Part 1
The old woman almost cracked her skull on the edge of the open gutter, and the whole market pretended not to see.
For 30 years, the people of Ijeun, on the dusty side of Abeokuta, had watched Mama Adunni Balogun push her rusty market trolley every Tuesday morning. She would pass the suya stand, the closed textile stalls, the church with peeling blue paint, and the last row of cement houses before the bush path. In her trolley, there were always 4 bags: Agege bread still warm from the bakery, a tin of peaches no one in that town could afford casually, a small carton of milk, and one round tin of butterscotch sweets.
She never ate them.
She carried them to an abandoned bungalow near the old Balogun Textile Factory, placed everything on the sagging veranda, spoke softly to the dark doorway, hummed a song, and returned home alone.
People said grief had eaten her sense.
They were wrong.
That Tuesday, the front wheel of her trolley snapped beside Madam Sade’s provisions shop. The trolley lurched sideways, and Mama Adunni’s frail body followed it. Traders looked. Customers looked. A bus conductor even laughed under his breath.
Only one man crossed the road.
His name was Nosa Ighodaro. He was 29, thin from hunger, with tired eyes and a cough that came from sleeping too many nights beside rust and old machines. He and his closest friend, Bayo Afolabi, survived by pulling scrap metal from the dead textile factory and selling it by weight in Lafenwa. They slept behind the factory gate in a broken pickup with no tyres.
Nosa had not eaten a proper meal in 2 days.
Still, he grabbed the trolley before it dragged Mama Adunni into the gutter.
—Let me help you, Mama.
She looked up at him sharply. Her eyes were not confused. They were clear, proud, and wounded.
—You are hungry yourself.
Nosa swallowed.
—I can still carry a bag.
For a moment, she studied him as though deciding whether God had sent help or another test.
—It is far.
—Then we should start before the sun becomes wicked.
He lifted the broken side of the trolley against his hip and walked beside her. People stared as they passed. Nobody offered to help. Nobody asked where they were going. In Ijeun, everyone already knew, and everyone had decided the destination was madness.
They walked beyond the last streetlight, beyond the football field where boys played barefoot, beyond a cassava patch and the red laterite road. Finally, they reached a small bungalow swallowed by weeds. Its windows were cracked. Its roof sagged. A dead mango tree leaned over it like an old witness.
Mama Adunni stopped at the foot of the veranda.
—Put the bags by the door. Not on the third plank. It will break.
Nosa carried the food up carefully. The warm bread smelled so good his stomach twisted. He placed it down, then the peaches, the milk, and the butterscotch tin. His hands trembled, but he did not steal even a crumb.
Mama Adunni climbed 2 steps, leaned toward the dark doorway, and spoke in a voice too gentle to be madness.
—I brought bread today. The soft one. And peaches. You always liked peaches, even when you pretended they were too expensive. Eat before you go out again. You never remembered to eat.
Then she hummed.
Nosa froze.
It was a small, aching melody with a rise and fall like a question that never found its answer.
He knew that song.
For 2 years, he had heard Bayo hum it in his sleep inside the dead pickup behind the textile factory. Bayo, 33, a big quiet man raised in foster homes, a man who never knew his mother, never knew his father, and carried only one old wooden bird on a leather cord around his neck.
Mama Adunni finished the song and turned back.
Nosa stared at the doorway, then at her, his mouth dry.
Because the song she had just hummed to an empty house was the same song Bayo hummed every night like it had been planted in his bones before he was born.
Part 2
Nosa returned the next Tuesday with a wheel he had taken from an abandoned supermarket trolley and bolted onto Mama Adunni’s cart.
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