4 Ejinkeonye Lane

Friday, 11 July, 2025 

5:00 p.m

The sun had returned to remind the moon of its preparation; the local birds danced into their roost with bliss, the feeling when your Chi smiles on you. I was drowned in the bustling sound from the street; the crackling of the ceramic plates from children who wanted to escape scolding from their mothers and different feminine voices bellowed names: Amauche, Agatha, Jekwu nwa m. The kind of call that was heard when one had done contrary to an African mother's instruction. Staying home in ABA during the dusk was a return to the civil war of 1967. If the raffia-made chair were to be a human, I bet my buttocks would have snatched life from it. I had sat on the chair for more than ten hours holding my jaw as I watched both women and children set out for their day and their homecoming. I was the key saver of my neighbors, a respondent of NEPA frequency, and an unpaid babysitter. This was the order of my life in Mr. Ejiofor's house. 

In 2020, I worked at a transit park as a cashier, leaving a life not fulfilled but satisfied until the beauty of marriage rainbowed my life. Unknowest to me that the colours only last for a time frame. I lost in admiration, but sane when the cloud took over after a year of being a Mrs. The idea to quit my job was a camel passing through a needle's eye. "Your husband has all it takes to train you and your unborn children; you are an Orieaku." This was my mother's last word at her first visit to my matrimonial home. "Who wishes to suffer after a sight of gold?" Agnes, my best friend, asked me over the phone while I complained to her. My husband thought my work was a show of irresponsible masculinity. My obstinacy constrained my wifely duty at night for a month. To secure my man from human hawks, I traded my job and stayed home as a watch over. The first five months of quitting my job were a relief. He was at my beck and call until the sixth when his business took a devastating turn. My marriage became a hellhole. 

We feasted on his savings for survival in wait for a turnaround, but as the dawn broke, it broke the hope for a better day. From a greener pasture to parched earth. The funds at hand were lost in the wild wind of the economy. Investors became a co-wife; they flooded my home for their money in the day and heart-wrenching calls at night. Nights became a closet from the trouble of dawn, my degree in microbiology wouldn't provide an opportunity that could pay off ten million in five months, or a loan from my previous workplace—it was an impossible possible try. We hoped. We prayed. We reached out to friends. But all seemed abortive. In the path to survive, he sojourned the great beyond while I was six weeks gone. There wasn't enough finance to renew my rent and his investors had taken valuable property that could meet the value of their money. Here I was thinking about my life. Who would employ an expecting mother in a country full of graduates? What if he had never stopped me from quitting my job? A gold everyone saw was just a bronze.