When she saw her father that evening, she went to him.

It had been a while since they had watched the local news together, but today Sunny needed his company. Anyanwu was still gone, and Sunny felt lost. She’d seen him settling down in his favourite chair to watch the news, a cold bottle of Guinness on the side table, a bowl of groundnuts on his lap. She sat down on the floor beside his chair, and he’d patted her on the shoulder, pointed at the TV, and said, “You heard about this oil spill in the Niger Delta?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been studying.”

“These idiots are… Just watch, here it is. Turn it up,” her father said. She grabbed the remote control and clicked up the volume on the large flat-screen TV.

A thin old man looked deep into the camera, a microphone held to his face. His voice was reedy, his expression perplexed. “I came here when there was no crude, no spillage, everything was so fine. People were enjoying back then,” he said. “It’s a strange thing to us. How could this occur? Are these oil companies stupid? Ah-ah, don’t they know what true wealth is? How could they? These people aren’t from here.”

As he spoke, oil-drenched riverways, creeks, mangroves, and grassy vegetation were shown. The story cut to a journalist walking through the mucky forest in yellow hip boots as he spoke with a short young intense man, also in hip boots, named Murphy Bassey, head of the local watchdog group Friends of the Delta Organisation. As they walked, they both pinched their noses.

“What’s that smell?” the journalist asked in a nasally voice.

Murphy stepped over a fallen tree and stopped at a large black puddle in the soaked vegetation. “You see this here? It’s not water.” He brought a piece of yellow paper from his pocket, rolled it up, and stuck the end into the black liquid. Then he brought out a box of matches. When he used one to light the wet part of the paper, it burst into violent flames. “Whoo!” he exclaimed, dropping it on a dry patch of vegetation and quickly stamping it out. “See that?” he said as he stamped. “What is that? This place is already mutilated by oil pipelines; now the forest and waters are poisoned.”

“So all it would probably take to set this whole forest and the towns near it on fire is dropping a match in the wrong place,” the journalist said, looking very worried.

“Correct,” Murphy said with a bitter chuckle. “We won’t do that, though.”

“I should hope not. I don’t even think you should have lit that paper just now.”

Murphy nodded, a bit out of breath. “I needed you to see, though. Give it a few days and the very air will be flammable. We have more than one oil spill every day here. In an area that’s already polluted,” Murphy said. “These oil companies are so sloppy in their mining of crude oil. They don’t care. It’s not their home. This new spill happened last night! It is not as big as the Exxon Valdez spill, but it is very, very bad. You see for yourself, do you see anyone here? No one is doing anything about it.”

Sunny sighed as she watched, trying not to think of her own problems. As Anatov said, the world was bigger than her. In some parts, the world was literally dying. Her father held his bowl of groundnuts down for her and she took a few. As she shelled one of them, he offered his bottle of beer. “Need a sip?” he asked.

When she looked up and met his eyes, they both burst out laughing. He took a gulp and put the bottle back on the side table, and Sunny popped a groundnut into her mouth.

The only woman interviewed spoke in Pidgin English and had a shell-shocked look about her. But her words made Sunny’s skin prickle and her head feel light. “I come to see the water las’ night. Wetin my eye see na one big thing wey be like animal as it dey descend into the water from air. Like some masquerade tin’. Ah-ah, mek these people stop wetin dem dey do, o… Because it don begin to attract evil, o!”

The woman’s words hit Sunny hard. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath. A “masquerade thing” descending into the crude oil-soaked water? Was this Ekwensu? Did that Lamb women just tell all of Nigeria that she’d seen Ekwensu? Sunny remembered when she’d encountered Ekwensu last year at the shrine beside the gas station, the oily, greasy smell, like car exhaust. Sunny could imagine Ekwensu tearing open a tanker and then bathing in the freshly spilled crude oil, a substance toxic to the flesh of the earth. If Ekwensu had just forced her way into the mundane world, such a “bath” would probably strengthen her.

Sunny moved closer to her father. He took another deep gulp of his beer and belched loudly. “This is not normal,” he said. “Everything in that creek will be dead by tomorrow, the people are getting poisoned, the whole place could go up in flames. It’s not even on international news.”

Sunny slowly got up, her legs feeling like jelly. “I should finish studying,” she said. Her father grunted, his eyes still on the TV where they were now talking about a murder in Lagos.

 

The next morning, when she received her daily Leopard newspaper, she didn’t find one mention of the oil spill in the entire paper. Her father was right; this wasn’t normal at all.