Eunice Okoro packed three suitcases and her
mother’s rosary the night her father signed the
marriage contract with the pastor’s son. She
boarded the Lufthansa flight from Lagos to
Frankfurt with no goodbye — only the sound of
her father’s prayer echoing in her skull: “God
will cut the thread.”
The curse had begun when her grandmother died
screaming in the compound at Owerri, mouth full
of ash from burnt kola — the same ash Eunice now
sprinkled on her windowsill in Toronto, just to
feel safe. In Nigeria, the dead don’t stay
buried if you run from your name. In Canada, the
air smelled of snow and silence, but the dreams
didn’t. She saw her sister, Ada, kneeling in a
Lagos hospital, throat swollen shut, hands
clutching a photo of Eunice as a child — the
only thing the doctors couldn’t explain.
Eunice had believed Japa meant escape. She had
believed modern life — pharmacy degrees, student
visas, Canadian winters — could erase the old
ways. But the curse didn’t care about passports.
It fed on absence. Every time she changed her
name on a bank form, Ada’s fever rose. Every
time she deleted a voice note from home, Ada’s
skin turned greyer.
She booked the return ticket with her last N280,
000. No one asked why. Not her boss. Not her
boyfriend. Not the Nigerian pastor who prayed
over her at the airport — he just whispered,
“The land remembers.”
On the third day back in Lagos, she walked
barefoot into the ancestral grove behind her
uncle’s house in Umuahia. The earth cracked
where her grandmother’s grave lay. The elders
didn’t speak. They handed her a machete and a
bowl of bitter kola. She didn’t cry. She cut her
palm. Let the blood drip on the soil. Said
nothing.
Ada woke the next morning. No fever. No swelling.
Just a whisper: “I saw you come home.”
Eunice didn’t go back to Canada. She opened a
small pharmacy in Surulere. Sold paracetamol,
antimalarials, and sachets of crushed kola nut
wrapped in white paper — each with a prayer
written in Igbo.
The curse broke when she stopped running. But
the cost was her name. No one calls her Eunice
anymore. Not even her father. They say, “The
girl who came back from nowhere.”
She doesn’t correct them.
