Everlasting

SUMMER 2025, SHORT STORY, 2200 WORDS

Even here, the hospital sounds bounce off the dense air around me. They ripple away and towards me in the blue light. The distance between me and my still, supine body grows, subtly so, with each passing moment.

I will never like this place. There are many things about it that I have forgotten over the years and ends. The air is frigid, and my heart beats weakly, slowly. I still breathe. The cold inches up my body, beginning at my feet and fingertips. Still, here, I remember what completeness feels like. Ordinary and full, like clean air moving through young lungs. My knees are not weak, my back does not ache. I stand strong for the first time in many years. My head is not cloudy, and my vision is not hazy. Importantly, my cancer will die with me, now—both of us lost in the end.

Moments before Death comes for me, I contemplate my body like a stranger. I feel a sloppy mixture of numbness and self-pity. My gaunt frame sinks deeper into the hospital bed. Jide sits by my side, his hand brushing my hair as he smiles and whispers to my body. I cannot hear him, here, but he knows. He also knows I am not coming back this time. His last words to me as I slipped into this place were a prayer.

“May God strengthen me to bear what remains of me till we meet again, my love.” My heart broke at the tremble in his voice. In my pain, I could only hum and smile, squeezing his large hand until I couldn’t anymore.

Ọlájídé. The tones in his name are my only warmth now, in this place. I smile and imagine him smiling in return. I hope to never forget the song his name has sung in my heart all these years. I hope to find him in Everlasting, though not anytime soon. At sixty-five years of age, three years older than I am, Jide is very much healthy. I hope he doesn’t forget me, too, the sour thought tightens my chest. My forearms and legs begin to itch from the cold as I blink and turn away from my body and my love. They grow colder when I see her.

In more ways than one, Death looks like my mother. She is clad in a dark buba, with a long wrapper tied tightly over her chest. Her plaited, greying hair is loosely bound in a scarf cut from the same material as her clothes. Like màámi, Death is plump and short, and astonishingly beautiful—age barely bridles her waxy mahogany skin. Her lips are black and full. I could bet that if she parted them, I would see a gap in her teeth.

Unlike màámi, whose eyes were milk and honey, Death’s eyes are jet-black, and they bleed thick blood down her cheeks. A string of stormy clouds sits on her head like a crown, journeying slowly around her. As Death takes small steps towards me, color drains from the surrounding world, escaping away to the edges of my vision like a drop of dye in water. Unlike màámi when she was alive, Death never speaks to me. Not now, not in all the six times I have come here before.

Of course, my mother would have hated such a comparison. No one I know despises Death as much as màámi did. In fact, before she died, màámi warned me against organizing any burial rites for her. She wanted no prayers or sentiment. She intended to go complete and rebellious into Everlasting. I remember her red, teary eyes those many years ago. I felt her anger and fear as she drew deep breaths, then shallow breaths, and then no breath. But her contempt for Death was not without cause.

For most of her life, my mother mourned one child or the other. She gave birth to six àbíkú children before me—stillbirths, miscarriages, or sick children who never spent up to a year in her arms. Her first child died on the day of its naming ceremony, passing quietly in her room while people pounded yam and served rice in the tents outside. My father told me that my mother’s scream swallowed the soft band music whole. He said she screamed until she passed out. The other children signaled their departure with rippling pain in her womb, butchering hope within her again and again. Leaving trails and blotches of punishment for her incredulity.

So when màámi saw that I lived past the one-year mark, when she realized with those calculating eyes of hers that I wasn’t going to die on her like the others, she took me to her brother, an herbalist of great acclaim in our village.

In those weeks of fasting and bathing in concoctions, they performed a grounding ritual to tether me to life. With blades, spices, and incantations, they inscribed six small marks on the back of my neck. One every three days. One for each of the siblings I should have had. One for every sliver of my mother’s heart that Death had carved off. Each incision was a promise, a deterrent. A reminder to Death, the Child Stealer, that she had done enough already. I would be spared six times, without contest. A year before then, at my naming ceremony, my father had named me Janet. After that ritual, my mother only ever called me Ẹniọlọ́runòpa—the One Who God Would Not Kill—or Eni, for short.

Now, as Death nears me, I remember the last time I saw her. Suddenly, strength leaves me, dragging away my peace with it. In their place is the inexplicable darkness of loss. The totality of hurt that blinds and bleaches the future of any vibrancy. I realize, now, that this darkness never really left me all these years. It just shrunk and hid somewhere in me. Only fleeting happiness or the other distractions of life held it back, like a reddening towel over a bleeding artery.

From the first end, during a ghastly accident, till the fifth one, when my troop was ambushed while on active duty in the army during the Biafran War, I enjoyed my gift. But I died the sixth time from stupidity and eclampsia. I imagine that if she had been alive then, màámi would have watched me with pain and anger as I gasped for breath that day. As I seized until I stilled. Now, I almost laugh at my stubbornness. Why did I think I could bear children when my own mother had failed? Why did I try? In a hospital bed like the one my dying body now lies in, I pushed my daughter from my womb, manic from understanding the ramifications of failure, until we both came to this terrible place.

I still remember the insanity. The itching and trembling that raked through me when I saw Death cradling my dying daughter in her arms. When Death got to hold her, even though I never would.

I rushed towards Death, who gently dabbed my daughter’s wet head with a corner of her wrapper. She eyed me defensively. I shook my head vigorously as a sense of future grief threatened to destroy me.

“No, she will not die. She cannot.” I felt a sharp pain at the back of my neck as the sixth incision burned off. Surely my gift would work for my daughter.

But Death watched me silently as I unraveled. I shouted into her silence. “Spare her, too! Please!”

But Death shook her head. I fell to my knees, my failing heart thudding.

“Please take me instead then! Surely you want me more than you want a child!”

Her eyes scanned me, but then she sighed. That was not part of the deal. So she turned away.

“Come back here! Oh, so you will take her too, Child Stealer!” I screamed with vitriol, before bursting to laughter at the joke that life had made at my expense. “What world am I supposed to return to? What future of mine can have meaning now?”

And in that agony, Death left me cold and colorless.

I am still cold, and everything is beginning to blur now. Death waits a few feet from me. The pain of my loss is now like the healed stub of an amputated limb. It feels far away, and so it seems inconsequential that I should hold a grudge after all these years. I want to hate, but hate doesn’t want me.

As usual, Death rests a small basket of fruits on her left hip. The fruit selection is uncanny. I see a bunch of bananas, a split coconut, a couple of cashews, three papayas, and one cherry mango. In the many times I have almost died, there were always differences in the number and type of fruits in the basket, but there is always one mango. The mango Death always extended to me and I always refused.  

Now, with all my incisions spent, I cannot but reach for the fruit. It is ripe but firm, with a spray of cold water on it, and it feels just as real as I am.

When I bite into it, my eyebrows perk up. The juice floods my mouth, agitating senses I didn’t know I could feel. My lips quirk into a tight smile. Who would have thought the end would taste so sweet? That the suffering and toil of our short time on earth was punctuated with delight? Death watches me as I chew. As usual, her eyes bear no grudge or sympathy. Around us, lines and dimensions warp, instinctively mixing together like watercolour. Though we appear to remain still, we have moved many feet from my corner in the hospital.

When Death turns and begins to walk away, I know to follow her. As I take those steps with her, I think about my encounters with the woman with the fruit basket at the beginning of the end. The silent understanding between us every time I refused her. Our shared confusion and contention. My anger and her indifference. Then the reality of what is to come cuts through my pain and fear, revealing a lone truth in the dark. I will miss her. Emotion floods my dying heart, and then I do something I never thought I could. I cover the distance between us and reach for Death’s free arm.

I hold my breath as Death spins. The hospital sounds mute. There is shock on her face, but she still doesn’t speak. She remains strong in spite of my intrusion. Colour drains away from where I am joined to her. In this moment, she feels like me in a way I cannot describe. I let out my held breath.

“I am grateful, Mother,” I say as I gently squeeze Death’s arm. This place ripples in synchrony with the fickle dredge-beats of my heart. It moves as if it gasps. “I have never taken it for granted.”

Colour pours back around us, capturing the sparkle in Death’s dark eyes. I nod, answering the hidden question in those eyes. Even now, in the end, I acknowledge that though I have suffered, I have enjoyed what only very few people ever did. Many chances at life. Many escapes from the end. In my tragedies, I realize that I have had plenty worth losing. And I won in love with Ọlájídé, who I would not have met if I had never stood up from that accident at nineteen.

We wait in the silence for a brief moment. My hand slowly falls from her arm, though my eyes remain fixed on hers. When Death recovers, she nods, too. A softness falls on her face before she points behind her. I look in the direction she is pointing and I see a small dot of light in the distance, charging towards us like a train. It expands as it nears us, consuming everything in its path.

Everlasting. It is time.

I turn to see it all for the last time. The hospital sounds are back. I see the doctor has come to pronounce me dead. Jide’s head is bowed, his body shakes from crying. I am sorry, my love, I think as my heart stops. When I turn to my side, Death is now a little boy with black eyes and blood tears, and a revolving crown of stormy clouds, headed away, towards a man convulsing at another end of the hospital ward. The basket of fruits awkwardly sits on his small head.

As I turn back to Everlasting, which is now larger than life, I know that everything else is in the past. I grin, a strange youthful excitement surging through me. I have lived! Now I have died! I am grateful. The cold will end soon.

As Everlasting collides with me, I feel it. In a moment, I know it in a way only the dead can.

Bright light in warm light. Perpetual. Forevermore.

 

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