The Nigerwife by Vanessa Walters EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Authors: Vanessa Walters
- Language: English
- Genre: Psychological Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
NICOLE
Before
NICOLE OFTEN wondered what had happened to the body.
A few months after she arrived in Lagos, a body appeared in the lagoon close
to the compound, bobbing along in a blanket of trash, a bloated starsh
facedown in the water.
The barrel-shaped torso and splayed limbs, blackened where the skin was
exposed, greenish-yellow where submerged, suggested it was a man.
She stared through the railings for a long time despite the stench. He was so
close she could have reached him with a pole. From a distance, the lagoon’s
surface had appeared smooth, a mirror to the sky, but now, for the rst time, she
really saw the trash that came and went in this bottleneck between Tarkwa Bay
and Victoria Island, the random shit the city spewed out: a minestrone of sweet
wrappers, cardboard fragments, buckled coat hangers, paint pot lids, foils from
biscuits, split Indomie noodle packets, buckets with holes in them, cut grasses,
jagged shards of wood, polystyrene food trays, Spar plastic bags, pure water
sachets, corroded poles, a ash mob of ip-op parts, all of it turning over in the
heat like a spit roast.
She was not alone in her interest. A white heron balanced on a cracked
bucket, its long orange beak swiveling as it appraised the various articles nearby.
Two men had moored their low-slung canoe a respectful distance from the
house and cast small nets. Neither party seemed to notice the body or her or the
West African sun climbing toward its ery zenith. The waiting shermen were
more focused on the waterfront mansion with its swaying palm trees, sparkling
swimming pool, and verdant garden, trying to imagine life on the other side of
the electried barbed-wire-topped fence.
Daydreaming as such, it was as if they were all seeing, but not really, the
rotten fruit, soda bottles, the twisted inner sole of a shoe, and the body,
bumping up and down in tandem with everything else. They were oblivious to
just another piece of garbage. Perhaps to them, a body was just a body; she knew
there were occasionally dead animals in the water—cows, pigs, dogs, rats; and
the smell was just the smell.
“Close the windows, so the stink doesn’t come in,” Tonye said. Her husband
refused to look outside. When she mentioned calling the police, he scoed at the
idea. “In this Nigeria?”
“And what happens to the body?” she asked.
“What happens to the trash?” Tonye shrugged. “Who knows?”
She remembered a strange feeling after he said that. Tension in her shoulders.
At the time she didn’t understand it, but now she knew it was fear. She was
afraid. She’d never been afraid of him before.
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