“Sometimes, the dust you clean is the same dust you swallow to survive. And silence, the only legacy you leave to an invisible child.”
My name is Lucia. This is the story of how, for years, I swept the office of a man who never knew his biggest mistake had a name, a face, and a grave.
I was seventeen when I found out I was pregnant. It was in my final year of high school, in Enugu, when all I wanted was to finish my studies and dream of a better life. He was my deskmate: Nonso Okoye.
Funny, always eloquent, the son of a well-off family. I, the daughter of a shoemaker and a banana seller, barely dared to look him in the eye. The day I told him I was pregnant, he remained silent.
“Are you sure?” he asked, his voice trembling. “I haven’t been with anyone else, Nonso. He’s yours.”
He never spoke to me again.
A few days later, I learned that his parents had sent him to study in the United Kingdom. One morning, my mother found the doctor’s letter in my backpack. “You want to shame us?
Find the father!” she yelled, furious. “Mom, I have nowhere else to go…”
“Then leave. There’s no place for sinners here.”
I was left alone, with a growing belly and a fear that consumed me from within.
I slept in half-built houses, washed other people’s clothes, and sold oranges at the market to survive. When the time came, I gave birth under a mango tree, behind the midwife Doña Estela’s booth. “Hang in there, baby, almost there,” she told me, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
The baby was born silently, with my fists clenched. “What are you going to name him?”
“Chidera,” I whispered. “Because what God has written, no one can erase.”
Life was a battle.
Chidera and I shared borrowed mattresses, cold nights, and hungry days. When he turned six, he asked me:
“Mom, where is my dad?”
“He traveled far, son. One day he’ll come back.”
“And why doesn’t he call?”
“Maybe he lost his way.”
He never did.”
When Chidera was nine, she fell ill.
Fever, cough, weakness. The doctor said:
“It’s a simple operation, but it costs sixty thousand naira.”
I didn’t have them. I borrowed, sold my ring, my radio, but it wasn’t enough.
I bu.ried my son alone, with a torn photo of his father and a blue blanket. “Forgive me, son. I didn’t know how to save you.”
Five years passed.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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