BENEATH THE RED SOIL Episode 1: The Letter That Should Not Exist.
KEHINDE AKPORIEN@akporienkehinde866986
17 days ago
The day Adaeze found the letter, the rain had not yet decided whether to fall.
It hung in the Lagos sky like a threat grey, heavy, waiting. She stood at the window of her late mother's house in Surulere, watching the clouds argue with themselves, a cup of cold tea forgotten in her hand.
She hadn't wanted to come back.
Three years away in Abuja had been enough to make her believe she'd escaped this house and everything it held behind its peeling yellow walls. But death had a way of dragging you back to the places you ran from. Her mother, Chidinma Okafor, had been buried six days ago. And now Adaeze had forty-eight hours to clear the house before the landlord changed his mercy to madness.
She started with the bedroom.
Most of it was ordinary grief folded wrappers that still smelled of her mother's shea butter, a cracked hand mirror, rosary beads coiled on the nightstand like a sleeping thing. Adaeze worked quietly, efficiently, packing and not feeling. That was the trick. Pack. Don't feel. Feel later, in private, where no one could witness the falling apart.
It was inside the false bottom of the wooden jewellery box the one her mother had always told her "held nothing important" that she found it.
An envelope.
Yellowed at the edges. Sealed with red wax pressed into the shape of a scorpion.
Her name was on it.
Adaeze Okafor. Open only when I am gone.
Her hands went still.
The handwriting was her mother's but younger, shakier, like it had been written by a woman carrying something too heavy to name. There was no date. No return address. Just her name and those six words that now sat in her chest like a stone.
She turned the envelope over three times as if it might confess something before she opened it.
Then she broke the seal.
Inside was a single photograph and a folded note.
The photograph first. A man she didn't recognise tall, light-skinned, dressed in the kind of agbada that suggested old money and older secrets. He was standing in front of a building she did recognise: Aso Rock. The photo was dated 1994. The man was smiling the way powerful people smile like they already know how the story ends.
On the back of the photograph, in her mother's handwriting:
"This man killed your father. His name is Senator Emmanuel Dike. He is still alive. So is the truth."
Adaeze sat down on the floor.
She hadn't known her father. Her mother had always said he died before she was born a car accident, nothing more, nothing to ask about. She had accepted it the way children accept painful answers: quietly, and with the private grief of someone mourning a person they never got to meet.
But her father had not died in a car accident.
Her father had been killed.
And the man responsible had been a Senator.
She looked at the note next. It was short. Four lines that would change everything:
"I was afraid my whole life. I should have spoken sooner. The proof is where we buried the red bowl you were four years old, you cried the whole drive. Find it before they find you. I am sorry, my daughter. I love you beyond what words were made for."
Outside, the rain finally made its decision.
It fell hard and fast, the way things in Lagos always did without warning, without apology.
Adaeze sat on the cold floor of her dead mother's bedroom, the photograph of a smiling murderer in her hand, and understood that she had just stepped into something she could not step back out of.
Someone had wanted her mother silent.
Now her mother was dead.
And Adaeze with her journalist's instincts and her stubborn, reckless heart was already thinking about where, exactly, they had buried that red bowl.
If you're ready for EPISODE 2, drop the word NEXT in the comment box. Don't forget to hit love button because it motivate me to do more.
#BeneathTheRedSoil
#NircleStories
#Thriller
#NigerianStories
#poetry
#My2026onnircle
#nircleblogpost
#hellonircle
#neighbour
#poetrychapbook
#nirclepoetrycommunity
#notes
#newsfeeds
#nirclestories
#storyteller
#quoteoftheday
#followme
