been attacked with acid. Ebenezer started running again. He had to save his wife. He couldn’t imagine losing her because he’d been with that woman, who had clearly wished evil on Chisom from the beginning. Who knew what she had put in his food? After all, he would normally never behave like that, going to another woman’s house. She must have done jazz on him. It had to be. But now he felt as if he’d broken her spell; now it would be okay. As long as he found Chisom.
As he was running, he passed a couple arguing on the side of the road. It was the tall girl with long hair. The man with her was holding her arm, shaking her till her hair fell in her eyes.
“We have to go now!” he was shouting. “Do you know what they’ll do to you?”
She pulled away from him so hard that she stumbled backward. Ebenezer saw her skirt flutter in the air, covered in small red flowers, but then he was past them and they were behind him and he couldn’t hear anything over the noise in his head and the air.
When he got closer to the mob, he slowed to a quick walk, trying to keep to the side. People bumped his shoulders and he was pushed a few times, but no one really disturbed him. They were focused on wherever they were going. Later he learned that most of them were heading to the area near the mosque, in the main market on Chief Michael Road, where a group of Hausa people plied their trade as shoemakers in a little market. An altercation there between a Hausa trader and an Igbo customer, a prominent shop owner, had escalated until the Hausa trader slapped the shop owner. In moments a crowd had gathered, coiled and furious, ready to make every other Northerner pay for that one man and his impertinence. This was not their town—they couldn’t talk anyhow here and expect to get away with it.
Ebenezer waded through whole sections of the market, now in ruins, the air full of smoke from the parts that were still burning. The muddy alleys were strewn with bolts of colorful fabric trampled by many feet; vendors scrambled about, trying to salvage them from the muck, crying and swearing and afraid. The smoke was worse by the time he got to Chisom’s shop, where she sold buttons and needles and sewing machine parts and thread. This area was already deserted. Some of the stores had been locked in haste, as if that could protect them from fire. Others had goods tossed about in front of them, discarded by traders who had tried to carry their merchandise away but found their arms overfull. He reached the wooden door to Chisom’s shop, with its flaking light blue paint, and coughed as he called her name. Particles of soot had settled on the white fabric draped for sale in the doorway.
“Chisom!” he shouted.
“Ebenezer?” She emerged from the back, her face marked with dried tears, but calm. “You came!”
He rushed forward and embraced his wife, who stood numb and shocked in the circle of his arms. “You came all this way,” she said, disbelieving.
“Are you all right?” he asked, patting her face.
Chisom nodded. “I was packing up the things as fast as I could.”
“Forget the things, jo! Can’t you smell the smoke? You want to stay here and wait for the fire to reach you?”
“I’ve almost finished. I just didn’t know how to carry them out. We can’t afford to lose the merchandise.”
Ebenezer looked at his wife and the determination hammered into her face. Her tenacity, he realized, was something he could learn from. How to stand in the face of actual fire and not run, how to do what it took for them to survive because she’d decided to. She could have been hurt, could have been killed, but she had done it anyway. Ebenezer felt ashamed at how hard he’d been fighting her about seeing a doctor. She had packed up the things, not knowing how she could carry all of it, simply because she was ready to handle that part when the time came. Now the time had come and he was there, as he should have been, as he always should have been. Why should she be carrying anything by herself when he was her husband?
“I’m here now,” Ebenezer said. Chisom gave him a small, unsure smile and he embraced her one more