30/04/2026
*ABAKWA – Part Eleven*
The light didn't burn.
It remembered me.
I stepped through and the promise-color washed over my skin like warm rain. No heat, no glare. Just the weight of every word I'd never said being lifted off my shoulders at once. I staggered. The man with no diamonds caught my arm. His hand was calloused. Real.
"Easy," he said. "First time's always like dying, but backwards."
Behind us, I heard the lantern go out. Not blown. Not snuffed. It just... completed. When I turned, the lantern woman was gone. Only a small pile of salt on the ground where she'd stood. The path was gone too. There was only this place now.
We were in the room I'd seen through the star-window. Mud walls. A mat on the floor. A louver window with morning pushing through it, blue and thin. Someone was under a thin sheet on the mat. Chest rising, falling.
Me.
Younger. Maybe nine. School uniform folded on a chair.
The man let go of my arm. He looked at the sleeping boy, then at me.
"You asked if you were him," he said. "You were. You are. Question is—"
The boy on the mat stirred. Eyelids fluttering. About to wake.
"—are you gonna let him keep sleeping?"
Outside, a rooster called. A pot clanged. The quarter was waking up. A radio started, distant, playing Makossa. Same morning I'd lived twenty years ago. Same choices waiting in the light through the louvers.
The man stepped back. Into the corner. Where the shadows live.
"He wakes up alone, you walk the memory road forever," he said. "You wake him, you walk the real one. With scars. With sugarcane juice. With slaps and stories and lights going out."
The boy's eyes opened.
He didn't see us. He saw the ceiling. The morning.
My throat was raw. "What happens if I—"
"Then the diamonds were never the point," the man said. "You were."
The light from the window hit the mat. Hit the boy's face.
I had one breath left that smelled like rain-that-hasn’t-fallen-yet.
I used it to say his name.