Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

I made eye contact with my wife before turning to look at the tall woman. She was… one of them. She looked so normal. Except… it’s hard to explain. There was a flicker of oddness about her if you looked long enough. Like she was more than what she was and less than what she was presenting, like a double-exposed photo. My wife took a step toward the car and I was about to leap out when the ground shook.

The boys woke up. “Daddy, what w’dat?” Loteh asked, slurring his words from sleep.

“I don’t…” I looked toward the Nollywood woman. She was looking up the busy road. So was my wife.

The ground shook again. This time harder. My wife came running to the car, the two women behind her. I watched the Nollywood woman, waiting to see her change into a monster or something.

“Udeh! What is going on?” my wife shouted.

I could only shake my head. I didn’t know where to focus. My children in the back seat, the shuddering road, my wife or the “woman” standing behind her?

“Get out of the car,” the Nollywood woman shouted. “Hurry! It’s not safe!”

My wife and I stared at her. The boys started scrambling out. I opened the door to get out. The woman in the black slacks ran around the car and up the street stumbling and pointing back at us, shouting, “I’ve seen one of them! Back there! Back there!” People leaped out of their cars and ran up the road with the woman, away. Away from us.

I grabbed my bag and my wife’s purse. One of the boys snagged a bag of food, the other, my wife’s phone. And that’s when the road began shaking like a snake fighting a feisty rat.

“Get off the road!” the Nollywood woman screamed. She was right beside me. Everything was shaking but even in the darkness I could see right into her eyes – clearly, steadily. They were brown but glowed like the sun was behind them; a sun from another world, maybe. In that moment, I understood in my gut, she was not human. She was not earthly. She was something completely other. But she was not evil, either. I felt dizzy but I had to stay alert. For the sake of my family.

I dragged my wife and kids into the grass, completely forgetting about the tarantula I’d seen run in there, and the Nollywood woman followed. If she said get off the road, then it was best to get off the road. We were the only ones to do so. It was dark except for all the headlights. Who would want to run into the tall grasses, bushes and shadows in such darkness? So everyone else ran up the road.

At least they ran away from… it. To this day, I will never really know what “it” was, o.

Not far from where the accident took place last year, the road was undulating. Then it began to stretch like hot plastic. Something beneath it groaned, deep and cavernous, “OOOOOOMMM.” The air stank of tar, and I felt a blast of heat on my face.

“Don’t move,” the Nollywood woman said. We didn’t. But everyone on the road did. They screamed and ran. People started their cars and tried unsuccessfully to drive out of the gridlock, into the grass. “OOOOOOOOOOMMM,” the road said, as it began to move beneath the vehicles. My nostrils stung from the stench. My wife pressed the kids close to her as she watched the Nollywood woman. My sons were crying as they looked up the road where something enormous was heaving and piling over itself.

The road was rising up in a huge snake-like slab of concrete, the faded yellow stripes still in view. Then it rippled into a concrete wave. It knocked cars off itself as it rolled toward the fleeing people. When it got to them – well, you heard nothing but shrieks of agony. I covered my sons’ ears. They were too far and it was too dark for us to see what was happening. I was glad.

And then it went quiet.

“OOOOOOM,” the road said. This time it sounded almost as if it were in ecstasy. The screaming had stopped. Had it eaten everyone? That was when the Nollywood woman ran into the road. She ran at the road monster, her heels sinking into the soft concrete.

“Stay here,” I said. My wife only looked at me and my children were pressing their faces to her legs.

Quickly I crept alongside the road, afraid to touch it but also not daring to go too far into the grasses. I slowed down when I was close enough to see the Nollywood woman. The monstrosity was so terrifying that I changed my mind and moved deeper into the grasses, getting on my knees and crawling. Snakes and tarantulas were nothing compared to what I could see.

Let me tell you something – that woman, she was from outside this earth, yes. But that thing, that thing that was haunting the road, it was from here and had probably been here since these roads were built, maybe even before then. I am not a Christian or a Muslim, or maybe I am both. But I also believe in the mysteries we can never understand, especially in my country. This thing was one of them.

“Bone Collector,” the Nollywood woman said, as she looked up at it.

It piled up before her, reaching five stories into the sky. I swear to you, this is what I saw. Concrete that smelled like fresh hot tar… and blood. It smelled like blood, too.

“Why?” the woman asked it. “Why do you do this? Why now?”

“I collect bones,” it said. The voice sounded blistering and wet. I felt the vibration of it deep within me. It made me feel like nothing but meat, like it could shake that meat from my bones, the bones it wanted. “I have always collected bones. I am the road.”

“Collect my bones and then never collect again,” the woman said. “I am everything and I am nothing. Take me and you will be free of your appetite.”

Everything around me seemed to go silent. I couldn’t even hear the grass rustling. Can you imagine? Never in my entire life had I witnessed such a selfless act. She was not from earth. Yet still. I thought of Nigeria’s worst diseases – pervasive corruption and unsafe roads. The one who had spoken through my wife’s phone was right. She and her people were indeed agents of change. I could feel the change in me then, while I knelt there. I’m sure I was not the only one, either.

I feel it now.

I watched it take her. I owed it to her to not turn away. I saw the pain on her face as she was pulled into the road’s hot flesh, as it turned to mush beneath her high-heeled platform shoes, pulled her down, her pink and grey dress pushed up around her as she sank. She never screamed, never made a sound, just let it take her. The road shuddered, the road stretched but in the end, the road was satisfied. It laid itself back down, and became still. And when it was done, I heard the relieved sigh of millions of ghosts.

Not long after, the gridlock cleared up. Some people came back, got in their cars, and drove away. My wife and I got into our car with our sons, drove around the abandoned vehicles, and left Lagos.

After the road ate that woman, I do not think any other people died on the Lagos–Benin Expressway. Not that night.

I was there.

Though, maybe I shouldn’t have been there. Maybe my mother was right. She’d warned me not to travel to Nigeria. She said that of all the African nations, this country was the one she heard the weirdest things about on CNN. Internet fraudsters, Christians and Muslims killing each other in the streets, a government that openly robbed its people blind. To her, Nigerians were a race of troublemakers. “You ain’t no African,” she declared the night before I left. “You American. They gon’ eat you alive.” Then she hugged me and gave me five hundred dollars and a bottle of cod liver oil capsules.

My mother hated hip-hop, too. She called it “successful trash” and “crass ghetto bullshit”. She’d always felt I should have been singing in church. She said she didn’t raise a rapper. But I am what I am and I be what I be. I can sing well enough but the church isn’t for me. My mother can deny it all she wants but she raised me to be a free-thinker and go after my dreams. And despite her issues and the fact that my father left us with nothing but debt when I was a baby, she did a good job.