Eze Okoro packed his three shirts and a Bible
into a rucksack the night his father’s church
announced the new tithing rule: every member
must give a live goat or lose their name from
the prayer list. He was twentytwo, had not eaten
meat in seven months, and had just been offered
a visa to Canada through a cousin in Toronto —
but Lagos had other plans.
The city was not sleeping. It was breathing.
Neon signs from Alaba Market flickered like
dying saints, while area boys in buba suits
patrolled the alleys behind the National Theatre,
whispering to girls who’d stopped answering
their mothers’ calls. Eze met Adaora under the
broken streetlamp near Surulere’s old bus
station — her father’s sermons had turned her
into a walking prayer, but her hands still
smelled of palm oil and perfume from the night
market. They touched for the first time when she
slipped him a key to the 2am bus to Accra. No
words. Just the weight of her thumb on his palm.
The bus was full of men with Ghanaian accents
and women carrying plastic bags of dried fish.
No one asked why Adaora was with him. In Lagos,
forbidden affairs were not sins — they were
currency. The world had changed since the oil
boom cracked: now, love was a visa stamp, and
ghosts collected their dues before dawn. The
bus’s engine coughed like an old pastor. Outside,
a woman in a headtie burned candles on the
roadside, screaming into the dark for her son
who’d vanished after buying “spiritual fuel”
from a roadside prophet.
At Oshodi, two men in suits stopped the bus. One
held a clipboard. The other carried a jerrycan
of kerosene. “You are not registered,” he said.
Not to Eze. To Adaora. Her father had signed her
into the Church’s Protection Registry — any girl
who left without a pastor’s written release was
considered spiritually unclean. Her name was now
a ghost in the system. The men didn’t touch her.
They didn’t need to. The rule bit: if you run
with a registered soul, you become the vessel
for their curse. Eze felt it first in his teeth —
a sour rot, like burnt pap.
They didn’t fight. They didn’t beg. Adaora
stepped off the bus. She turned once, looked at
Eze with eyes that had seen too many prayer
circles. He didn’t cry. He couldn’t. The
kerosene smell was in his throat now. The bus
moved on. The driver didn’t stop.
Three days later, Eze boarded another bus — this
one to Accra, no girl, no rucksack. His hands
shook. His skin had turned yellow. At the border,
a nurse asked if he’d been near a shrine. He
said no. She gave him a bottle of bitter herbal
tonic. He drank it. The rot inside him didn’t
leave. It just learned to wait.
He never made Canada.
He never told anyone her name.
But every night, when the Lagos nightlights
flicker, a man with yellow eyes stands at the
Oshodi bus stop, staring at the road — waiting
for a girl who never came back.
The city remembers.
And it always collects.
