The River of Lost Words

At the Balogun market, under a corrugated iron awning weeping rust, Mama Ireti keeps her stall. Around her, the cacophony of fabric sellers, the honking of danfos, the smell of smoked fish and kerosene. But her space is an island of silence. She sells neither yams, nor wax print, nor refurbished phones. She sells stories. People pass, stop, look at her. She is old, her face carved with deep wrinkles like furrows after rain. Her eyes, veiled with cataracts, seem to look beyond things. Before her, a chipped calabash. You drop a coin in it, and she speaks. Not long. A few minutes. But those who listen leave with something heavier than a shopping bag. She says she does not choose the stories. The stories choose her. Sometimes she tells of the child who crossed Benin on foot, feet bleeding, to find his mother. Sometimes of the man who built a bridge with his bare hands, a bridge no one ever saw. Sometimes of the woman who cried so hard her tears formed a river, and that river washed away her cheating husband's house. People laugh, but they listen. That day, a young man in a starched white shirt stops before her. He holds a phone, headphones around his neck. He looks like those who work in the glass towers of Ikeja, those who have forgotten the taste of earth. He hesitates, then drops a fifty-naira coin into the calabash. Mama Ireti looks up. She stares at him for a long time. Then she says, 'You came looking for a story, but you are the one who has one to give.' The young man free