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It’s during the rains, the year the breadfruit trees bear unfamiliar seed, that the stranger comes to the drowned city. The year everything changes.
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Ebunoluwa draws the basket of fish to the top of the ravaged tower like water from a well. The sky overhead is a cool, clear bowl, the street below submerged several feet. The tides of those streets are awash with scattered seedpods, algae, and coral, grown wild over sunken curb barriers and debris gathering centuries of rust.
The still-standing towers, mostly clustered along long-drowned beachfront developments, are cast a dusky gold in the reflected light of the sun, their glass and steel another sea. The rest of the world below – shops, street vendors, and homes – washed away when the floods hit.
It’s been years since she’s seen another living soul; no drifters have passed through the wreckage below on their way to somewhere else since before her mother’s death. So Ebunoluwa startles at the sight of the stranger on a small boat, a pole clutched in her long, slender arms as they push into the lagoon from the south. The waving hand reaching higher still than the woman’s wild hair is the only thing to tell she’s not one of the ghosts that haunt the city.
It’s a moment before Ebunoluwa waves back, the movement so unfamiliar. The stranger’s smile more foreign still. So unlike the ghosts Ebunoluwa lives with.
They sing to her sometimes, the ghosts of her city, when the sun is low in the sky, washing a burning red soft enough she can stare directly at it before it sinks beneath the earth. Their voices whisper through the breadfruit and mulberry trees her great-grandmother’s great-grandmother’s great-grandmother, Yejide, planted as saplings in deep soil hauled up the tower’s winding stairs; through the rooms of the house Yejide and her wife, Morayo, built there – the house in which Ebunoluwa still lives.
When the ghosts raise their voices to the heavens, their song is the sweet song of cloudstreak, fast-moving. Of wind whispering through high grasses and sparse trees. Of the world alive and awake. A whisper of voices, building until it envelops the curve of the sky and the water below swells as with an oncoming storm. She used to fall asleep to the whisper on long nights, with the moon drifting overhead and her mother teaching her to name the stars. Her mother taught her to name the dead too – to tell the ghosts of family apart from the ghosts of the city: all those who cannot leave in death, tied down when fire rose and the earth tore itself apart; in the days when mountains in the shape of women walked and the worms of the earth slipped free from the cracks in the world.
