The Fishermen

after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives. His employer, the Central Bank of Nigeria, had transferred him to a branch of the bank in Yola—a town in the north that was a camel distance of more than one thousand kilomet

Because there was a perennially erratic power supply in Akure in

him to let it go, but he refused. Then, one morning, he lifted the bird’s lifeless body in his hand and dug a hole in the backyard; his heart was broken. He and Boja covered the sparrow with sand until the bird was buried under the earth. This was exactly how Ikenna vanished, too. First, the earth poured by the mourners and the undertakers covered his white-shrouded trunk, then his legs, arms, face and everything, until he was obliterated forever from our eyes

At the beginning of the third month, his long arm that often wielded the whip, the instrument of caution, snapped like a tired tree branch. Then we broke free.

But Father’s move to Yola changed the equation of things: time and seasons and the past began to matter, and we started to yearn and crave for it even more than the present and the future.

I sat there, frozen under the power of his words, unable to say anything.

had no home, no fixed allegiances. He loved the far and the near, the small and the big, the strange and the familiar.

Like sparrows—which we believed had no homes—Ikenna’s heart

two years my senior