The Smallness of Asking
The craving was instant. We had just gotten home from school, my sister Nneka and I. As I changed out of my uniform in our shared bedroom, I looked out the dust-mottled window and saw two boys across the street. They stood under the shade of a pine tree sucking tangerines, the best thing God had ever made (after small dogs), and licking bits of it off their fingers. Nneka would soon be going to Ogbete Market, a place she deemed “not for little boys.” She was fifteen, and I was eight, and she treated our age gap like an ocean, as if she were older than Mama. I tried my best to avoid her until nighttime when Mama and Papa returned home from their tailoring shop in the city. But this Thursday afternoon, I was willing to bear the penance of Nneka’s company, saliva already frothing on my tongue at the imagined taste of cold, delicious tangerine slices.
I found her in the kitchen frying plantains, oil hissing off the pan.
“I’m coming with you to Ogbete,” I said.
She didn’t look at me. “Why?”
“It’s none of your business why.”
“Then no.”
“I want to help you. Keep you company.”
She turned around, smirking. “You want to help me?”
“Yes.”
She examined me closely, brows raised. Then she shrugged. “Okay. Why not? After lunch.”
We left the apartment at 4pm, walked down our twisting street of tenements and hair salons. At the bus stop, a dozen people stood waiting. The sun licked my skin, sweat bathing my forehead. Already, part of me longed to be back home, curled on my bed, but I pushed my thoughts toward the tangerines, their sticky-sweet pulp, the juice in every bite.
The bus pulled up 30 minutes later, every seat occupied. Nneka and I stood swaying in the back, squeezed between limbs and rancid armpits. She refused to let go of my hand, glaring at me each time I pulled away. She didn’t let go at the market entrance either, bending low so that our heads were level to whisper, “Hold on at all times. At all times, Chijioke.”
But I was looking over her plaited scalp, my eyes wide. The road crawled with taxis, three-wheeled keke napeps, motorcycles, and feet marched in either direction, the most feet I’d ever seen at once. Stalls lined the sidewalks, marked by wide umbrellas looming over carts of wrappers and blankets. Nneka led us inside Ogbete, into an overwhelming rush of sound. Music blared from static-prone speakers—gospel songs and Afrobeats and the occasional North American jam. Trilingual chatter rose over the din, “How much for that one?”; “Tufiakwa! Chineke ga-ata gi ahuhu,” “Fine madam, wetin you want, we get am for here.” The stony lane flanked by shops was crowded, as were all the roads it forked into, replete with men pushing wheelbarrows loaded with cement bags and noodle cartons, children lugging baskets of bananas on their heads, women handing out pamphlets about the town’s newest church. The air changed with every step, wafting from fried fish to acerbic paint to the rusty tang of coiled wires.
My heart thumped in my throat, and I clutched ever more tightly at Nneka’s hand. I marveled at how effortlessly she moved, her lightning pace pushing us past tight gaps and brimming corners. A plump woman grabbed her wrist and smiled through brown teeth, “I can do your hair!” Nneka shook her off without missing a beat. We took a few more turns until finally she stopped at a shop stocked with rice pouches and spices. The owner, a skeletal man swallowed whole by a sports jersey, smiled in recognition. Without her saying more than a greeting, he stuffed a nylon bag with cans of Peak Milk, sugar cubes, spaghetti, and garden eggs; she handed him several wrinkled nairas. Then we were off again.
My initial terror soon settled into weary distrust—we had seen other stalls selling milk and sugar minutes ago, but she’d whizzed past them. My feet ached. Was she trying to tire me? To punish me for tagging along? A fruit stall appeared on the right, its wooden table topped by adjacent pyramids of gooseberries, pockmarked jackfruits, and tangerines. I’d barely pointed before we turned left, the juicy goods vanishing.
At one stall, she asked a man for a 100-cube pack of beef-flavored Royco. He pulled it from a rickety shelf, said, “500 naira.” Nneka laughed, that half-scornful sound she sometimes took with me.
“Do I look like Yemi Alade?” she asked. “Other stalls are selling this same pack for 250 naira.”
The man glared at her, his face steeped in wrinkles. “Then go to the other stalls. I will not go lower than 400 naira.”
They came to a mutually reluctant agreement at 350 naira. As we left, Nneka mumbled thief under her breath. At our next stop, she laughed at the initial price and walked away, only to be called back. At another, she pointed out wear and tear on a flour bag’s packaging, shaving off 60 naira. She was transformed, animated, and I sensed her joy in the tango of back and forth, her swell of inner pride. It was like discovering a new sibling.
After Nneka purchased new lace wigs for Mama, she could no longer fit all the bags in one grip, so she released me, freeing her other hand, screaming “stay close” over the commotion. We were separated and reunited by the motion of things and people—a man on a bicycle, a stray dog, two women interested in a nearby stall filled with DVDs. As Nneka rounded a corner, the distance between us widening, I quickened my trot to a run. I missed one step and fell sideways into a gutter overflowing with mango pits, crumpled plastic bottles, and garbage bags.
Sickening pain bloomed on the left side of my head. My wails followed, intensifying when I rubbed my hand against my temple and saw blood. Something tugged at my shirt, lifting me up. It was a wide-eyed Nneka, her nylon bags discarded at her feet.
She wiped smudges of dirt off my clothes, cupped my face in her hands. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Behind her, a bare-chested boy and his mother watched from their stall. The boy was smirking.
I shoved Nneka’s hands away. “Can we go home now?”
“You’re bleeding, Chijioke.”
“I’m fine.”
“We need to get you some bandages. Jesus, Mama is going to kill me.”
She tightly balanced her six bags on the fingers of one hand so that she could again hold me with the other. I glared at my muddied cleats as we walked to a medicinal stall. There, an albino man dipped balls of cotton in methylated spirit and rubbed them on my wound. I resisted the urge to scream at the fiery sensation.
“No wahala; the cut no dey deep,” he told Nneka as he applied a bandage. “E go better on its own. Oya, my guy, high five.” He raised his hand, but I did not reciprocate.
“Don’t mind him,” Nneka told the man, handing him 200 naira.
We moved toward a section of the market marked by an archway where the words OK Line had been crudely painted.
“This area is called okrika,” she said. “Most things here are secondhand, but they come from abroad. I’ll buy Mama and Papa some Kenyan jewelry so that they don’t disown me when they see your head. Then we can go, okay?”
I shrugged.
She sighed, lightly squeezed my thumb with two fingers. “You still haven’t told me the real reason you came, Chijioke.”
I kicked at a stone, watched it soar.
Unlike the rest of the market, the OK Line stalls were less exposed, connected overhead by adjacent sheets of protective zinc, loose sunlight spilling through the gaps. The day seemed impossibly hotter, my damp shirt matted to my skin. We passed rows of clothes hanging from nails in walls, colorful bedsheets, oversized purses. Toward the end of the path, a teenage boy, seventeen or eighteen, stood over a glass table beset with all manner of ugly bracelets and necklaces. Nneka dropped her bags on the edge of his table, and he pulled her into a brief sideways hug. They beamed at each other like old friends, like something more than old friends, and then I understood that we were not here on Mama and Papa’s behalf. Not entirely.
“Long time, long time,” the boy said, exuberantly rolling his ls. “I thought you had forgotten me.”
“I have o,” she replied with a grin, pinching at the skin of her elbow. I had never seen her do that before. “I am getting married next week.”
“Oh yeah? Who’s the lucky man?”
“A 60-year-old grandpa with big thighs and an even bigger bank account.”
The boy laughed, and Nneka laughed, and I hated it, the tangle of their voices, the way he crooned when she tried on a gold-colored rosary, the way I stood on the edges, invisible. Across from me was a shop stacked with irons, hairdryers, and extension cords. Near the entrance, two calabashes of fruits were set atop a small shelf, one with green apples, the other with tangerines. The shop’s owner was a portly gray-haired man. A generator buzzed next to him, powering the television angled high into the wall. He was distracted by a Nollywood movie.
I glanced at Nneka, who was now rotating the beads of a band around her wrist. Nneka, who seemed to have aged ten years in Ogbete, who blended so seamlessly with its chaos. Here, legs still marched in droves; a dozen conversations mixed with the shriek of songs. I could disappear into the storm. It would only take five seconds.
I moved to the other side of the teeming market road. The gray-haired man remained distracted, enraptured by the tiny lives on his television screen. I stood on my tiptoes and reached for a single tangerine. It was soft in my grip. I spun around, shoved it into my pocket.
“Hey!”
A furious high-pitched scream from behind me.
I pushed my legs faster toward Nneka. She was staring my way now, frowning. A hand twisted my shoulder, fingers dug into my flesh like claws. The gray-haired man dragged me toward his shop. He reached into my pocket and flattened the tangerine against my nose. “Is this yours?”
Nneka was by my side in a flash. “Don’t touch my brother!”
“Your brother is a thief,” he said, waving the tangerine like a weapon. “A thief in Ogbete of all places! With just one word, I can have all the agbero boys in this market flogging the devil out of him. I will teach him a lesson.”
Nneka looked at her more-than-a-friend, her lower lip sweat-slick and trembling, but he remained at his stall, gaze fixed on his own little trinkets. She turned back to the man, dropping to her knees, her palms pressed together in prayer.
“Please,” she whispered. “I will pay.”
“You think I want a thief’s payment?” His voice was rising. “He deserves a bloody beating!” People were stopping in their tracks to stare. A man holding a thick bamboo stick over his right shoulder started to approach us. An uncontrollable shiver took over my body. Urine filled my underwear, creating a dark oval around my shorts.
Nneka reached into her purse for all her remaining naira. She extended them to the gray-haired man. “Please, biko, o nwanne mu, he’s an idiot, but he’s my brother. My only brother.”
The man considered the money dangling in her hand. His face relaxed and was soon curled by a smile. He bunched the cash into one fist and nodded at me. “Get this criminal out of my sight.”
Nneka yanked my hand and dragged me forward with a force that nearly dislocated my shoulder. She picked up the nylon bags at her more-than-a-friend’s stall, rebalancing them on one hand so that the other was free to keep dragging me. The boy started to say something, but she gave him a look that immediately silenced him.
The minutes spent marching out of Ogbete seemed eternal. I crunched gravel beneath my feet, my head throbbing anew. It felt as though the eyes of every man, child, and wandering hen were on us, unseen pinpricks poking at my sides, lines of urine drying on my calves. Once, I dared to look up at Nneka. I wanted to break the silence, to explain what I had done.
I knew you wouldn’t have bought the tangerines if I asked seemed insufficient. No, it had been something about the smallness of even asking; here, she’d loomed larger than life, the things she wanted hers for the taking. I opened my mouth, unsure of what would come out, but when I saw the droop of her shoulders, the sadness pulling down her eyelids, I said nothing.
Outside Ogbete, a gloom had settled over the sky. The sun was a receding half-ball. Taxis honked. Conductors clung to the roofs of buses, screaming their destinations. We moved away from the vehicles and started down a sidewalk. We would have to walk all the way home.
I tried again.
I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to.
The first was true, the second not so much. In any case, the words still wouldn’t form. What came out instead was a hacking sound, a rasp caught in my throat. Nneka looked at me, and I came undone at her gaze, my reflection in her pink eyes. I was a boy, a tiny, foolish boy, and I cried my little boy tears, let their salt run down my cheeks, let snot clump around my nostrils.
Nneka released my arm.
We were still within the commercial stretch outside of Ogbete. A woman carrying a box of frayed Bibles approached from one end, children selling frozen yogurts approached from the other. Nneka made no attempt to move out of their way. She pulled me into her body, my face pressed against the plantain-scented warmth of her stomach. I hugged her back, harder than I ever had, and refused to let go.
Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google. He was born and raised in Nigeria but now lives in Canada. His short stories have appeared in Carve Magazine, Bending Genres, Pithead Chapel, and Callaloo, among others. He was also a fiction finalist in the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is currently working on his debut anthology. Find him on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.