I drove through Alagbado into Ijesha and then into the neighbouring lands of Bafoussam, and partly settled on barren areas of Am Timan before approaching the many seas encumbering our many distinct lives. 

Night was fast approaching and sleep was calling. I was fagged out. The motels were closed and my car was too stuffed to be slept in. In it, were gifts from my close relatives and letters to the many strangers I was meant to meet at my destination. 

My bones yearned for softer bases, delicate layers of foam, to stretch and relax. I lay half asleep as I watched the people make their way into the canoe. 

In the land were indistinct noises of farewells I only imagined came from the deepest places of the heart. Farewells of regret, perhaps of an unguaranteed posterity. 

Along the shores of the gentle waves, I saw something greater surge behind it; billowing waves of destruction, something the people that bid farewell couldn’t see. I realised their neglect, after I did not hear the call for an alarm. They continued bidding their farewell, hugging and kissing each other. 

I imagined the promises they made; nearer suns, relieved troubled pasts. It wasn’t until a boy tapped the side of his mother, that the crowd became aware of the current predicament. 

People screamed names I had heard from the past. God! Allah! I saw in their eyes fear, dread of things they perhaps had no words to describe. 

And in their calls, followed the force of a mighty spirit, a deity they felt great enough to save them. “Come over, you sucker”, a white man exclaimed, as though expecting it. 

The wave trooped in, past the land and swallowed the man, and all the people begging. Neat, without the trace of a disaster.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadows behind – Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I awoke to the songs of the sweet morning birds, my daughters all around me. Igu my oldest, wrapped her tiny arms round my afro. Tipe laid on my hairy chest, with her thumb in her mouth. 

They reminded me of the angels I dreamt about as a child. Little flickering creatures. Their curly hairs and the beads of sweat round their noses reminded me of their mother. 

Where is your mother, I asked? They pointed to the door, their mother in the kitchen in tears. When I tried to walk over, I realised my legs fizzled. They felt inundated with liquid. Perhaps with water from the sea or the tears from my wife’s eyes, through the night.

Dupe, Dupe, I called seven times, yet no-one came. I then asked Igu to go call her mother. She dashed over and came back after a few minutes. She shook her head, and I knew Dupe had refused to come over. 

Since my legs felt heavy, I resolved to sit on the bed, and wait a little longer for her. I was not furious, for I knew whatever made her stay away from me, was to a degree, justifiable. 

Yet I needed her by my side, close enough to explain where I was and why she cried. Through the window wall of my bedroom, I looked over the lawn; unfiltered, all flourishing in earth’s emerald green. 

Nature had proclaimed more than required. Igu and Tipe were now fast asleep, in the whites they wore before I awoke. It was when I tried out my legs once more, to locate the sound of my weeping wife, that I saw her; looking paler, shorter than I had known her to be. 

“You have been asleep for 6 months now John” she said, “and a lot has transpired”. She said people had been swallowed by a wave she could not explain. 

She described something vaguely similar to what I had seen in my dreams, or sleep, or past, of six months now, a fact still startling to me.

Apparently, some famous American folks and close friends in the places I used to and now reside had died during the time I slept. Achievers, some of whom I admired. Kobe Bryant, Pop Smoke, Chadwick Boseman, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ismailia Barry; an old classmate and Uncle Lami, our mower. Dupe tells me he died just a few hours before I awoke. 

That perhaps explained why the grasses were levelled beyond what I had come to know. My throat became tight and my heart heavier, as though carrying the weight of my legs. In that moment, my mind wandered to these people. Men and women our universe in myriad ways depended on for sustenance. 

Who will father the children of the forgotten? who will show love to the ones most in need of it? Who shall actualise the dreams of the many gone? I thought. How did it all happen, how did death come so swiftly? 

We held hands and watched our children sleep, slightly also looking through the window for morning to come, the nightmare had to end.

By Onyekachi Okorie