Song for Night Read Free

curse aimed at my absent comrades. If they’d checked they would have noticed that I wasn’t dead.
    The first thing I do is search for Nebu’s body. That’s the way it is laid out in the manual (although of course none of us has ever seen the manual but Major Essien drummed it into us and we know it by heart): first locate and account for friendly casualties, then hostiles; in that order—friend, then foe. The funny thing is, though I search, I can’t find Nebu’s body. There are no other bodies either, which means the enemy hasn’t been around.
    Let me explain something, which on the surface might sound illogical but isn’t. We all lay land mines, the rebels and the federal troops, us and the enemy, but we do it in such a hurry that no one bothers to map these land mine sites, no one remembers where they are. That and the fact that territory shifts between us faster than sand tracking a desert, ground daily gained and lost, makes it hard to keep up. Given that the mine diffusers and scouts are always the advance guards, it is easy to see how minefields are often places where we intersect. In this case however it seems like there was no enemy, that Nebu simply got careless; or unlucky.
    My first instinct is always survival so I abandon the search as quickly as I can and get out of the open. I debate whether to head for the river, fifty yards to my left, or the tree cover, seventy yards or so to my right. I choose the river. Rivers are the best way to keep close to habitation as well as the fastest means of travel. I hug the banks in the shadows and carefully observe any developments, of which I must confess there are very little. So far I haven’t met anybody and I haven’t found any traces of my unit. It is not good to be alone in a war for long. It radically decreases your chances of survival.
    But my grandfather always said, “Why put the ocean into a coconut?”

Night Is a Palm Pulled
Down over the Eyes
    It is dark: lampblack. The only points of light are flickering fireflies. Stupidly I fell asleep practically in the open, under a mango tree near the riverbank, amid the rotting fruit strewn everywhere. I lie still, waiting for all my senses to wake up to any possible danger, remembering how I came to be here, and realizing that I must have fallen asleep after feasting on too many mangoes. I strain and discern dim outlines to my left: the forest. Getting up, I walk across the dark spread of grass between the river and the forest, stopping at the edge of the tree line. The silence is absolute as though the forest has just sucked in its breath. Deciding I’m not harmful, it lets it out in the gentle noises of night. To ground myself, I run my fingers meditatively over the small crosses cut into my left forearm. The tiny bumps, more like a rash than anything, help me calm myself, center my breathing, return me to my body. In a strange way they are like a map of my consciousness, something that brings me back from the dark brink of war madness. My grandfather, a fisherman and storyteller, had a long rosary with bones, cowries, pieces of metal, feathers, pebbles, and twigs tied into it that he used to remember our genealogy. Mnemonic devices, he called things like this. These crosses are mine.
    Filtering the dark into gray shadows, fingers still reading the Braille on my arm, I try to force my eyes to adjust, but my night vision is not very good. The forest isn’t familiar territory despite years of jungle and war, and the silence is disconcerting particularly because for the past three years I haven’t been alone at night.
    I have been in a pack with the other mine diffusers. Even then, we all relied on Ijeoma to guide us. She always knew the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. God knows I miss her, love her. Loved her. But I can’t think about that now. I must move. I glance around me and sift my memory for ideas, guide points. I look up, thinking perhaps the stars will guide me, but there are