The Dark Issue 74 by L Chan

Author:L Chan [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer living in Colorado. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and TulipTree Review, among other places. Follow her work at hannahyang.com or on Twitter at @hannahxyang.

Divine in the House of Hunger

by Dare Segun Falowo

I

When you come to Lagos from the heart of Osogbo, you know you’re going to have to work till your knuckles bleed, till the bones in your back go sour, if you want to survive in that jungle.

You have been to Abuja, Benin, Ibadan, Ilesha; offering your services of impeccable housekeeping. Then Aunty Mimi calls and tells you it’s time to go to Lagos. Miriam is your father’s sister and your manager. She is the one who nurses you and christens you Divine after your father dies, following your mother into the grave where your birth had led her.

Aunty Mimi advises you about Lagos and how raucous it is for the poor and how much decorum and perfection is expected of the rich. You will be going to a commissioner’s house in Ikoyi and much more will be demanded of you than usual.

Most of the houses you have been maid at have been middle-class affairs: Daddy is a pastor and Mommy sells cold drinks at a nice shop near the road. Sometimes there’s a dog, a garden, tapwater. Most of them wait a month before they begin to bark your name out, without the softness they give to their pets.

Eventually, the masks would slide off. There was the Daddy who slapped you when you refused to let him squeeze you from behind as you washed plates. The woman who didn’t let you show your hair in her house because its beauty would put her sons under a spell.

You bend into various shapes for all these people, these families and their peculiarities. You go blind to their secrets, even as you serve them with your lifeblood. Aunty Mimi is saving your salaries till you’ll have enough to write WAEC or go to Ghana for Fashion School. You trust her because she makes it a clause that you have your own phone at all the houses that you work, to call her when things go south.

You get to Lagos on a Sunday, alone.

The sky is cloudless and blue as detergent. There is more noise and people than usual but it’s the same as all the other cities you’ve been to, led around only by Aunty Mimi’s voice to your destination. She tells you to get to Obalende and wait. You enter one of the yellow-black buses, sitting by the window to gaze upon the bricolage of the hot world outside. Everybody talks at the tops of their lungs here and it makes you chuckle.

When the bus zips over the ocean which manages to be bluer than the sky above, you remember nothing. Somehow, even in homes where you were shown care and love; the moment you exit the door, turn your back and move away, you forget. Just like you forget that one of your names in the world is orphan.

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