1. The Stall
I wrote this one standing up, in a market, pretending to buy tomatoes.
The morning my mother died, the market opened anyway.
Ngozi arrived at half past five and found the padlock exactly where her mother had always left it — hooked over the top hinge, never locked, because a lock on an empty stall is an insult to your neighbours. She stood there with the key in her fist and did not use it.
Across the aisle, Mama Bisi was already arranging her peppers into small pyramids, each one worth two hundred naira and a short argument. She did not look up. In this market, grief was acknowledged by not being mentioned.
"You will open today," Mama Bisi said, to the peppers. "Debt does not do burial."
That was how Ngozi learned that her mother had been lending money for eleven years, and that every person walking past her that morning owed her something.
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