The London call went fine. But after hanging up, she looked around her “home.” White leather couch. Italian marble floors. A fridge that dispenses ice cubes shaped like diamonds. It was beautiful. It was also a gilded cage.
That night, there was no air conditioning. No Wi-Fi. Just a kerosene lantern and the sound of crickets so loud they vibrated in her chest. She lay on a bamboo mat, staring at the thatched roof.
Ebiere wept. Not sad tears. Tears of recognition. This boy had nothing, yet he had the one thing she had lost: the belief that home is not a place of comfort, but a place of belonging. Even broken. Especially broken.
She hung up. Mama Patience handed her a hoe. “The yams need planting,” the old woman said. “You think you can remember how?” Evi Edna Ogholi - No Place Like Home
She looked at the phone. Then she looked at the boy with the plastic bottle. He had caught a small tilapia.
The next morning, she walked to the creek. It was still black. But she saw something surprising: a single green shoot, a mangrove seedling, pushing through the oil-slicked mud.
But Ebiere had listened too well. She had built a life where the water was clean, but her soul was dry. She had replaced the sound of village drums with the sound of Slack notifications. She had replaced the taste of fresh bush mango with the taste of anxiety. The London call went fine
She stood on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment in Victoria Island. Below, the city roared: generators hummed, street hawkers sang praises to their goods, and a thousand Danfo buses coughed black smoke into the sky. It was a Tuesday. She had a video call with the London office in ten minutes.
She hadn't slept well in seven years. The doctor called it insomnia. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have called it “the roaming sickness.”
As the city faded, the oil pipes appeared. They ran alongside the road like black pythons, oozing rust and crude. Then the flares. Even in daylight, they stained the sky orange. This was the Niger Delta. Her home. A place the world had come to for oil, but left behind in poison. A fridge that dispenses ice cubes shaped like diamonds
She turned up the radio. Evi Edna’s voice filled the evening air. And for the first time in her life, Ebiere understood the song not as a lyric, but as a truth:
“I never forgot,” she said. “I just buried it under marble floors.”
She remembered why she left. She was nine. Her father, a fisherman, had died because the creek he fished in was coated in crude oil. An oil company’s pipeline had burst. They paid the village a pittance. Her mother sold her gold earrings to pay for the bus to the city. “Don’t look back,” her mother had said at the bus park. “Make a life where the water is clean.”
And there is truly no place like it.
“ Ebiere! The little one who ran away to the white man’s school!” “I didn’t run away, Mama,” Ebiere said, her voice breaking. “I just… left.”