Six

The last one went up this morning. I Am Son of a Fallen Woman. Six books between the first of September and the end of November, from an internet café by the market in Owerri and then a table by a window in England, and I want to write down, because nobody will believe it, that I did not write six books in three months. I wrote them in ten years, on a phone, under a mattress, after the pill, on the stadium road, in a kitchen with my mother talking, and in three months I pressed six buttons.

Two of them are my life. One is Mama's and mine. Two are the things I could not say as fact, so I said them as fiction and put a name on the boy that is my name, so that nobody could say I hid. One is the prayer. All six in a shop that reaches Owerri, where they will be read on phones under other mattresses, which is what they are for.

Here is what it is like to have said everything. It is quiet. Not empty; quiet, the way Owerri was on the Easter Sunday of the plague, with birds underneath. I have been carrying the notebooks since I was nineteen, and tonight they are in six places in the world that are not my bag, and the bag is lighter, and I keep touching it.

Pill at nine. Took it. Twenty-eight. England. Six. The line is still on, three friends in Owerri answering it, a fourth in Ghana now, and next week I am going to get a British number for it. That is what the books are for, from now on. Every copy is a night in a guest house for someone with no shoes.