2025 OPEN SHORT STORY COMPETITION FOURTH PLACE

Fourth place goes to…

 Tosin Balogun

HERE I AM, HERE I AM

Friday 

Hey Papa. My day started with me screaming and stomping on what I thought was an unhoused person who’d snuck into my car overnight. To be completely honest, I don’t know a single woman who wouldn’t have responded the way I did, but I know you’re gonna be disappointed in me anyway which is why I went out of my way to call the person ‘unhoused’ instead of ‘homeless’. 

The past has come looking for me, Papa. Literally. As I rammed my foot into the shoulder of the unhoused individual, I quickly realized that the person I had automatically assumed to be some kind of a serial car-rapist was in fact me. Rather, me from six years ago. Eighteen-year-old Adaeze Azikiwe. When I realized this, I apologized profusely and even helped wipe the dirt off her shoulder. Then she shifted away from me and looked out the window. We sat in the strangest of silences for a while, sparing tiny glances at the other. I have to say, I’m not entirely sure what it says about me that I found myself attracted to myself, but I did indeed find myself attracted to myself. Although after some light self-examination I concluded my up-till-now latent desire to sleep with myself was still mercifully dwarfed by my alive-and-kicking desire to defenestrate myself. As we sat, I noticed she still looked despondent despite my apology and light shoulder dusting, so I offered to buy her Waffle House, and then she didn’t look sad anymore, and it occurred to me I’d played myself.

I’m away from home right now. I drove around the Midwest in your car—don’t worry I didn’t scratch it, I just scratched it a little near the fuel door—and am probably gonna start the trip home soon. It was a good trip, but I’m not doing so well, Papa. Somewhere in North Dakota, about four days from Columbus, one week since I left you in Nigeria, and I’m already destitute, already sleeping in your car, already waking up next to strangers who weren’t there when I fell asleep.

A-two-ze—let’s call her ‘A-two-ze’ for the time being—has no idea how she ended up in my car. According to her, the last thing she remembers is being ‘punched the fuck out’ by Ngozi in the school courtyard. I cried in the Waffle House while looking at her, Papa. She and the waitress looked at me like I was crazy. And I probably was, but she was sitting right across from me. The place where Ngozi’s ring split open her chin was still bleeding. She didn’t know, Papa. She didn’t know anything.

I guess I should tell you about Ngozi. I never explained why I threw up in the sink after you told me she’d tried to kill herself. I knew you knew I was lying when I said I hardly knew her, but you didn’t ask. You never ask Papa. What’re you scared of? 

Ngozi’s parents were fire and brimstone, and they beat her with the biblical fury only christian Igbos could brew. Because we lived so close, we were naturally friends throughout middle school, and I wouldn’t say anything when she’d come to class with lash marks on her palm or with her voice hoarse and perforated. You’d told me stories of your parents. And their parents. And their parents. 

I liked Ngozi because she seemed sure of herself. Fitzgerald said personality is a series of successful gestures, and Ngozi never failed once. Unlike me, who was a fountain of regurgitated words and ideas stolen from TV, and books, and Ngozis, when she talked, you got the sense that everything that came out of her mouth had its roots in her and her alone. Everything from, Good Morning, Adaeze, to Do you want to kiss?

She asked me on the last day of middle school, in the woods behind the soccer field. I shrugged and laid my back on the big ginkgo tree. She pressed her lips against mine under that sun that filtered through the Ginko’s leaves. As the wind drew them back and forth, we were suddenly kissing beneath green butterflies, rustling and fluttering excitedly, going nowhere. I didn’t particularly care for the kiss, for women at all as it were, and I was going to ask her to stop when she put her tongue in my mouth, but she moaned when she tasted my saliva and I was vindicated, Papa. I felt as though, for a moment, I was an irreplaceable resource, that I was some kind of sustenance for whatever comprised her soul. It didn’t matter that her tongue tasted the way old Toyota car seats smelled, it was infinitely more significant to me that she wanted more.

A-two-ze cried when I told her you were dead, Papa. She was sitting next to me on the hood of your Buick. We were staring out at the highway, backs to the waffle house, drinking soda. I pulled out a joint from my jacket pocket and offered it to her. She placed it between her lips, and I placed one hand against the black february wind, using the other to light the joint. The sun had risen somewhat, but it was still dark enough for the tiny flame to cast soft orange light on her face. We were quiet, our breaths visible instead of audible. Her eyes, sand-coloured and heavy and glistening, stared back at me; her whole body shook visibly, and I wondered if maybe I should tell her what happened to Ngozi as well. We turned back to the highway, then. She cried harder next to me. The joint hung between her lips, glowing pitifully.

I didn’t talk about the kiss with Ngozi afterwards. In hindsight I think I was embarrassed of how much I craved being craved. I got a text from her that night, she told me she thought she might like girls. I didn’t respond. We didn’t talk for the rest of the summer, and by the time high school started we were practically strangers. A nod as we passed each other, a closed-lip smile if we bumped into each other. Years passed the way goldfish died. I didn’t know when rumours about her started spreading, but by the end of senior year they were unavoidable. Obviously we didn’t care that she was gay. We cared that she wore a crucifix and read her bible during lunch yet was allegedly caught kissing Franchesca Reyez in the janitor’s closet. We cared for story more than we did truth.

During lunch one day, I looked up from my chicken sandwich to see a crowd gathering. People who never talked to me, people who didn’t know I existed, hell, people who hated my guts, sitting at my table, chins on fists, listening attentively. Listening to me. To me. They knew I was friends with Ngozi in middle school and they wanted to know if it was true. If I could speak to the rumours. I remember glancing over to Ngozi on the other side of the cafeteria. I remember seeing in my head the way she would wince while holding her pencil, hearing the pathetic, croaking laugh she would give when asked what happened to her voice. I saw her mother’s hand raised, pankere arched for the drop. 

I told them about the kiss, of course. I told them everything. Phones were pulled out. Dings were heard. The next day Ngozi came to school with a limp. During Algebra I noticed her holding her pencil funny. She didn’t raise her hand to answer any questions. During lunch, she asked me to go behind the school. I followed her and opened my mouth to ask what’s up when she rammed her fist into my chin. I bled on the pavement and watched her limp away from me. The next day, you told me you’d heard at a PTA meeting she’d tried to kill herself. It was me, Papa. I told you I didn’t know why, but it was me. You should have seen their eyes when they asked me to spill the beans. How can anyone be thoughtful when they get to be the answer to a question, Papa? 

A-two-ze and I hit the road. She spent a solid hour looking at the window, saying nothing. When we crossed state lines, I spared a glance out my window, and snow so blindingly white singed my retinas. It took a while, but my vision coalesced, the white finally diffused and the roads and buildings made themselves somewhat visible. Lines of grey and yellow and blue and brick and brown streaked by like wishing stars, asphalt became tree became sky became concrete became ice became metal.

I heard A-two-ze speak. She said, Ngozi. Is she okay? Did her mom hurt her?

I peeled my eyes away from the window and focused on the road. 

No, I said.

Saturday 

Hey, Papa. Today, parked in a home-depot parking lot somewhere in Minnesota, A-two-ze and I woke each other up with our yawns. I yawned first, and then she yawned. We blinked ourselves awake and stared at each other. 

That was when we heard the third yawn. For a moment we were confused, because we both heard a yawn, but did not in fact see any lips spread apart to create such a sound. Then in unison, we turned to the backseat and saw a very third, very fourteen-year-old Adaeze Azikiwe scratching her eyes and stretching. She was wearing a Powerpuff Girls T-shirt, and her Jordans were stained with what I almost immediately recognized as Bingo’s blood. 

I think I’m understanding how this works, Papa. In which case, I have more secrets for you.

A-three-ze, A-two-ze and I went to your favourite all-you-can-eat chain. A-three-ze tracked blood into the place, but the host either didn’t notice or didn’t care. As we often do, the two girls went to the seafood section, but I went elsewhere. As I piled into my white plastic plate lo mein that I could not stand the slimy texture of, and steak that I could hardly digest, I thought about you, about us. About that day you caught me with Bingo. Tell me why I stood over your favourite foods, silently crying in the all you can eat.

A-three-ze had all sorts of questions for me and A-two-ze. Where we worked, what we majored in, what boyfriends we’ve had, if we ever saw Jean Dawson live. We tried to answer dutifully, but, Papa, there was something wrong. I know what she did. A-two-ze knows what she did. She knows what she did. There was a literal trail of blood following her to the booth, but there she sat, giddily asking if Midwest Emo ever grew on us. And in her eyes or her voice or her general demeanor I tried to find some kind of guilt, or maybe shame, anything to marry the bloody sneakers with the girl slurping Coke-Zero, but I failed.

Back then I told you I didn’t know dogs couldn’t eat chocolate, and that I had only arrived moments before you did, but both of those things were lies. I couldn’t look away from you as we drove your already dead dog to the vet. Is that what love is, Papa? An anti-agent to the truth? You convinced yourself I was telling the truth, you convinced yourself the vet could do anything for Bingo. Maybe that’s my problem. I am chronically, fatally invested in the truth and am without fail deleted by love, and so I can convince myself of nothing, I can believe in nothing, I can be nothing.

You knew I never liked Bingo. He was loud, he reeked unforgivably, he chewed through my copy of Purple Hibiscus, and he would—I’m convinced on purpose—frequently drool on me when asking for pets (which he would do by placing his big-ass paw on me and digging his unseemly nails into my thigh-flesh).

I asked you many times to return the thing, and the one time you agreed, you looked so miserable at the pound that I changed my mind and agreed to let it stay with us.

Bingo died a horrible death, Papa. I won’t lie to you. I saw all of it. It was the week after Ngozi had kissed me under the gingko tree, and I’d used the last of my allowance to buy a box of unsweetened baking chocolate bars to make brownies. I came back from the store, placed the box on my desk and went down to the kitchen to finish my chores. By the time I returned to my room, hands wrinkled and smelling of dish soap, Bingo was by my desk on the floor, convulsing, blood spilling from his open mouth into the grey carpet. I remember he looked like a dragon breathing fire the way his blood-pool extended outward in a cone shape away from his mouth. On the floor by his spasming head was an almost fully eaten 4oz box of baking chocolate. I rushed to him, stepping on his blood, and then I hesitated. He was looking right at me, Papa. His big copper eyes quivered but stayed centered on me, and I felt a calm seep through me like his blood did the carpet. I wanted to see if I could catch the point where he’d stop looking at me. If he no longer being present could be represented by him no longer perceiving me. And so I waited, and I waited, and I waited. I thought about the taste of Ngozi’s tongue. I thought about the door I could no longer close, about that big Gingko tree and its leaves like butterflies. Bingo shook beneath me, whining, limp tongue twitching with the rest of him, and then I saw his last exhale. His body deflated, stilled. But there was no visible difference in his eyes. If I hadn’t literally watched him die, if I wasn’t stepping in the crimson fire he spat, I’d have thought he was still seeing me. It made no difference. I made no difference.

I was weeping when you found me maybe fifteen minutes later. But not for the reasons I told you. Never for the reasons I told you. On the car ride to the vet, I could not deny that laced into my discomfort was relief. The dog was gone. The dog was gone. Even as you wept over Bingo’s body, I kept having to remind myself something terrible had happened, and I kept dreading how I’d have to walk around all mopey so as to not trigger any of your grief-planted landmines. I don’t think I’m a real person, Papa. There’s something wrong. I suspect Bingo, in his refusal to not chew my favourite novels, in his incessant barking and need to be walked, in his terrible, terrible body odor, knew that before I did.

And so, as I sat opposite A-three-ze and watched her chew with her mouth open and ask if there were any web-comics on A-two-ze’s phone, I debated asking her how she was feeling in regards to Bingo. It had clearly just happened for her, the way the punch just happened for A-two-ze. 

But I didn’t. I knew there was no conceivable way she would not lie. A-three-ze, like me, is much too aware of the truth to ever consider telling it. I began cutting the steak.

Sunday 

I was seven when I found out you existed.

I don’t have many strong memories of my mother. More than anything I remember waiting for her. I learned to lie from you, Papa. She’ll come visit me on my eighth birthday. She’s too busy. She’ll come on my ninth. Sorry Adaeze, she’s sick. Tenth, for sure. Eleventh. Don’t cry, don’t cry. Eventually I stopped asking. Not because I stopped missing her, but because you would so visibly wince when I did. To lie to me was to betray yourself. I learned the act of lying from you, but it was a currency in my hand, and a tax in yours.

My earliest memory of my mother was of her staring out the window while doing the dishes. I don’t remember why I wasn’t in school—and indeed I don’t remember being in school very much back then—and I don’t remember what I was saying to her, but I know I was talking. I was saying many little excited somethings and she was nodding and giving ‘ah’s and ‘mm’s but her eyes would never leave the window. I felt, without knowing that I felt, that she wanted to be elsewhere, that I was too cramped a home for her.

That night, she pulled a bag out of the closet and handed it to me. In it was a bright orange fox plushie with a massive head and tiny body. As I squealed and hugged the plushie tight as I could, she told me that the man who came into her house and threw things on the wall wasn’t my father. That my real father, who would take better care of me, was coming the next morning. She told me this in front of Oprah reruns, the TV glowed with a sharp buzzing blue-ness, and she did not turn to me as she spoke. She said my name was not Erin, that you and her had agreed to call me Adaeze, but she took me and moved back to Alabama because her mother did not want her marrying you. She said I was Nigerian, and she wanted me to take your last name, and I did not understand anything she was saying to me. I was Erin Burns. She was saying I was not Erin Burns.

Finally, she turned away from the tv and looked at me. Her eyes shone with fickle neon, and—entirely separate from her eyes—her face split open with a smile. I don’t remember her face, but I remember for a moment not recognizing her face. I remember a complete stranger wearing my mother’s skin, looking at me, finally accepting I was the wrong answer to the question of her. She swallowed hard, and tears slid over her pale white cheeks as she spoke.

I’m so sorry Adaeze, she said, breath shaking, and I thought to myself, Who?

The sun is setting, Papa. A-two-ze and I just helped A-three-ze smoke weed for the first time. She spat smoke into the pink sky and cried when we told her you were gone. I tell you the story of my mother because this morning, I woke up in the backseat, A-two-ze snoring on my left shoulder, A-three-ze on my right, and a young girl curled up in my lap, a big-headed fox plushie death-gripped in her arms.

A-four-ze was, needless to say, absolutely terrified. She was skittish and wide-eyed around us, and would frequently cry silently when she thought we weren’t looking. It was the ‘when she thought we weren’t looking’ part that irked me. Did she think we would lynch her if we caught her crying? Mom’s boyfriend wasn’t here, and I kept trying to tell her that, and she kept nodding, but it was obvious from her eyes that it was a nod of submission, not understanding. 

Eventually, A-three-ze reminded us what mom would use to cheer us up, and so we took A-four-ze to McDonald’s. I–against my will–paid for everyone’s meal and we slid into a booth. A-two-ze and A-three-ze took my phone to watch new seasons of South Park, and A-four-ze sat opposite me, sniffling and playing with the fox plushie’s tiny arms. 

A part of me wanted to throw away the plushie. Primarily for her sake–the thing was a vestige of something that essentially no longer existed–but also for mine. In my memories, the plushie was a bright, vibrant orange. Like the fruit, or Charmander. In reality, the thing held in A-four-ze's arm was sorry. The orange was dead, more brown than anything. The fur was so cheap it came off each time she rubbed its head, and it was several, several times smaller than I remember it being. The last thing that belonged to Erin Burns was probably bought at the checkout of a CVS. 

I stared at A-four-ze. She was muttering things to herself as she played with the fox, likely making up words for the thing. She looked so tiny, Papa. So frail. Like I could blink her away. There were bags under her eyes and green mucus would occasionally reach the bridge of her upper lip before she would sniff it back up. I don’t remember this. Did I feel as sickly as I looked? What was it like for you? To drive all the way south, only to see your spawn, one-half you, hollow and flighty as an insect. Something in my throat swelled and I blinked away moisture. This minuscule thing would willingly watch your dog die. She would throw a former friend into the fury of a mother she knew would beat her. She had, in the dawn of her person, been wiped clean, and she was truly, almost unspeakably alone. I looked away from her. What a mess.

She surprised me by speaking. I realized it was the first time she'd done so without being called upon.

Are we going to see Mommy? she asked, still looking at the fox.

I chewed the inside of my cheek. Yes, I told her, yes, she's waiting for us.

Just then, someone at the counter holding a tray of food called out Adaeze! and all five Adaezes perked up. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that unlike the rest of us, A-four-ze wasn't looking towards the person who called her name. She was looking right at me.

 Monday

Hey, Papa. This morning I woke up with a baby in my arms.

I won’t say I was surprised, but at the same time I wasn’t expecting her to literally spawn in my arms. I awoke to the sound of her crying, Papa. Are all babies like this? A needle shrill pierced through me with such force and such alarm-inducing agony that I jerked awake and looked for the fire, or the gunman, or any thing that could incite such excruciation in a living being.

She’d pooped her pants. I didn’t want to touch her so I made A-two-ze do it and the baby’s stayed with her since. She stopped crying after A-two-ze cleaned her, but only for an hour at best. Once she resumed, she resigned, it seemed, to never stop.

We tried, Papa. God help us, we tried. We stopped at a Walmart and bought formula but she spat it out. We played lullabies and bought her chew toys to no avail, as a last resort I ordered the Adaezes to elect a breastfeeder amongst themselves, and when they pointed out that I was the one most likely to have breastmilk, I decided to let the wretched thing wail into oblivion.

I’ve never liked babies, Papa. You know this, I hate them more than I hate dogs. Whenever I brought this up around you you’d inevitably ask, “But what about my grandbabies?” and I’d glare at you until you changed the subject.

Babies prove we are fundamentally empty, unintelligible, coincidental creatures. Adults like you and me are the result of affect upon affect upon affect. We build our persons by gauging the reactions of other people. Babies have not done any of that, they haven’t had the time to learn any of the various routes into selfhood. So in a way, they are the true form of humans, before we discover lying. If the soul—the pure, unalloyed core of us—exists, it would probably be like a baby, and this one just pooped its pants.

All the other Adaezes came to the future after doing or seeing something significant. What did this one do? Be born? Or maybe she saw something I dare not remember, I don’t know. And honestly I don’t care. I just wish she’d stop crying. Even now, as I write this in a rest stop a few hours from Columbus, I can hear her in the bathroom with A-two-ze wailing, wailing. Scraping her voice through the air, pitifully in search of something she is incapable of knowing, much less describing. She is me, Papa. I stare at her and I see the self I had spent so many years mourning. She proves that I am. She proves that I am not.

I won’t lie to you. In my head, I harboured the vivid image of me pressing a pillow to Baby-Adaeze’s head until I could encounter rare, blessed silence. We’re about an hour away from home, Papa. I got tired so A-two-ze took over driving, and Baby-Adaeze was handed over to A-three-ze, who held her not unlike Clark Kent would hold kryptonite.

As I sat in the passenger seat, I kept thinking about that passage from The Great Gatsby where Fitzgerald described the Middle West as that place where one could be, ‘unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour’. I thought about my mom back in Alabama, I thought about Oprah Winfrey’s pixels printed onto her eyes as she told me I was a lie. I thought about Bingo’s ashes on the TV Stand in Columbus, how I’d stare at it every day before school. To clear my head, I looked out the window, and my eyes told me they didn’t know what the hell Fitzgerald was talking about. Broken, blackened branches on wet grass, water in the air binding the water on your skin—stopping it from fleeing with the wind, a casual acceptance of whiteness as default, flat lands, the unending, deep-rooted, cacophonous silence that can only be drowned out with light or drink, corn, corn, corn. That’s my Middle West.

I screamed at the Adaezes in the QuikTrip, Papa. I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. A-two-ze was pumping gas, and A-three-ze had come from the QuikTrip with boneless chicken wings she bought with my card, and A-four-ze was holding Baby-Adaeze in a way that was probably bad for her neck, and they were both crying because the latter wanted to hold that stupid plushie instead , and I threw the stupid plushie in the trash-can and told her mom was never coming for her, and it was so goddamn cold, and I lost it.

I don’t remember exactly what I said to them, it melted together under the heat of my fury. Maybe I just wanted to see if the sound of me could overpower them. It worked at first. They were all quiet as I hurled obscenities, as my throat grew gravelly like Ngozi’s would. But then Baby-Adaeze’s howl came back with a vengeance, and no matter how much I tried I could not compete with her, I could not out-Adaeze the original. Finally, as I stood inches away from the crying infant, calling her a waste of sperm, we were asked to leave by the store attendant. My voice all but vanished, I had to apologize to A-two-ze. She was distraught because she had to stop filling gas at 9.71 dollars, and she really wanted a perfect ten.

It was dark when we got home. I told A-three-ze and A-four-ze to take Baby-Adaeze to my room and shut the door so I wouldn’t have to hear the cries. A-two-ze and I slept in your room. 

I was joking about being attracted to her of course, but as I watched her sleep it occurred to me that I really was beautiful in my own way. The allure came in that despite her being me, something about her remained unintelligible. I could never really know her in the way you can never really know another person. I sighed deeply, and I guess it must have been loud because her eyes flickered open. We could still hear the Baby wailing across the hall. I asked if I woke her, and she shook her head. I asked how she was feeling, she said she was worried, and I asked why. She said she didn’t know what would come after Baby-Adaeze. I told her I didn’t think there would be anything after her, I told her Baby-Adaeze was the core of us, and she frowned.

I don’t get it, she said, what core?

Tuesday

Hey Papa. My day started with me cursing the heavens. I woke up alone, assailed by what I took to be Baby-Adaeze’s cries. After cursing, I stared at the leaf patterns on your ceiling. My throat began to clog, my breaths shook and shrank, and the sheets no longer smelled like you, but I could not cry because a floor below that wretched thing wearing my face and my heart kept squealing. I thought about the pillow again.

My feet dragged along the carpet as I trudged down the stairs. Head throbbing, I realized it’d been a while since I vacuumed—I’m twenty-six and I need my dad to leave post-it notes on the fridge before I do anything—Despite my readiness to defenestrate the infant, I froze when I reached the bottom of the stairs.

Baby-Adaeze was laughing.

From behind the sitting room couch I saw her tiny brown hands poking out, trying to catch the older woman bent over in front of her. In the corner, A-two-ze and A-three-ze watched in baggy-eyed amazement, and behind the older woman, A-four-ze sat entranced in front of the TV.

As for the older woman in question, I knew who she was the moment I saw her, Papa. She was wearing a red, ankle-length sundress with pink flowers on it. Her locks were long and heavy and grey, her skin adorned with spots and wrinkles, and her voice was creaky, roughened from use.

She was crouched in front of Baby-Adaeze. Her hands were covering her face, and she was disappearing and reappearing, flickering like a dying lightbulb, or a life. She was saying, in the moments when she was non-existent, Where’s Adaeze? Where’s Adaeze? and her fingers would part, and she would be once again real and present and full of me, of me, of me, and she would say, mercifully—

Here she is. 

Here she is.