The child had been marked from birth. Mama Chisom knew it the moment the midwife set the boy on her chest and he did not cry—not the usual fury of new lungs tasting air, but a deliberate silence, as though he was evaluating her. His eyes opened too soon. Lagos heat pressed through the open window like a living thing, and somewhere below in the street, a woman was selling agbalumo with a voice like a lament.
They named him Chidubem, though Mama Chisom's own mother had pulled her aside at the naming ceremony and pressed dry fingers against her wrist. "Watch him," Grandmother Adaeze had whispered, the tobacco smell of her moving between them like a warning. "He has that look. The look of someone who has been here before and found it lacking."
Chidubem grew the way strange things grow—quickly, and in unexpected directions. By the time he could walk, he would not cross the threshold of the compound alone. He would stand at the gate and stare into the street as if waiting for something only he could see, his small hands gripping the rusted iron bars, his head tilted at that listening angle that Mama Chisom would later learn to dread.
Then, on his fourth birthday, he sat down in the courtyard and died.
The doctors at Lagos General had no explanation. His heart, they said, had simply stopped. No disease. No malnutrition. No accident. His heart had stopped the way a decision is made—cleanly, with finality. The attending physician was a young man with a new degree and a face that had not yet learned to hold difficult things, and he told her this in a voice that kept reaching for authority and falling short of it.
He was buried on a Thursday. On the following Tuesday, Mama Chisom's upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Obi, came down to ask why she could hear a child crying in the night.
Mama Chisom had no answer. She did not tell Mrs. Obi that she had heard it too—the crying coming from her son's empty room, a sound that stopped whenever she pressed her ear to his bedroom door, replaced by something worse: slow, deliberate breathing.
She pressed her palm flat against the wood and felt it, a warmth that should not have been there.
"Rats," she told Mrs. Obi. "I think it must be rats in the walls."
Mrs. Obi looked at her the way people look at someone who is in the middle of something they do not yet understand themselves, and then she went back upstairs. The house was quiet. Outside, somewhere on the main road, a Molue bus announced its approach with the particular authority of a vehicle that knew it would not stop for anyone.
Mama Chisom stood alone in the hallway.
In the morning, she would go to the market. She would buy something ordinary—tomatoes, perhaps, or peppers. She would stand in line and pay and carry her bag home and peel the tomatoes over the sink the way she had always done. She would do all of this. But first she would stand here a little longer, her hand on the door, and let the warmth underneath her palm be whatever it was.