SHORTLISTED
FAITH EGWUCHUKWU
I knelt beside the white plastic anchoring chair, my fluffy church gown pooling around me like a cloud, just like everyone else. In Assemblies of God Church, Azugwu, the benediction was an uncompromising geography; you were either on your knees or you were a rebel against the Almighty. I would have freed my eleven-year-old aching joints if I could, but I wasn’t ready for the wrath of a congregation that believed pain was the only currency God truly recognized.
It was the “ember” period of 2010 — the third day of a seven-day fast that had turned the air into a thick, salty soup of human breath and desperation. We moved through the holy choreography: hands pressed to foreheads as if to keep our thoughts from escaping; bodies turning toward the cardinal points of distant villages to dismantle “wicked altars” built by enemies we had never met. I clapped my hands with a fierce, rhythmic violence, defeating a Satan I only knew through the pages of a book.
”Lord, all I’m asking for is that You give me a child. Give me a child! Nye m nwa!”
The words didn’t fall; they tore. I was forced to look. She was kneeling over her chair, praying her soul out of her body. Sweat pooled in the dips of her brow and dripped onto the plastic like bits of heavy rain — a private monsoon in a public space. My childhood prayers were thin, polite things: “God bless my parents,” “Make me a blessing.” But this woman was naked in her wanting. At eleven, I was a creature of Sunday school lessons and girls’ classes, a girl who had never known the touch of a man, let alone the rhythmic, private rituals required to summon a life. Suddenly, her prayer wasn’t just a spiritual cry; it was a confession. It carried the scent of the bedroom, the heavy, unvoiced secrets of the flesh that I was not yet supposed to understand.
A hot wave of shame washed over me. I felt like a thief who had accidentally stumbled into someone’s most sacred, uncurtained room, witnessing a transaction of the body I wasn’t prepared to name. I recoiled from the raw, unpolished weight of her truth, embarrassed by a revelation that made my own innocence feel like a garment too small for the world I was now seeing.
After the service, I trailed her through the magnitude of the crowd, watching her cascade down a hill like a secret being carried away. I wished God would catch her heart before it shattered. I was too young to understand the cruelty of the trade. I had no way of knowing that the life she was about to summon would be the very shadow that would eclipse her own.
***
A couple moved into our street on a beautiful amber evening, their properties clinched together on a small truck as if they knew the slightest slip would send their whole fortune down the gutter. I watched the woman unload. My heart did a slow somersault of recognition. She was the praying woman, and she was carrying a miracle beneath her heart. She was pregnant.
I smiled at the beautiful coincidence of it. I wouldn’t understand until fifteen years later why the people my heart reaches out to always seem to drift into my orbit, but that evening, I simply smiled at the logic of God.
I often saw her in the early evenings, sitting outside with her legs stretched before her, slowly fanning a space that felt too small for her. She wasn’t just another neighbor; she was a radiance. There was a deliberate, scholarly grace in the way she communicated — a woman who spoke in measured, thoughtful sentences that made you feel, for a moment, like she was the only person in the world worth listening to. You could tell she was properly schooled by the effortless, melodic lilt of her English and the way she flipped through her stacked books, treating the worn spines like old, sacred friends.
She was the kind of woman who gave from an empty cup. I remember her sharing the last of her garden eggs with me and my friend, Chinenye, her faint, apologetic smile suggesting she was sorry she didn’t have a whole feast to offer. I felt a sudden, sharp guilt taking from her emptiness; I wanted to push the gift back into her hands.
They lived in one of the single rooms in the compound — one of those cramped, rectangular boxes where life is forced to happen all at once. There were no hallways for secrets, no spare corners for a quiet recovery. Every indelicacy of existence — the cooking, the sleeping, the washing, and the demanding growth inside a woman — is compressed into the same few square feet of linoleum. I would study the cracked walls of their room, where the doors were plastered into the center of the square walls like an accidental revelation — as if the building had never intended to house a human soul, but had been forced to admit one.
LaVaughn Belle. Beyond Blue. Chaney series.
She had meticulously shoved clothes and scraps of paper into every gap beneath the door, a painful, silent labour intended to keep the sound of her life from seeping into the ears of the neighbors. She lived in a muffled world. I always wondered how a woman of such refinement had ended up married to a man who was her total opposite — someone whose “uncooked” words were rough and jarring, a man who used his might to ensure every consonant ending was “louudddd and cleaarrrr,” as if volume could replace understanding. She would hum tunes I don’t recognize, her voice a fragile thread holding together the heavy demands of her swelling body.
The morning of her labour held its foggy silence at 5:00 AM. My father was already dressed in his “dragon” shirt — the fire-breathing fabric he claimed brought him bad luck every time he wore it. Usually, he would wake us by painfully poking our ribs with a purposeful middle finger, a ritual of discipline that asked, “Can’t you tell it’s time for prayers?” But that morning, the poke never came.
I heard his taxi engine cough and fade, a mechanical rattle that usually signaled the start of a long day. But then, it stopped. He pulled up at our neighbor’s door, a hurried dash that broke the stillness of the dawn.
People often reached for my father in the bruised hours of the night — calling out to the man with the car when the world felt too heavy to carry alone. He was the vessel for every neighborhood crisis: a child burning with a sudden, mysterious fever; a neighbor slumped in the shadow of a stroke; or Papa Elmond, who had quietly slipped from sleep into the forever-outside while his family breathed the safe, recycled air of the indoors. But that morning, my heart didn’t lean toward tragedy. I let myself believe in the sweetness of a new arrival. I imagined the dash was for a beginning. To me, it meant a gathering of food and the crinkle of biscuit wrappers; it meant the air would soon be thick with talcum powder and sugary with the scent of a naming ceremony. I lay there in the dark, smiling.
I listened to the muffled urgency behind that thin door. I didn’t yet understand the geography of poverty: how in a single room, the distance between the birthing mat and the coffin is no wider than a heartbeat; how the cost of a surgery can turn a place of life into a place so cold; and how a mother can bleed to death, accompanied only by the desperate rhythm of clapping hands, prayers, and wishes.
The news of her demise didn’t just spread; it stained the street. I was eleven, but I felt the walls of my own civilization crumble. My friend told me the woman had promised her new school shoes. I didn’t care about the shoes. I wanted her to be here. I wanted to know where miracles go when the body becomes a battleground between complications and prayer. How she had prayed! There is a specific, jagged kind of mourning for the woman who dies at the finish line, her hands gracefully reaching for the prize, only for those hands to turn too weak, too fragile, to grab it.
***
I would find my first lover on the day the Royal Rangers led her funeral procession past my school gate. The band played, and her picture — boldly printed on a large poster — decorated the cars and the bodies of the mourners. I sat on the assembly ground, my eyes blurring the world into a smudge of grief. My classmates asked, “What’s the problem, Faith?” but I couldn’t explain the precarity of a life lost in the pursuit of a miracle.
Twelve years later, history repeats itself with a cruel, rhythmic accuracy.
June 2022. Mummy Ukwuoma “bled too much.” As if a life could be summarized in those three words. As if her laughter and her dreams could be poured out into a single, dry sentence. She was a neighbor who wasn’t easy to love — we had our differences — but I watched her fetch water from the dormant stream even when her belly was a heavy, protruding weight. The stream at the end of our street was a stagnant, green-filmed eye that watched us all, but for Mummy Ukwuoma, it was a daily battlefield. Even as her belly swelled into a hard, uncomfortable mountain, she refused to yield to the exhaustion that claimed her eyes. I remember the rhythmic slap-slap of her plastic yellow slippers hitting the dry earth. She would carry that extra burden of a jerrycan more than nine times a day — a woman trying to wash away the “bad luck” of three daughters with the hope of a son.
When the boy finally came, we jubilated, though not with the usual fanfare. She had come home weak, and we watched, hushed, as the “victory” began to rot. Penury is a quiet, hungry thing. It started with joints too fragile to hold a child; on several occasions, her son would slip from her arms while breastfeeding, leaving her to cry and lament. Her feet could no longer carry her. The last time I saw her standing was the day she dragged herself to our flat to complain to my mother about the insistent weakness. I saw her from the window and filled with fright — she looked like death, a specter who had just birthed life, supporting one shoulder against the other.
After that, she never came out again. Then came the bedsores — angry, blossoming craters on her skin that smelled of damp rooms and neglected prayers. I sat at my laptop, my fingers flying over the keys as I messaged foundations on Facebook, my words a desperate, digital libation. I described the way her laughter, once a boisterous shield, had thinned into a whistle. I pleaded for blood, for gauze, for a miracle that didn’t require a funeral poster. But the internet is a vast, cold ocean, and my pleas were just bubbles on the surface.
The day she died, the street lost its sense of smell. The air was thick with the powerful, undeniable stench of properly rotten human flesh that lingered for hours, a grim testament to her slow departure. She died in the indelicacy of pain, her skin sticking to the very linoleum that had witnessed her silent labour.
What is this frantic struggle to bear children? To silence the whispers of the street? To wear a full gele at Christmas with a baby strapped to your back — a crown that costs a life? What does it cost to feel like “enough” in a world that only counts you when you are carrying, when you are labouring, when you are breaking?
I never knew their real names. They were always Nwunye Darlington and Mummy Ukwuoma. Identities swallowed by the roles they died to fulfill.
Now, the hospital tiles are cold against my heels, a sterile geography that feels miles away from the Azugwu church floor, yet the air is just as thick with the scent of impending transaction. As the strikes of a contraction ripple through me — a white-hot blade of lightning — I don’t see the monitors or the nurse’s masked face. I see the ‘dragon’ shirt my father wore in 2010. I see the muffled gap beneath Nwunye Darlington’s door. I see Mummy Ukwuoma’s bones beneath rotten flesh.
I grease the memories of these two women with my own sweat. Every time the monitor pings, I wonder if it is a heartbeat or a countdown. I am walking a bridge made of glass, and beneath me lies the history of women who traded their breath for a cry. I look at my own hands, gripped white against the bedrails, and I ponder the fragility of this crossing. What if I never see the light of day again? What if my name, too, is traded for the sweetness of a child’s first breath?
I rest my head against the pillow, drawing a deep, jagged breath. I embrace every incoming strike with a groan, and at the command of the nurses, I push. I push — not just against the physical pain, but against the history that waits to swallow me whole.
