Imperfections

by Chukwuka Nwafor “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” - Salvador Dalí In the presence of readily inquisitive guests, in the heat of an ongoing conversation, Ginika abandoned me. But since the earliest days of her NYSC trips to the village, there had been signs of a different woman—steadily emerging—and warily securing its way into my mind. We had both... Read More

The Goat That Eats Meat

by Brian Bwesigye “He does men.” Syson said as he tapped Medius’s shoulder. “No surprises, his looks tell it all”, Medius said. Jim, oblivious of Medius’s and Syson’s banter was involved in a different conversation. He threw his arms in the air as he spoke. When he laughed, his pitch reverberated with a wave that seemed to sweep his entire body off the seat like a... Read More

Sweet Notes

She was the music and the music was her. The music had been with her from her first conscious moment. She learnt her alpha-notes to solfa notes and had sung her way through school work and exams. She had come to the point where music was an obsession, a consuming passion, an addiction she was happy to habour. Her happiest moment was when she performed in front of an audience. She... Read More

A Shadow’s Quandary

By ABUBAKAR ADAM IBRAHIM Abubakar is the author of The Quest for Nina, his first novel, published in the US. He is also the winner of the BBC African Performance Playwriting Competition and the Amatu Braide prize for Prose. His poems and short fictions have been published locally and internationally. FOR two weeks I watch the widow toil, trying to pick up the pieces of her life... Read More

My BMW

By EGHOSA IMASUEN # I frowned in the car beside Mommy, remembering I was happy with the party only after Uncle Max gave me that Five Hundred Naira note. Not when I was allowed to run my hands across the sides of the shiny cars parked outside; not when I smelt the party-cake smell of the big parlour upstairs. “Buy something decadent with it, my dear,” he had said. Decadent means... Read More

Betty

By ADEBIYI OLUSOLAPE The Ijaw Students Association of the Delta State University was having its annual Jaja of Opobo Memorial Lecture. It had been one hundred and seventeen years since Jaja had died on his way home from forced exile in Saint Vincent. He was born in the same year Bonaparte died in exile on Saint Helena. His exile was a price he paid for breaking a personal rule of... Read More

A Lesson in Fishing

By DAMI AJAYI It was not a weekend, not a time for a son to be around his fisherman father except that the teacher’s strike had extended beyond the Local Council’s “worst-case scenario,” twenty-eight days and counting. The son stared into his father’s face, trying to decipher his expression. Though the nascence of his mind and his newness to the experience couldn’t plunge... Read More