In a village where red dust lingered in the air like an unspoken truth, a little boy named Tobi leaned against a cracked mud wall. The wall had seen better days, so had Tobi.
He was seven, or so his mother said. Dates didn’t matter much in life. Life moved in rhythms of hunger and harvest, rain and heat, hope and heartbreak.
Tobi’s eyes, wide and curious, held the kind of silence that made adults uncomfortable. He didn’t talk much anymore. Not since the fire. Not since the night that shouting turned into screaming, and the screaming into silence.
He remembered smoke curling through the air like it had a message, and his father’s voice, loud with rage, suddenly gone. His mother had run out barefoot, dragging him behind her, her wrapper half-burnt, her heartbeat loud in his ears.
They lived with Auntie Sade ever since. But Sade was not his mother’s sister. No one knew whose sister she really was. She simply appeared one day, claiming kinship, offering shelter, food, and rules that felt like thorns wrapped in honey.
“Don’t speak when elders are talking.” “Don’t eat unless given.” “Don’t cry.”
Tobi learned quickly. He also learned to be invisible.
Every morning, he stood by the wall. From there, he could see the school children passing, laughing, some with dusty feet slapping the path with careless and endless joy. He watched them like someone watching a world he didn’t belong to. His mother once promised he would join them. That was before her silence began.
She spoke only in glances now. Her voice, once full of stories about the moon and river spirits, had dried up like the village well in dry season. Her eyes looked far away, like they were chasing something that refused to be caught.
One day, a girl with sky-colored beads in her hair stopped in front of him.
“Why are you always standing here?” she asked.
He blinked, unsure if she was real. Most kids passed him like air.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
She smiled. “I’m Ifeoma. You look like you know secrets.”
Tobi looked at her—at her school uniform with one missing button, at the books tucked under her arm, at the mud on her ankle. She looked like adventure. She looked like tomorrow.
“I know some,” he said, voice barely above a breath.
From that day, Ifeoma stopped to talk to him every afternoon. Sometimes, she gave him pages from her old notebooks. She showed him how to write his name in the dust with a stick.
“Tobi,” she said one day, “your name means ‘God is great.’”
He nodded. But inside, he thought If God is great, why did He forget me?
Weeks passed. Tobi waited for her every day like a ritual. Her presence was the only thread stitching the torn fabric of his world. Then one day, she didn’t come.
The next day, she still didn’t come.
On the third day, he asked a passing boy, “Where is the girl with beads in her hair?”
The boy shrugged. “She and her mother moved to Enugu.”
Just like that, she was gone.
Tobi stared at the place where she used to stand, the emptiness louder than his heartbeat. The wall behind him felt colder that day.
He wanted to cry. But Auntie Sade’s rules echoed in his mind. Don’t cry.
Instead, he ran.
Through the dusty paths, past the goats and the whispering trees, until he reached the riverbank where his mother used to tell him stories. He sat there, legs drawn to his chest, watching the slow water carry leaves to places he could only imagine.
“Tobi?”
He turned. His mother stood there, barefoot, the wind teasing her faded wrapper.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to remember,” he said. “You used to tell me stories here.”
She sat beside him. For a while, neither of them spoke.
“I forgot how to tell them,” she whispered finally. “The stories. They disappeared when your father did.”
He looked up at her. “Can we find them again?”
She looked at him like he was asking for magic. But then just maybe she remembered too.
“Once,” she began softly, “there was a boy who lived on the edge of the world…”
Tobi leaned closer. Her voice was shaky, like a drum that hadn’t been played in years. But it was there.
That night, under the cracked zinc roof, he asked her, “Can I go to school?”
She hesitated. “It costs money.”
“I’ll help you find it.”
“How?”
“I’ll work.”
He started the next day.
Fetching water for neighbors. Running errands. Cleaning courtyards. Every coin he earned, he hid under a rock near the wall. Auntie Sade complained, but Tobi didn’t stop.
His mother began sewing again. Old wrappers turned into headscarves. Slowly, she stitched herself back into the fabric of living.
Six months later, they had enough.
On his first day at school, Tobi wore a borrowed shirt and carried a second-hand exercise book. He stood at the gate and looked back once at the wall where he had once waited for a world
that never noticed him.
And he smiled.
Because now, he wasn’t waiting.
He was walking into it.
