This excerpt is the first few pages of the novel In the Past. The novel follows two sisters and their pregnant friend as they attempt to escape the vexed ghost of a girl sacrificed alongside her own two sisters in a protection spell cast by a village during the 1967 Nigerian Civil War. In building a modern mansion in the village, the girls’ father violates the dictums of the sacrifice, an oath agreed upon by the people that the village remain untouched by Westernization, an act that conjures the ghost. Now, to survive, the girls must reach back to the past and undo the spell, while also trying to remedy a failed abortion. The novel ex- plores the implications of a repressed past on an individual, familial, and communal scale.
2017
Grace
The house whirled out of the earth like a scream. Round, white, and tall, and with an eerie holiness to it. The sisters, Lota, Grace, sixteen and fifteen, and the friend Bidemi, sixteen, stood staring at it for a while, before Lota, the one most naturally inclined to lead, twisted the knob and spread the door open. Inside, the house looked even more like an upward vortex. It had a sunroof tinted a light blue, and the furniture, arranged in a circle—dark blue suede couches, a glass center table, a large potted bamboo plant—seemed intentionally placed to accentuate its cathedral effects.
“What was Daddy thinking?” Lota said to Grace.
Grace shrugged, turned towards the framed picture of their father, a big, greying man, wearing a white kaftan and a red ichie cap. She was not surprised by the excess of the house: her father loved making statements. The girls walked upstairs, entering room after room, all of them designed the same, spacious, dark, their windows facing the forest. They had queen-sized beds, wardrobes the hexagon shape of a coffin, bathrooms with large bathtubs. The master bedroom, larger than all six bedrooms, allowed some sunlight. It had a king-sized bed, a walk-in closet, and a balcony, from where one could see the empty, untarred road leading into the mansion.
“Bidemi and I will stay in this room,” Lota declared, plopping on the tightly made king sized bed. “And you, Grace, you’ll stay in the room next to us.”
Bidemi, nodding in agreement, joined Lota on the bed. Grace pressed her tongue to the bridge of her mouth but held back from clicking irritably. Bidemi, of course, agreed. Recently, she’s swallowed Lota’s every utterance with the fervor of a paid employee.
“I don’t want to sleep alone,” Grace said.
Lota turned to Bidemi, her jaw drawn towards her neckbone, her brows raised, as if to say incredulous! She then giggled, prompting Bidemi to giggle too, but nervously.
“Listen, you can’t be in the same room with us,” Lota said. “The things we discuss.” She shook her head. “You are not just there yet.”
“But—”
“The bed is not big enough. Simple. Now, please, go downstairs and bring up our bags.”
Grace glared at Lota. Lota glared back. Bidemi, her eyes wet with discomfort, stood up and said she would go with Grace to grab the bags.
Outside, the sun beating the back of their necks, Bidemi put an arm around Grace and said not to mind Lota. “She just likes to be in charge,” Bidemi said.
“I don’t even want to share a bed with her,” Grace said, lifting a bag from the car boot. “She snores like a generator. This house is just weird and scary, and I don’t want to sleep alone.”
Bidemi reached for the duffel bag Grace carried. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We are here for just six days, and then we will leave.”
“Truly, Bids, you are okay with this?” Grace leaned on the warm metal of the car, watched as a black bird landed on the branch of a tree jutting out the small path. “I don’t like this plan at all.”
The plan: they would rest on day one. On day two, Bidemi would be administered the misoprostol. On day three and four she’d bleed heavily, spend most of the time on bed rest. On day five, they’d explore the village if Bidemi was feeling up to it—go to the river, to the village square, into the forest to find a mango tree. On day six, still bleeding lightly but well recovered, they’d head back to their campus in Awka. No one would ever know what had happened.
When Lota first proposed this plan, on a Tuesday evening, while all three of them crouched on the floor of Lota’s and Grace’s one bedroom hostel apartment, Grace sprang on her feet.
“Why can’t we give Bidemi the pills here, in the hostel?” Grace said. “Have youhad anabortionbefore?” Lota said, hernose flared, bulbous
and sturdy like a hardboiled egg.
Grace opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“I thought so,” Lota said, and then turned to Bidemi: “Look, I know what I’m doing. The process is painful. I don’t want you crying and attracting attention. In this hostel, it’s not hard at all for stupid gossips to start poking their nose in our business. In our father’s village house, you can cry and scream freely, and no one would hear. I know what I’m saying. But at the end of the day, it’s your choice. You can say no and decide to have this baby. You can decide that you want to ruin your future.”
So here they were, in the middle of July, in a small village in southeastern Nigeria, which according to their father who took a strange pride in the place, was currently home to no more than a hundred people, with a few hundred of its people scattered around the country, and a little less than a hundred, mostly young men and women, living outside the country.
The village, thick with vegetation, dotted with lakes and rivers, invoked in Grace the sensation of outsideness, of being apart from the world. It was not simply that it was quiet—now, as Grace slapped shut the car boot, the sound sliced nothing but the choral of birds and insects in the forest nearby—but it had so little human life present. The houses they had driven past on their way here were made of mud, their roofs of thatches, and showed no signs of being inhabited. There were no electric poles about, no cars or motorcycles. The one person they encountered on their drive, a man on a bicycle, wearing a straw hat, had looked quickly away when they waved at him. Grace, who was last here when she was six, did not remember the village being this empty. Then, her grandmother, Kaka, was still alive. Perhaps it was Kaka’s energy that pumped life into this slumber village, for she remembered people trooping into Kaka’s home, sitting around, waiting for food and drinks.
“My dad would kill me anyway,” Bidemi said now, wiping sweat from her forehead. “So, whatever happens to me here doesn’t make a difference to anything.”
Bidemi carried her bag and Lota’s upstairs, and Grace dragged the bag filled with foodstuff into the kitchen and began unpacking. Her family’s new wealth often caused her to marvel. This kitchen, painted a soft yellow, all white tiles, sophisticated with its sharp gold cupboard knobs and tall grey refrigerator, stunned her. It looked better than their also impressive new kitchen back home. The whole house looked better, grander, heavy with the intent to gobsmack. A shocking contrast with how they used to live a few years ago.
She lined the cans of peak milk, Diet Coke, and crates of eggs inside the refrigerator. The bread loaves and the bunch of bananas, she sat on the shelf. They did not want to draw attention to their presence until the last two days of their trip, so they’d stocked up. No one knew they were here, not even their father, who they’d withheld the information from for fear that he would insist they have supervision. Over the years, he complained often of the hostility of the villagers, certain that his new wealth had spun a viciousness in them. They’d made it difficult for him to build the mansion, calling meetings upon meetings, sending young men to chase away the construction workers he brought from Lagos.
“It’s a village of backward people,” he told the girls. “They want everyone rolling in the mud with them.”
Satisfied with her arrangement of the foodstuff, Grace leaned on the kitchen counter and took in deep breaths. She wanted to trust that Lota knew what she was doing. She wanted to trust that Bidemi would be fine. But she’d be lying to herself if she did so. She knew Lota, Lota and her grandiose plans, her unreasonable belief that she could mold the world into whatever shape she liked.
Grace headed to the sitting room, unrolling her plans for the day in her head like a map: she’d unpack her bags, make dinner, sit by the window in the sitting room and finish reading her copy of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana. Like Bidemi said, it was only a six-day stay. She just needed to nurse her agitation to numbness, so she could carefully walk on the taut rope of Lota’s poor plan.
She’d picked up her bag, ready to head upstairs when the girl cracked
open the door and walked in, airily, as if a peaceful ghost roaming the earth as an enjoyable pastime.
“When did you people come?” the girl said, smiling, a sliver of mockery visible in her stretched lips.
The girl walked in further, with the ease of one overfamiliar with the space, and then leaned on the back of the couch by the door.
“Who are you?” Grace asked. The girl looked all wrong, a deathlike pallor breaking through her dark-grey skin, her hair, spikes of threaded wool pouting out of her scalp, the view like that of a dying forest gazed at from a distance, her eyes clear white.
“My name is Chinyere,” the girl said, a finger scraping the chenille fabric of the couch, unbothered by Grace’s fright. “Your father pays me and my sisters to take care of the house.” She paused, observed Grace sharply. “You look like him. Your father. You people have the same nose.” Grace took a finger to her nose, small and flat, a less compelling version of her sister’s. She did not know that her father had hired house cleaners.
She was about to say so when she heard the clap-clap of Lota’s slippers on the staircase, and then her full frame appearing, descending the staircase, an inquiring frown on her face, a hand massaging the collar of her pink pajama shirt.
“Who’s this?” Lota asked on landing off the final stair, gazed fixed on Chinyere, question directed to Grace.
Grace told Lota that the girl was hired by their father to look after the house.
Grace could see the uppishness take over Lota’s shoulders, the length of her neck, the curve of her jaw.
“You can’t tell my dad that we are here,” Lota said declaratively. “And I need you upstairs. The toilet bowl in my room needs a thorough scrub.”
Chinyere smiled, showcasing brown, well aligned teeth. “You wash your toilet yourself.”
Lota’s frown thickened, her gaze tapping Chinyere and then Grace and then back to Chinyere. “So why do you get paid then? To sit around and do nothing?”
Chinyere bristled, shoulders raised to reach Lota’s. “I washed the toilet already. You don’t like it? Then wash it how you like it.”
Grace watched the girls, more like twins now that they stood so near
in a fierce standoff, glaring into each other’s face. Same height. Same large, wallowing eyes. Same deep dark skin, except that Lota’s had a warm golden undertone.
The light in the room dimmed suddenly. Night knocking gently on day’s door. Grace felt fleetingly that the two would begin to tear each other’s clothes. Then Lota retreated, finally, walked over to Grace, whispered, “This girl is insane.”
Grace held her tongue, though she wanted to tell Lota to mind her business, to leave Chinyere alone. They had a bigger fish to fry. They had a pregnant Bidemi lying in bed upstairs.
Chinyere folded her arms, her face reverted now to what seemed to be her default, a mocking smile, a pepper-hot glower. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said with forced piety, so that it sounded like a threat, before ambling out of the door.
Over dinner of noodles and fried eggs, Lota went on and on about Chinyere.
“She looks like a witch,” Lota said to Bidemi. “I swear. Like a kind of demon. And her audacity to just talk to me anyhow.” She shook her head, drummed her fork on the ceramics plate. “If it’s not because I don’t want my dad to know we are here, I’d call him immediately and get her ass sacked.” Lota turned to Grace, palm turned upside down, seeking substantiation. “Tell Bidemi. Tell her how that crazy girl almost brushed her nose on my nose.”
Grace peeled her gaze from the bright magenta pink of Lota’s nails, stabbed and twisted the dry noodles around her fork, a golden fork, one of the thirty pieces shipped by their father from Italy.
Lota’s voice deepened. “Tell her.” A plea. A threat.
“You told her to go wash the toilet that she’s already washed,” Grace said. “She got angry because of that.”
Lota paused, stared at Grace for what seemed like eternity, and then sighed.
When they were done eating through a long silence, Lota stood and said, “You know what? I’m done. I’m done with this nonsense. Nothing Lota ever does is okay for anyone. You came to me with a problem, Bidemi. I did not just tell you sorry, and then go about my business. No. I brainstormed ways to help you, and I came up with a plan. Still, I did not
just give you the plan. I swung into action. I used my contact to get the pills. I paid for it with my money.” She beat her chest. “I put fuel in my car, paid for the groceries, brought you to my father’s house. To help you. Yet, somehow, I’m the bad person.”
“But, Lota, I didn’t say anything.”
“You are siding with Grace. You are siding with this stupid girl who sided with that village riff-raff who sneered in my face.”
“I’m not siding with anyone.”
“Oh, please, shut up. You think I didn’t see the two of you? Kiking behind my back when you went to bring the bags inside? I saw, okay? I saw. I saw you people laughing at me.”
“We weren’t laughing at you.”
Lota stood, picked up her plates. “You know what? Since you two are best friends now, enjoy your dinners alone.”
She walked away, into the sitting room, where she stood looking about for a moment, and then climbed up the stairs.
Alone, Grace and Bidemi stared at each other. Grace was the usual victim of Lota’s outbursts and she had grown to absorb and dispel it. But Bidemi was new to this. She’d only been friends with Lota for a few months, and they often hung out on campus, while waiting for lectures to begin, or at the bars in tempsite, where they met some evenings to eat suya and drink cocktails. They’d only known each other’s better sides.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said.
Bidemi pushed her plate to the side, placed her elbows on the table, and cried into her palms.
“She’s just stressed,” Grace said, feeling that old impulse that it was her responsibility to nurse Lota’s victims. “You know she drove here, and she’s tired. And about the thing tomorrow, I think maybe she’s a little scared about it. But I think everything will be fine.”
“She’s so mean to me because I’m disgusting.” “You are not disgusting.”
“She didn’t used to be like this. I’ve gone and made myself disgusting with this stupid pregnancy.”
“I don’t think that’s what it is.”
Bidemi’s small head quivered on her palm as she heaved, and Grace thought that there was no use comforting her. Bidemi wanted to cry.
Lota
For a while, Lota watched raindrops slide down the glass window. She then stood and walked to the room next door, where Grace and Bidemi lay closely, asleep, as if they’d rocked each other to sleep. Sadness spread over her. She hadn’t meant to lose it with Bidemi. She was only tired of having Grace doubt her. The doubt surely was the reason Grace took the side of that Chinyere girl. And it filled her head with bad thoughts about Bidemi bleeding out her womb and dying. They were stupid thoughts, she knew. When she herself took the pills last year, the pain in the first hours after she inserted the pill did seem like it was splitting her in half from the waist, and she threw up a lot, clung to her weak knees as she squeezed clumps of blood clots into the toilet bowl. But she was okay afterwards, even feeling that the pain was necessary, purifying.
Now she tiptoed quietly downstairs and walked into the kitchen, where she stood by the window, looking out to the thick forest. She had very little memory of when she was here last, ten years ago, but she remembered liking it. She and Grace walked around the village, legs coated in red dust, nose dry and cracking from the sharp harmattan air. She remembered visiting River Kalawa, sitting by the shore, refusing to go in. Grace always went into the water. She liked to dip her head in and pretend to have disappeared.
She went back to bed, grabbed her novel, and made hard attempts at making sense of the words. She was distracted. In a few hours, she’d have to administer the pill to Bidemi. She knew how. The doctor she’d gone to last year, a man in his late twenties, who’d invited her to his house because it was illegal for him to do the procedure at the hospital, had asked her to touch herself first, get wet. He said this would make it easier to insert the pill in her vagina. He sat, watching her rub herself. He then asked if he could help, and she said yes because she was scared. He rubbed her, kissed her just right at the edge of her mouth, where the two lips joined, and put a finger inside her, and then inserted a pill, and gave her two to swallow. When the pain came, exactly an hour after she’d left his damp apartment, with its dim lights and cold concrete floor, she was grateful. The pain bathed her in a moist, sharp sensation, erased the feel of his fingers on her thighs. This was what she wanted to save Bidemi from, his shoveling fingers, the sight of his smug and satisfied smile, and
she’d like to tell Bidemi this. Tell her about the entire experience. But the memory still brought her shame. She could not say why. She knew very well that she’d done nothing wrong, and she did not exactly feel changed by the experience, broken, like she’d heard several girls claim after an assault. She was maybe a bit upset of that the slimy feeling about him, moving with the reluctant speed of a turtle, speaking like he had water in his mouth. She was maybe more than a little upset that she had to do as he said because she was at his mercy. But that was it. When he smiled at her before closing the door in her face, it was whoever would marry him she pitied. She pitied his future kids. To wake up every day and see that face, that smile? That was the real hell.
It was about an hour when Grace stuck her head through the door crack and said breakfast was ready.
Lota peeped at her through the spread book. “I’m coming,” she said. Grace burned her. She could not explain it. The straight pathway Grace had to the soft place in her stomach.
Breakfast was bread, scrambled eggs, and bananas sliced in the oval shape of fried plantains. Lota refused to look at Bidemi’s swollen face. She’ll remain brave. She’ll get the job done, and then they would see. They would finally respect her.
At about half past one, the girls gathered in the master bedroom. Bidemi laid on the bed, wearing a loose fitted mickey mouse engraved nightwear. Grace stood by the headboard, holding a glass of water. Lota sat at the edge of the bed, between Bidemi’s open legs.
“Ready?” Lota asked.
Bidemi nodded, and Lota handed her two pills, watched as Grace took the glass of water to Bidemi’s tensely parted lips.
With a little force, Lota planted the remaining pills in Bidemi’s vagina.
It felt strange, muscly, mucky.
To loosen the tenseness in the room, Lota said, laughing gratingly, “If I catch that Paul boy, I’ll break his head.”
Paul, the boy who’d gotten Bidemi pregnant. He did not know what they were up to. Bidemi had kept the news of the pregnancy from him, afraid that he’d insist she keep it. His parents, like Bidemi’s, were staunch Anglicans.
“I’m serious,” Lota said. “Can you imagine? He’s chilling somewhere, and you are the one who has to bear the consequences for the act that the both of you enjoyed.”
“I didn’t even enjoy it,” Bidemi said, between tearful sniffs. “I don’t even like sex. It’s dry and uncomfortable and useless.”
“You are not supposed to enjoy it,” Lota said, rubbing her knees. “Like when he’s doing it, it’s for him, but when he’s finished, he’s supposed to focus on you. Touch you and stuff.”
Eyes closed, chest heaving, Bidemi said, “When will I start to feel something? I’m not feeling anything.”
Lota glued her gaze to Bidemi’s small feet, the hard calluses crawling up her ankles. How she wanted to hold them, still their trembling. “You will feel something soon,” she said, with a wistfulness she thought excessive, so she added: “and before you know it, it will all be over.”
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a fourth-year PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her works have appeared in Isele Magazine, Southeast Review, and Catapult. She’s a recipient of the 2021 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a 2024 Torch Literary Arts Fellowship. Her debut novel, The Tiny Things are Heavier, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in June of 2025. Home for her is Lagos, Nigeria.