Amina

Shells in the shape of sky

It is true that in the end, we cannot tell the mind where to go. The storm gusts into the dome, where I wait, the past riding on its winds. Although it is my mother I have loved most, memory retrieves my father first.

**
Before I was born, my father, Sani, was an executive at a steel company; then he lost his job and became a cloth seller. Of the eighteen people who sold fancy-patterned and skillfully woven cloth at Harvest Market, he was the only man, and this, like the limp in his right leg—the aftermath of a polio infection when he was a boy—embarrassed him. When the market’s river began to dry, the scraggly children—the ones with snot-stained shirts, food-driven bellies, and no proper home-rearing to speak of—were the first to disappear. They vanished, much the way a street-corner store is found closed one morning, nailed plywood and blank signs where lights and words used to be. Life in the river city had begun to dim.

After two rainless weeks in the wet season, trips to Harvest Market became a scattered, once-in-a-while sort of thing. Even for those for whom it had been a way of life, imported cloth for naming ceremonies and societal weddings was now a seldom luxury. Sani, in his frustration, went days not speaking to my mother and me. In our passing, he hissed under his breath about this person or that one who’d bought cloth but hadn’t paid him on time.

One night, at dinner, my mother pushed her questions to him. “You think you’re the first man to sell women’s clothes to feed his family, the first man whose business struggled in a drought?” I looked at my father. Did he think this? She looked at him up and down, peeling him with each round. He said nothing.

When Sani kicked my mother, she wobbled like a calf in its first step. A boxer dizzied by an unscripted blow, she grabbed at anything near to steady her body. The metal chair next to the kitchen sink and the cupboard handles became like ropes. And in all of this, even with the sparks flashing about her eyes, she stopped to do the numb-tongue-over-sore-gums “Am I really bleeding?” bit. She licked the tip of her forefinger. The taste of blood, like the shock of a first beating, is distinct this way. I have never forgotten.

**

On the day my mother left my father, there weren’t any harsh words between them. Sani relished his breakfast along with Esther’s pretending everything was fine. Since the rains had returned, he left for the market as usual. The clang of the gate closing meant his Peugeot 505 was on its way. Esther ran to the bedroom closet for the stack of boxes, already filled with our belongings. Until that moment, I hadn’t known this would be the day.

And it was good that Sani was gone. Had he been home, he might have embarrassed Esther into staying. He would have summoned the neighborhood aunties to help him shame her.

They would have obliged, warning Esther against being a terrible mother and the perils of singleness.

One day, we were living as an unhappy family of three. The next, Esther and I were in our new flat on Elekuro Street, beginning again. In the middle of that first night, I went to my mother’s bedroom door. At seven years old, I was afraid to sleep alone. I watched her stomach and held my breath—my chest aching then, as hers didn’t rise and fall as it should. I ran to her side, sure she’d stopped breathing. “Mummy mi!”

“Ehn, Amina, what is it?” she answered calmly as she woke, as if she’d anticipated this childish ambush.

“I thought you were dead!”

The fear of losing my mother is the shore upon which our bond has ebbed and flowed across the years. In that moment, death might as well have arrived. I walked back into the hallway, through the pitch black, swallowed by the silence of night.

***

Excerpted from The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole. Copyright © 2025 Olufunke Grace Bankole. Published with permission from Tin House, an imprint of Zando, LLC.