07/01/2026
The Sound That Never Left
The sound of the pestle hitting the mortar used to mean dinner.
For Damilola, it meant pepper soup on Sundays, egusi thick with palm oil, his father humming low hymns as his mother cooked. It meant home.
Until the night it didn’t.
He was nine when the shouting started.
His mother’s voice—sharp, tired, desperate.
His father’s—low, firm, refusing.
“It’s her last birthday as a child,” his mother cried. “She deserves a party.”
“There’s no money,” his father said. “We will celebrate when things are better.”
That was all.
A birthday.
A refusal.
A moment that should have passed.
But it didn’t.
The pestle was close. Too close. And anger is quicker than thought.
By morning, his father was gone. Not to work. Not to another town.
Gone.
The house filled with police, neighbors, whispers. His mother was taken away in handcuffs, her wrapper slipping, her eyes empty like she had left herself behind in that room.
Damilola never saw her again as his mother. Only as a woman behind bars.
⸻
They went to live with their uncle.
Three boys. One house. Too much silence.
No one talked about that night, but it lived with them anyway—sat at the dining table, slept between them on thin mattresses, followed them to school.
The youngest cried in his sleep.
The middle one flinched at raised voices.
And Damilola learned something early:
Love can turn violent.
Women can destroy.
Home is not safe.
⸻
Years passed.
Their mother was released. She remarried. Started over—as if starting over was allowed.
Damilola watched from a distance. No anger. Just a hollow space where something should have been.
By the time he was grown, he was calm, successful, respectful.
But when women loved him, he pulled away.
When they raised their voices, his chest tightened.
When they said forever, he heard danger.
“How can you be afraid of women?” a girlfriend once asked. “You’re a man.”
He didn’t know how to explain that the first woman he ever loved had broken the world with her hands.
So he left.
Again.
⸻
Some nights, he still hears the sound.
Not loud.
Not violent.
Just the dull echo of a pestle hitting something that cannot be fixed.
And in those moments, Damilola wonders:
If a birthday had been postponed…
If anger had rested…
If silence had been chosen instead…
Would he know how to trust love today?
