Eunice returned from London with a suitcase of
wool coats and a diploma that meant nothing in
Lagos. Her husband, Tobi, had buried his first
wife, Adunni, under the iroko tree behind their
Oshogbo compound three years prior — no funeral,
no mourning, just silence and a locked door. The
house still smelled of burnt palm oil and
unspoken prayers.
The curse was not whispered. It was in the way
the water in the well turned bitter every new
moon. In the way the children born after Adunni
never lived past their fifth year. In the way
Tobi’s mother kept her head down and never
looked at the second floor. The rule was clear:
no woman who enters Adunni’s room shall leave
unchanged — and none who sleeps there shall bear
a child who breathes past the wet season.
Eunice, desperate to prove she was not just
another wife to be discarded, opened the door.
She swept the dust, lit kerosene lamps, and laid
Adunni’s lace veil across the bed — a gesture of
respect, not provocation. That night, the
ceiling wept black tears.
Her son, Chidi, fell sick the next morning —
fever that did not break, cough that pulled his
ribs like dry calabash. The doctors in Ikeja
shrugged. The pastors prayed. The herbalist said
the boy was being claimed.
Tobi’s mother brought a bundle of bitter kola
and a single warning: “You took her place. Now
you pay her debt.”
On the third night, Eunice heard Adunni’s voice —
not in words, but in the rhythm of the wind
through the eaves, singing the lullaby their
daughter never lived to hear. The curse did not
speak. It remembered.
She found Adunni’s diary under the floorboard —
not in English, not in Yoruba, but in the old
script of the Ijebu priestesses. The last entry:
“They say I died. I only became the door.”
The miracle healing was not in medicine. It was
in the rule that bit back: to save the child,
the wife must take the curse’s place — not by
death, but by becoming the vessel. The curse did
not kill. It moved.
At dawn, Eunice walked to the iroko tree. She
took off her wedding ring. She peeled off her
skincolored stockings. She wore Adunni’s veil
and sat beneath the tree, barefoot, silent, as
the first rain of the wet season began.
Chidi’s fever broke by noon.
Tobi wept. His mother whispered “Omo owo” —
child of wealth — and turned away.
By evening, Eunice could not speak. Her hands
trembled. Her eyes no longer reflected light —
only the shadow of a woman who had once loved,
and was now the space where love was buried.
The house still smelled of palm oil.
But the well water ran sweet again.
And the second floor door?
It never opened again.
