Efunola wakes before dawn to the wet cough of
her younger sister, Adaeze, lungs rattling like
a broken generator. The hospital bills are
stacked under their mother’s grave—three years
dead from the same fever that now gnaws at
Adaeze’s ribs. The clinic says it’s tuberculosis.
Efunola knows better. It’s the oil.
In Lagos, the oil doesn’t just flow from pipes—
it walks. Since the ’70s boom, when foreign rigs
drilled through sacred earth near Port Harcourt,
the land began to bleed memory. People who drank
from contaminated wells saw their dead in the
dark. Those who sold stolen crude woke screaming,
fingers blackened as if buried alive. The church
called it demonic possession. The elders called
it ancestral wrath. The state called it
“economic necessity.” But in the alleyways of
Surulere and the backrooms of Jabi Lake’s
midnight clubs, everyone knew: oil taken without
blessing carries a soulprice.
Efunola was raised in the pulpit, daughter of
Pastor Okafor, whose sermons warned against
greed, whose collection plate never missed a
Sunday. But when the bishop seized their family
compound to build a “Prayer Tower,” and the
stepmother, Mama Chinyere, began selling their
late mother’s jewelry to fund her own
Pentecostal empire—Efunola learned the true cost
of piety. Mama Chinyere didn’t just hoard; she
traded. In the back of her new chapel, behind a
curtain of fake ivy, she sold vials of “anointed
crude” to desperate women—each drop, she swore,
could heal, but only if you paid with your
firstborn’s future.
The heist began at 11:47pm. Efunola slipped past
the gatekeeper who owed her father a debt,
slipped into the sealed compound where the
state’s abandoned oil drums still wept rust. One
drum—marked with a faded cowrie shell and the
name “Eke” (a name from the old Igbo line that
once farmed this land)—was warm to touch. It
hummed. She knew. This was the one.
She carried it in a burlap sack, past the area
boys who sold phone chargers under flickering
neon, past the beggars who whispered prayers to
the god of pipelines. She didn’t steal for
profit. She stole because the stepmother had
just sold Adaeze’s name to a spirit merchant—
three drops of oil, one year of the girl’s life,
sealed with a prayer in Yoruba that sounded like
a curse.
At dawn, Efunola poured the oil into a basin
beside Adaeze’s bed. The liquid didn’t glow. It
didn’t sing. It simply thickened, then split—
like a wound opening. From it rose the scent of
yam smoke, the sound of a woman weeping in the
language of the Niger Delta before the first rig
came. Adaeze stopped coughing. Her breath
steadied. But as the sun rose, Efunola’s left
hand turned black—fingers curling inward, veins
dark as tar. The oil demanded balance. Not a
soul for a soul. A life for a life. Her mother
had paid. Now it was her turn.
Mama Chinyere found her at noon, kneeling by the
basin, whispering to the empty air. The
stepmother didn’t scream. She smiled, slow and
cold. “You thought you were saving her?” she
said. “You saved her from death. But you just
became the next altar.”
The drum was empty. The black spread to
Efunola’s wrist. She didn’t cry. She only stared
at her reflection in the water—her face, already
fading, like a photograph left in the sun.
Lagos kept its lights on. The nightclubs
throbbed. The pastors prayed. The oil still
flowed.
But in one room, in a house smelling of kola and
ash, a girl with blackened hands began to dream
in a tongue no one else remembered.
