I did not mean to study her hands. It just happened.
After the cassette, everything in the house felt dangerous to look at—her face, her eyes, even her footsteps. But her hands… her hands betrayed her long before anything else did.
They had always been farmer’s hands: hard, cracked, browned by sun and survival. But slowly, they began to lose their old language. The calluses thinned. The dirt vanished. And in its place appeared faint cuts and bruises, like punctuation marks in a sentence she would never speak aloud.
I watched them when she cooked, when she swept, when she braided my grandmother’s hair. I watched the way they trembled when she thought she was alone. I watched them stiffen into fists as she slept.
I wanted to take those hands, cradle them, tell her that I saw everything—even the things she hoped I wouldn’t. But the words choked inside me. So I said nothing, and silence filled the rooms like smoke.
To feel less helpless, I began quietly replacing her chores with my own. Fetching water before dawn. Sweeping the compound. Washing dishes before she reached for them.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said one morning, finding me bent over a pot that refused to come clean.
“I want to,” I muttered.
She studied me—too long, too deeply. I stared at the soap bubbles clinging to my fingers.
“Ifechi,” she said softly. “Look at me.”
I couldn’t.
“Look at me,” she repeated, and something in her voice left no room to hide.
When I raised my eyes, the light was behind her. Her face was shadowed, unreadable.
“Whatever you think you know,” she said, “whatever anyone has told you… it is not your burden. It is mine. Only mine.”
I nodded.
“You are the only good thing I have brought into this world,” she whispered. “Nothing will change that.”
And still, after everything, she was trying to shield me.
But the shield was already shattered, and she never knew I had been cut by every piece.
My grandmother died three months later.
Maybe it was sudden. Maybe she had been dying all along and we were too lost in our own wounds to notice. My mother found her at dawn, her face smooth in a way I had never seen in life.
My mother did not cry. Not once.
She washed and dressed the body with quiet precision. She arranged my grandmother’s arms like she was putting a child to bed. Her silence was terrifying—empty in a way that felt deliberate, like a closet she refused to open.
When the funeral ended and everyone drifted home, my mother stayed by the grave. She stood so still she looked carved from the same red soil.
Then she knelt.
She pressed her palms into the earth—those hands that had fed us, carried us, endured unbearable things—and she screamed.
The sound ripped through the air. It did not sound human. It was an animal sound, a wound turned into noise.
I ran to her. I held her as she clawed the dirt with her bare fingers. I had not touched her in months. But grief breaks rules. It breaks walls. It breaks people.
When she finally collapsed in my arms, empty and shaking, I helped her home. I put her to bed like she had once done for me.
Our roles had changed. Our silence had not.
After the burial, a hunger entered her—a hollow sort that devoured from the inside. She stopped eating. Just a little at first, then almost entirely.
“You have to eat,” I pleaded, sliding a plate toward her.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re getting sick.”
“There are worse things than sickness,” she whispered, smiling a fragile, broken smile.
It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t sorrow. It was resignation.
Someone had convinced her she was nothing but a body—something used until it snapped. And I began to hate them. The men. The car. The nights she came home with her hands shaking.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill.
I was seventeen. Barely strong enough to lift a sack of cassava. Yet the fury inside me felt older, wilder, as though some animal was living behind my ribs.
But fury does not change anything.
Fury cannot rescue a person drowning under shame.
So I did nothing.
I watched her disappear.
One night, long after the generator had fallen into its sleepy rhythm, I heard her talking in the dark.
“I am tired,” she whispered. “So tired.”
Silence.
“I know I cannot stop. But I am tired.”
More silence.
“He is a good boy. He deserves better. He deserves a different mother.”
I froze. My heart pounded like it was begging for escape.
“Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just…”
She stopped. The pause stretched.
“No. He would blame himself. He already does.”
My breath left my body in one long, shuddering wave.
I understood then:
My existence was the only rope tying her to this world.
And that rope was fraying.
I was not saving her.
I was keeping her alive in a life she no longer wanted.
It is the most painful truth I own.
I began leaving small tokens for her. A flower from the bush near the compound. A smooth stone from the stream. A torn magazine page showing the ocean she had once dreamed of seeing.
I never said a word. She never asked.
But she kept them.
And that was enough for me to continue trying.
Some evenings later, the black car dropped her off earlier than usual. She walked like her bones had forgotten how to hold her up.
She lifted her head, saw me sitting outside, and stopped.
For a heartbeat, she looked as though she might speak—truly speak—for the first time since everything had fallen apart.
Then something inside her shuttered.
She shook her head, walked past me, closed the door.
The sun set. The generator hummed.
And the space between us felt like two continents drifting apart.
I did not know then what was coming. Lagos. The rooms. The migration. The cities that would eat us alive—Bangkok, Manila, places where her body would become currency.
All I knew was this:
I loved her.
She was breaking because of me.
And neither of us knew how to stop the quiet destruction we shared.
