There’s Something in the Water Honorable Mention
Nobody tells you the worst part of NYSC is not the khaki uniform, or the allowance that disappears before it arrives, or the fact that you have to iron said khaki at five in the morning. The worst part is the posting.
Oluwakemi got Lagos, and not just Lagos, but she was posted to the Island. That’s the dream of every youth waiting to be called up for the Nigeria Youth Service Corps.
I got Obu.
Obu, where the road from the junction turned to red dirt after exactly three minutes of walking. Obu, where the closest ATM was forty-five minutes away and sometimes it worked and sometimes it stared back at you with a blank screen like a sleeping eye. Obu, where our corpers lodge had six rooms, two buckets per bathroom, and a ceiling fan in the common room that moved the hot air from one side to the other without cooling anything.
This was my luck. This was my life for eleven months.
I had been here two weeks when the Local Government Inspector pulled us aside during our first community meeting and told us, plainly, “Stay away from Obu River.” Mr. Pius Friday who was in the habit of not repeating himself, repeated the sentence three times. He did not explain. He moved on.
When we got back to our lodge, I raised it with my friends. “What is this Obu River we must stay clear from.” Angela laughed under her breath beside me. Peter had raised an eyebrow at me from across the room and I had to press my lips together to keep from smiling.
“How would a river know who is a stranger?” Angela questioned me. We were thirty-one years old with university degrees. We had read things. We did not believe in rivers that chose people. We are learned for heavens sake.
It was Peter who suggested it. Thursday night, generator off, nothing to do.
“Obu River,” he said, from where he was lying on the common room floor with his phone flashlight pointed at the ceiling. “Let us just go and see.”
“I’m in,” Angela said immediately. She was already sitting up.
I looked at both of them. Something shifted in my stomach, not fear exactly. Something quieter. Like a warning in a language I had not learned to speak yet.
“We have our cameras,” Peter added, looking at me. “If those villagers are doing something illegal at that riverbank, we catch them. We document. We report.”
It made sense when he said it like that. I told myself it made sense.
The woods between the lodge and the river were not far. Twenty minutes of walking, maybe less. We set out at thirty minutes past ten, our phone torches cutting thin lines through the dark.
The moment we entered the bush, the night went silent.
Not the comfortable silence of a sleeping town. Something more deliberate than that. As though the woods had been busy with its own activities and had stopped, because something had stepped inside. No sound of owls or cricket. No frog announcing itself from the bush. It was just our footsteps, and our breathing, and the sound of my own heartbeat, which had become inconveniently loud.
“It is quiet,” I said.
“Forests are quiet at night,” Peter said.
“Not like this,” I said.
Nobody answered.
Suddenly a figure appeared between two trees without warning. An old woman, small and bent, her wrapper hanging loose at her shoulder. She walked as though she was not quite touching the ground. Her eyes, when our torches found them, were bulging. It seemed they were going to pop out.
She stopped in front of us.
“Go back to your beds,” she said. Her voice was low and certain, “Or you will never get back to your beds.”
Angela burst out laughing. The sound cracked through the silence and I flinched.
“Mama, we are just taking a walk o,” Peter said, still grinning. He stepped around her. “We are not doing anything.”
The old woman did not move. She kept her clouded eyes on me.
I looked back at her as we walked past. She did not turn to follow us with her gaze. She did not need to. She had already said what she came to say.
“Toya.” Angela linked her arm through mine, still laughing quietly. “You’re doing that face again.”
“What face?”
“Your scared face. Your What-are-we-doing-here face.” She squeezed my arm. “This is why you don’t have a boyfriend. You are always in your shell. Always afraid of everything.”
The words landed the way they were meant to. Small and sharp.
I thought about Oluwakemi in Lagos Island. I thought about my mother and two older sisters. I thought about being scared of a river in the dark because an old woman with bad eyes had looked at me.
“I’m not scared,” I said.
We kept walking.
Obu River appeared through the last of the trees.
I had expected something murky. Something that looked like it deserved its reputation. Instead, the water was clear as glass, wide and still, catching the full moon so completely that the sky seemed to have fallen into it.
The surface did not move. Not a ripple. Not a current. As though the river was not water at all but a mirror someone had laid flat on the earth.
“Ehn!” Angela breathed. “But this place is fine o.”
Before I could speak she had pulled her top over her head. Peter was already unlacing his shoes. Within two minutes, they were in, splashing, laughing, calling to each other in the darkness. The sound was jarring after the silence of the woods. It felt too loud and wrong.
I stood at the bank.
I told myself I was only being cautious. I looked down at my reflection in the still water near the edge. I saw myself looking back. Clear as a photograph. The moon behind my head like a halo I had not earned.
My reflection smiled, but I had not smiled.
I stared. My face in the water stretched slowly, the corners of the mouth pulling wide, wider than a mouth should go, while my real face held still and cold and confused.
I crouched down. I needed to see better. I needed to be sure.
The closer I brought my face to the surface, the wider the reflection’s smile became. It was patient. It was waiting.
I touched the water.
The cold went through my fingers like electricity and the reflection shattered into a thousand pieces and then the world went with it.
“Angela, Peter, something is in the water.”
I spun around. The bank was empty. Their clothes were still there, Angela’s orange top, Peter’s shoes placed neatly side by side, but the river was still again. Completely still. As though nothing had ever broken the surface.
I screamed their names. My voice came back to me from the trees, smaller each time.
Then from somewhere beneath the water, not from a direction I could name, not from upstream or downstream but from under, from the deep wordless centre of it, I heard a loud scream. Then silence.
They say I was found at dawn.
I know this only from the voices that came to me through the dark. The dark that was not sleep, that had no bottom to it, that pressed on me from all sides like water.
“Oh, poor children. How will their parents feel,” a voice said.
I tried to open my eyes. I tried to scream. My body was there, I could feel it, distantly, the way you feel a limb that has gone numb, but nothing answered.
“Come, see, see the one without a face is still alive. Somehow.” A strange voice beckoned others.
I understood the words but they did not make sense to me yet. What do they mean by no face? – when I had a mouth to ask questions with.
“The other two, ah this is bad o, no heads, no faces, no hands, no limbs. We need to call the Local Government Inspector in charge of the corpers for Obu,” another voice said.
“She won’t make it. This one will die soon, you see how she’s shaking her body, that is life leaving her,” another voice muttered.
Something in me refused. Something small and animal and furious. Call my mother, I thought, as hard as I could think it, pushing the words up through the dark like pushing through water. Call my sisters. I am not ready.
I do not know if anyone heard.
I only know that I am still here, in this dark, and I am still asking the question I should have asked before I ever touched that water. Before I let Angela’s words shame me into proving something to a river that had already been decided.
There was something in the water.
There is something in the water.
And now I think, I think it might be me.
Published 8/7/26