Maroko is completely parceled from Heaven; a gift against the unlubricated heart of the iron city, Lagos. The waters flow just good enough; to deny the mosquitoes, a replacement egg. And not good enough to pull Chimnanu’s refuge apart.

She wakes again to the mosquito sound of speed boats, that steal from the demurrage vessels, but soon drifts away again in thought.

These acts are still wrong. It is wrong to take another person’s thing. 

But someone has asked, “What if these people took it, just as Sandfill; The Monarch with Babangida is taking Maroko away from us?” 

Others say, they took our dignity and made us thieves when they took the money that would have created us jobs. 

But these things are still wrong, though the merchants have taken insurance and get what is taken taken from us”

Chimnanu turns and stretches but pushes had on the stick that poles her polystyrene house.

Many things fell apart. Now floating on the water with other shacks, further away from coming together. In it ripples of muted light also glimmered. 

On her raft she stretched again and somehow she finds a stray will to live yet another day.

Leonard Chintua-Chigbu

Listening and Creative Communications