Loose Ends (V)- another short story

Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of

I once spent an entire Saturday preparing to write a business plan. I did not

What the Dancing Plague of 1518 still has to teach a city like Lagos A

I once sat in a gathering of otherwise reasonable, educated Nigerians, the kind of room where everyone has an opinion and every opinion is delivered with total conviction, and listened to a full hour of righteous fury about the state of the country. The politicians were thieves. The system was broken. Nobody in government cared about the common man. Heads nodded. Glasses were raised. It was, by every measure, an excellent vilification session, and I nodded along with the rest of them, because every word of it was true.

I remember scrolling through one of those glossy “Forbes 30 Under 30” style lists one quiet night, the kind of night when you are not really looking for trouble but find it anyway. Photograph after photograph of confident young faces, each caption more impressive than the last. Founded a company at twenty two. Sold it at twenty six. Sat on a panel by twenty eight.

There is a statistic that should discourage any lion from ever hunting again. Three out of every four times a lion charges after prey, it fails. Twenty five percent success. Seventy five percent waste. If a man ran a business on those numbers, his accountant would resign quietly, his investors would call an emergency meeting, and his mother would move from praying for his success to praying for his sense.

There is a woman I know, call her Adaeze, who loves her husband the way a well-tended fire loves the wood it is given: completely, warmly, without……

A message arrives from someone you have not spoken to in years. A parent needs surgery. An account number is attached, and a photograph of a hospital bill that may or may not be real. You have just been paid. Not much is left after rent and the small emergencies that always find a way to arrive before the salary does. You send something anyway. You do not ask why the message found you specifically, out of everyone this person knows.

I ran into a post on social media a few days ago. Someone had turned Animal Farm into a slideshow, cartoon pigs in suits, captions lifted straight from the book, the whole thing dressed up for a scrolling audience. It stopped me mid scroll, the way certain things from your teenage years do when they show up uninvited in your adult timeline.

It was the spring of 1900. A group of Greek sponge divers, blown off course by a fierce Mediterranean storm, dropped anchor near the small island of Antikythera — a barren, wind-battered speck of land sitting between Crete and the Greek mainland. They were looking for shelter. What they found instead would take another century for the world to begin to understand.