After the wedding, Ekene decided to move out of the village and into town, into the bustle and noise of Owerri, so Mary was staying with Ahunna while Ekene went to set up their new life. Mary had to tilt her head up to look at Ekene as they recited their vows-the men in their family were always tall-and Chika had watched her throat curve, her face glowing as his brother lifted up the tulle and kissed her. Chika had never seen his brother look so tender, the way his long fingers trembled, the love and pride simmering in his eyes. Ekene had been waiting for her at the altar, his spine stern and proud, his skin gleaming like wet loam against the tarred black of his suit.

They had married a few months ago, and Chika had watched Mary float down the aisle, white lace gathered around her body and a veil obscuring her pretty mouth. Mary was his brother Ekene’s wife, a full and soft girl with cheeks like small clouds. Everything is fine now.” She spat udara seeds from her mouth like small black bullets.

“I stepped on a stick when I was on the farm,” she explained, as her son sat down beside her. The large compound of her village house stretched around them-old family land, a whole legacy in earth that she’d held on to ever since Chika’s father died several years ago. “There was no need to disturb you,” Ahunna replied, splitting open an udara and sucking out its flesh. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you send someone?” “Mama! Gịnị mere?!” Chika cried when he saw her, running up the veranda stairs.

She had fine wrinkles around her eyes, hair plaited into tight cornrows, and her left foot was bandaged and propped up on a stool. Ahunna’s wrapper was tied around her waist, leaving her breasts bare, and her skin was redder than Chika’s, deeper and older, like a pot that had been bled over in its firing. The next photograph in the stack would be of Chika’s mother, Ahunna, sitting on her veranda when her son arrived, a bowl of udara beside her. He had looks that should have lived forever, features he passed down to Vivek-the teeth, the almond eyes, the smooth skin- features that died with Vivek.

The women on the bus looked openly at him, his white shirt billowing out from the back of his neck in a cloud, and they smiled and whispered among themselves because he was beautiful. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.Ĭhika was twenty and as tall as his mother, six feet of red skin and suntouched-clay hair, teeth like polished bones. If this story was a stack of photographs-the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country- it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. They burned down the market on the day that Vivek Oji died.

The death of vivek