Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon

“You’re a child,” his uncle said, irritably. “What can you know about devils except what those silly churches pound into your head?” He pounded his own head to illustrate his point. “What we just heard that normally brainless president say – that was the most wonderful thing I have heard any politician say in decades!”

Kelechi’s aunt came out with another bowl of okra soup and gari for his uncle.

“Have they gone?” his mother asked Kelechi.

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

“Thank God,” she said.

Kelechi laughed. “Well, thank something.”

“No, thank God.”

“If those idiots had not left, I’d have gone out to handle them, damn the consequences,” his uncle growled.

Kelechi’s father winked at him and nodded. “As we did during the civil war.”

“No one could stop us.”

“Not bullets, not armies.”

“If all the other rebels had been like that, we’d be citizens of the Republic of Biafra.”

They both laughed, sharing a knowing look as they ate their okra soup. Kelechi’s father bit into an excellent piece of goat meat. Still chewing, he said, “It is a good, good night.”

“Devilry,” Kelechi’s wife muttered, adjusting her wig.

The woman who looked straight out of a Nollywood film showed up at the door just as the sun set. Chris didn’t want to think about how she had gotten past the high concrete wall and locked gate of the community where his mother lived. The woman wore high heels, had the body of a goddess and spoke with a confidence that reminded Chris of the best lawyers. In a firm voice that Chris found impossible to disagree with, the woman invited herself in for a cup of tea. As he showed her to the kitchen, followed by his curious son and daughter and his anxious mother and two aunts, she said that a road monster that called itself the Bone Collector had eaten her. “Your roads are safe now,” she said.

Then, not even ten minutes later, there was another knock on the door. This time, it was an older Yoruba man with smooth onyx skin who said that he’d been inside the internet for hours and hours talking to Ijele. No matter Chris’s religious beliefs, even he knew that no one spoke directly with Ijele and lived. Not even one of… them . Still, he stepped aside and let the black-skinned man into his home. After that another seven aliens came. What was attracting them to his mother’s house and why, he did not know. But something deep in him had broken open, leaving him warm and curious. He wanted to be a part of whatever was happening.

His aunts were excited to have so many to cook for and they happily went to the kitchen to get to it. Nevertheless, his mother’s face looked pained. She must have had a feeling that this situation went beyond the family. Beyond their beliefs. Beyond their religion. His mother was a Pentecostal Christian widow who gave much of her ample savings to the church and fell over with the Holy Spirit regularly during mass. Still, she retreated to the kitchen and helped her sisters cook a feast. They cooked egusi soup, okra soup, pounded yam, fried fish and stew and rice. His mother even made chin chin. There was nothing left in the house’s two fridges when they were done. And when the strange guests had eaten their fill, there was no prepared food left, either.

Kola and Fred served the visitors and then after the visitors had eaten, Kola and Fred asked them questions. They joked and laughed and told them about Ayodele and about life in Nigeria.

Chris kept his distance, talking only to the Nollywood woman who called herself Stella Iboyi. And the only reason he talked to her was because she wouldn’t leave him alone. After a while, his blood pressure began to rise.

“Why did you people allow your roads to be so dangerous?” Stella asked.

“We didn’t ‘allow’ it,” he said. “Our government—”

“Your wife’s father was eaten by the road monster, though. You never went to the road and asked it to give her father his life back.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!” he snapped. “When a man dies, he goes to heaven or hell. He doesn’t…” He frowned. “Her father was hit by a truck. He wasn’t eaten by a road.”

The television, his mobile screen and his mother’s computer all came on at the same time. On their screens was the President. Everyone in the room grew quiet. Chris watched on his phone, everyone else watched on his mother’s most prized possession – the widescreen television. Adaora had bought it for her last year when his mother had broken her ankle and had to stay in the house for three weeks.

When he heard his wife’s name mentioned Chris felt his heart flip. Then a surprising emotion washed over him. He was proud , deeply proud. His witch of a wife was part of something that was going to be grand.

“In the name of Jesus,” he whispered.

In the city of Accra, Ghana, several people in a street market had stopped walking. They were looking at their mobiles. The sun was setting in a beautiful display of orange, pink and indigo but few noticed. Music drifted from the MP3 player of a man selling women’s dresses, then it stopped and began playing the voice of Nigeria’s president.

A woman who’d been walking down the middle of the busy dirt road that passed through the market wanted to throw her mobile phone away. She’d never liked mobile phones. She knew it sounded crazy but she had always been sure that they could do more than anyone let on. She had a feeling that they could watch you. That they could speak to you at night when you were asleep and brainwash you. “Maybe this is why Ghana is still the way it is,” she’d proclaim. “Because we all use phones and they all control us.”

Nevertheless, her boyfriend insisted she carry one. She’d only agreed because he was a sweet, sweet man and she liked the way he spoke Ewe, the language of her mother, whom she missed very much. She’d done exactly what he asked her to do, which was to carry the phone. When he called she answered, but that was as far as it went. She never used it otherwise. She wrapped it in tinfoil and kept it deep in her purse where it wouldn’t harm her.

She’d never set her phone to vibrate, but vibrate and vibrate it did as she walked through the market. Finally, she brought the thing out and unwrapped it. It was talking. And it was showing the Nigerian president. It wasn’t made to do any such thing! Her boyfriend had assured her. And what the Nigerian president was saying made her stop and stand still for many minutes. When he finished talking, he disappeared from her phone’s tiny screen and there was the date and time again. Like normal.

She frowned, her nostrils flaring. She squeezed the phone. Then she wrapped it in tinfoil and put it back in her purse. She started walking very fast, wanting to get home to check the news on her boyfriend’s computer. For the first time since the internet and mobile phones had come to Ghana, she wasn’t afraid.

A young man named Waydeep Kwesi slung a plastic bag over his shoulder as he stepped out of the fast-walking woman’s way. He watched her pass and then looked around. He didn’t have a mobile phone and he hadn’t been near any sort of screen in the last few minutes. He was more interested in the people around him, anyway. His belly growled. He reached into his bag and brought out one of the smaller garden eggs he’d just purchased. He’d been hungry for them for hours.

No one noticed as he bit into it like it was the sweetest mango and continued on his way.

Femi didn’t think he’d ever see his Honda Civic again. He sat in the grey, well-worn driver’s seat and sighed deeply. His car smelled faintly like his girlfriend’s perfume. Laughing, he’d sprayed the driver’s seat just before he left their apartment two days prior.