The truck that stopped beside her was old and noisy, with one dim headlamp and a driver named Kunle, a broad-shouldered man who delivered food supplies between villages. At first, he thought she was a sack on the roadside. Then she moved.
He jumped down into the rain with a lantern in his hand.
“Madam! Can you hear me?”
Enkiru opened her eyes for only a moment.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t let me die.”
Kunle looked up and down the road. There were no houses, no other cars, no witnesses. Only the storm and a woman trembling in the mud.
He wrapped his coat around her and lifted her carefully. She cried out when his hands touched her stomach, and his face changed. This was not just exhaustion. This woman had been suffering for a long time.
By the time he reached Ajanaku village, Enkiru had stopped responding. Instead of taking her to the tiny clinic first, Kunle drove straight to Mama Ifeoma’s roadside eatery, because if anyone could fight death with bare hands, it was that old woman.
Mama Ifeoma opened the back door holding a wooden spoon, ready to scold whoever was disturbing her before dawn. But when she saw the woman in Kunle’s arms, her anger disappeared.
“What happened?”
“I found her on the east road,” Kunle said. “Barely alive.”
Mama Ifeoma moved faster than women half her age. She cleared a narrow bed in the back room, boiled water, sent Kunle for the clinic assistant, and began wiping mud from Enkiru’s face.
Under the dirt, she saw bruises.
Some old. Some new.
Her mouth tightened. She had seen women like this before. Women whose husbands smiled in public and destroyed them in private. Women who were told to endure until their bodies began telling the truth their mouths were too afraid to speak.
