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The Wooden Shack | Fiction by Ndakotsu Abubakar

The Wooden Shack | Fiction by Ndakotsu Abubakar

The Wooden Shack

You have heard Kurugi say countless times that true love does not exist in a brothel; the love in a brothel is usually deceptive. The first time she said it, you felt a lump in your heart while you sat before her on a stool in a short line with the other prostitutes.

By Ndakotsu Abubakar

You will die. No one will bury you. No one will mourn you. No one will care when your body begins to moult and when sores begin to protrude. No one will wrap a piece of white cloth on you, nor will anyone carry you to the mazugata to bury you when you finally pass away. This is where you will die and rot and stink, and meld with the earth.

Yes, even this rectangular shack of wood and zinc, where you now lie paralysed, is disgusting. Who, apart from your kind, would spend a single night in this filthy enclosure with its floor smeared in grease?

You have been living in this shack for three years now, under the command of Kurugi, your landlady. She picked you up from an abandoned truck three years ago where you were dwelling among overgrown grasses.

She brought you into this shack as a commoner, a new being — as a lady that could not stoke sedition or any form of disrespect against her. 

She did not waste time to tell you then that you were no longer a free lady but a prostitute. Your identity was stripped away, replaced with that of the accursed, the homeless, and the disgraced. Because, is it not a disgrace to be a prostitute?

The men in this community where this shack stands are savages. Their sexual urges are insatiable. They always visit this shack every night, filled with sweat, panting, and trudging into the apartments, to pin you and the other prostitutes down upon the mattresses so that they can sleep with you.

They are ferocious, always hurling insults at your sordid trade before they leave. Each time they visit, they scavenge your bodies as though they own them.

Among these swarthy-faced men, Sanusi stood out. Though he spewed the filthiest words at the other prostitutes, he always held his tongue when it came to you. He reserved his pleasurable moments for the evenings, ensuring they were exclusively spent with you.

When you first gained knowledge of this, you complained about how stupid the set-up was. But Kurugi had lambasted you for your naiveté and was confident when she told you to sell yourself to Sanusi.    

Sanusi began spending his evenings with you at the brothel. He was a dark, flat-faced man, tall and lean, with a light gait, as if he were treading on beds of thorns. His voice was deep and resonant, booming through the partitioned shack whenever he spoke aloud to you, much to the envy of your fellow prostitutes.

You finally gave in to him many days into his visits because he was always there for you. He was the only one who presented you with a gold-coloured wristwatch during your birthday celebration last year. Apart from the fact that the gift rounded you off as the most exquisite in the shack, it gave you confidence that you would always win over the green-eyed prostitutes, especially Caroline, who once spitefully told you that you would die under the smelly weight of Sanusi one evening.

Sanusi did not care about what the other men did to your body. He did not care about how Gorozo–one of the prominent customers of the shack–had walked slowly into one of the sections of the old shack one day, looked around himself, and pulled himself towards you, his breath filled with the smell of alcohol. 

That day, Gorozo pounded you on the flat mattress and left your genital area in pain to the extent that Sanusi felt the wounds on your vagina when he finally came over for his round. Sanusi did not care to know whether you were a prostitute; he promised to marry you and take you away from the shack.

You have heard Kurugi say countless times that true love does not exist in a brothel; the love in a brothel is usually deceptive. The first time she said it, you felt a lump in your heart while you sat before her on a stool in a short line with the other prostitutes. And then that day, while you walked out of her chamber and into your apartment, you assured yourself again and again that Sanusi’s love was genuine and not deceptive. 

You had believed that Sanusi would take you out of this wooden shack— out of this apartment that is clogged with pest-infested mattresses and an assortment of luggage scattered across the floor. He would take you out of this smelly place. He would take you out of this field of smelly alcohol and drugs, out of the laughing voices of the drunkards, out of this hole that is a brothel.

You were so confident in his love the day he let you put your head on his bare chest in the darkness. You cried that night as you thought about your parents. You told him how your parents died in an accident on their way to your hometown. And how, after their death, you found yourself lodging inside the remains of a Bedford Truck, tucked away in the thicket of grasses, begging for food.

The news of Sanusi being afflicted with AIDS spread through the brothel one evening. That day, the sun was slowly retreating, its rays refracting through the expansive compound and into the shack. Sun-beaten nylons and clusters of broken ceramic crockery scattered throughout the shack absorbed the sunlight and cast distant, flickering lights.

The inside of the brothel was calm that day save for Esther’s droning radio that was blaring in local music. And that was when Caroline, your ever-tempting rival, leapt in and announced that she eavesdropped on Kurugi’s conversation on the phone with one of her customers. Caroline said she heard them talking about Sanusi’s death.

She heard that Sanusi had died from AIDS.

Hearing those words, you sat up on the mattress you were lying on. Your ears twitched, and waves of spasm rippled through your body.

“I could sense that from his late behaviour”, Caroline continued to say as she walked towards the end of the apartment where a handful of prostitutes assembled to hear the news better. 

You knew already that their tirades would set off from there.

You remained unmoving as they talked. You listened as they conversed in turns, their forms bluish under the pale glow of the late evening:

“To be a prostitute is a curse”. 

“At least, I am doing this to earn a living”.

“It is all the same”.

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“Contraceptive is there for us, we use it, but it is not the solution to our hazard”.

You heard someone quip that raw sex mesmerised the body.

“Maybe that is why our Madam over there should have possibly contracted the infection”. That was Caroline’s voice.

“Sure now”.

You sat up properly, resisting to fight back the insults. You knew Caroline was referring to you.

Their voices continued to ring, amplified than before:

“Thank God that goat has not laid on me”.

“Me too, o”.

 “And me”.

There was a dry clapping sound and when you stared at them, you saw their dark forms swivelling and spinning in blades of shadows upon the walls. That was when the pressure of their insults exerted its full force on you, pushing you back to the mattress, where you sank to cry.

You are lying on wood splinters now, your body clasping to the flat mattress on top of it. The air is stale and polluted with the smell of alcohol. The men outside the shed are talking on top of their voices. There are sounds of ticking feet. Outside, the world moves on: the sound of machines hums, and a low voice cuts through the air, forming an incomprehensible sentence.

But this is where you will remain clasped to, eaten to bones. This is not a curse. This is your reality.

Ndakotsu Abubakar is an 18-year-old Nigerian writer. He was shortlisted for the Sandra Whiteley Prize, 2021 and the Nigeria Prize for Teen Authors, 2022. He was longlisted for the African Writers Awards 2022 and 2023 and the DKA annual Short Story Prize, 2024. His short fiction, The Heart of the Earth, was an honourable mention for the 2023 My Rainbow Books Annual National Writing Competition and was published in the My Rainbow Books For Children, Vol. 8. Connect with him on Facebook.

Cover photo credit: Feyza Nur Khassanov

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