a big house near the coast, far away from the city. I was almost there, following a gravel road toward the sea, when the thick grass made it impossible to go on driving. The roof of the house could be seen in...

My mother went to a high school which was run by the nuns. After she got through she wanted to be a nun too. My Grandma Toscana told me. But Grandma and the whole family didn’t want her to become a nun. They told her it was all right for...

When Mr. Glen Otterbausch hired Sammy Boone she was sixteen and so skinny that the whole of her beanpole body fit neatly inside the circle of shade cast by her hat.