Shelter Skelter

5

THE SCATTERED CONVERSATIONS in the compound fizzled into silence when Ebo Pinaman opened the gate. The metal creak prefixed the neighbours’ hush. They averted their eyes when he greeted good morning. The sun in the east was a crawling infant, palm-printing the walls of the horizon with orange and pink hues. Ebo’s tongue wagged dry in his buccal darkness. The veins across his temples pulsed taut. From time to time his neighbours had shot caustic remarks at him, but he was already used to the whispers of “one-hand man” and “man-woman” before he travelled to Kaduna for his shoe-making business. For the casual jeers, he had managed to maintain a sense of civility with everyone. But today was different. Most of his neighbours usually returned his greetings with reluctant responses and contrived smiles, and until today, they didn’t end their banter in dashes when he walked in. 

Adesola’s presence on his balcony worsened the clamour in his head. The knots in his abdomen tightened. She clicked her tongue and spat over the railings when she saw him. Ebo registered her shudder as she straightened up and ignored his greeting. He turned the key with his trembling left hand. 

“I came here last night to search for you,” she said finally. She’d followed him inside. The words came out of her mouth frosty, like air from an ajar refrigerator. 

“Yes, I spent the night at a friend’s place,” Ebo said with contrived flippancy as he walked to the table and turned the radio’s knob. 

“A friend’s?” 

The judgment in her voice could crush bones. Ebo flinched like a chastised child in front of his chagrined mother. 

Then the radio static gave way to a strong Hausa accent. Amid his consuming panic, news about the complications surrounding the Miss World Pageant scheduled to hold in Abuja faded into the background. Adesola remained standing, her posture starch-stiff with the air of someone who bore bad news. 

“I—,” Adesola started. She stopped and Ebo’s eyes followed her gaze to the walls where some of their pictures hung. In one, they were atop the Zuma Rock, swathed in glee as their heads touched while they punched the air. The outing was just before the Sharia riots of 2000. Adesola’s unravelling would begin after, followed by the consequent disintegration of their bond. 

The fragments fell and shattered on the floor between them with her next words:

“My husband and I want you to leave this house.”

The ground beneath Ebo Pinaman contorted into a warping expanse. His legs wobbled. The stump on his right arm itched as though ants were crawling all over it. 

“What happ—I haven’t done anything,” he protested. 

“You’ve been a bad influence on the children here,” Adesola said, scratching about the tribal marks on one side of her face. “They copy the way you walk during their games. And the neighbours see the men you sneak out at dawn.”

The unease that had been swelling in Ebo’s chest exploded. 

“Des, please. Do you want me to be paying rent now? I know things are hard now. We fit talk nau. Anything, I go pay.” Ebo walked towards her and she inched away from him, towards the door. The man scratched his head and words formed behind his quivering lips. 

“The shoemaking business is better now,” he started, switching to Twi. “We have known each other for many years now. You told me not to mention rent when I insisted on paying, Akua Des!”

“This is not rent matter, Ebo. I kept trying to convince you to stop this life when you started it. Come back to the church, you said no. Stop sleeping with men, mhmm-mhmm. My husband wants you to leave. By the end of tomorrow, your shadow should not be seen in my compound.” She clapped her hands to end her statement. 

“Ehn-ehn, your husband?” Ebo snarled. “That stupid pastor that you married months ago, abi? Are you not the landlady? Now he is telling you what to do. After everything we’ve been through all these years?”

Adesola sighed. Her tone in Yoruba now was more pacifying. 

“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but the parents in this compound are worried, Ebo.”

“I didn’t treat you this way when I was in the church!” Ebo screamed. “All those women you were with before you decided to start this Christian nonsense with Kofi, did I ever treat you badly for it? Leave today? Where will I even go?”

“Those men you do your things with should have a place for you.” She snickered and snapped her fingers. “We called you Apostle for years. A respected man of God. Now, see: an apostate.”

Ebo’s throat tightened. The air in the room had grown colder, and the hairs on his leg shot up like quills. 

“An apostate? Is that what he calls me?” Ebo’s feet burned from betrayal and pushed him forward, past the door and up the stairs, heading for the Landlady’s quarters. He cursed, spittle flying out of his mouth as he charged upwards, his calves tensing and relaxing like drawn bows. Adesola ran behind him, and the neighbours sitting outside rose in the wake of the chaos. Ebo barged in to see Pastor Kofi Amoako hunched over a Bible commentary. Beside multiple versions of Bibles lay a magazine with Agbani Darego’s face splashed resplendent on the cover, celebrating her Miss World win. A bottle of Mirinda crouched at one of the table’s legs like a sleepy cat, and it shook slightly when Ebo’s leg hit the wooden fixture. 

“So you’re the one calling me an apostate, ehn? When did you come that you want me to leave?” Ebo barked at the bespectacled pastor. The man brought down his glasses with a dismissive chuckle. Adesola joined him when he rose. On the wall behind them were pictures of their recent wedding; in one of them her Nigerian father and Ghanaian mother flank her with bright smiles. 

“You turned away from the church and have refused to return. This is the will of the Lord. We can’t have your corrupting presence here.”

“Please—” Ebo offered, half-raising his hand in deference. He momentarily got distracted by the clamour unfolding on the TV. The three of them watched as the newscaster gave updates of the altercations erupting from the outrage that a recent column in the ThisDay newspaper on the Miss World uproar had caused. Adesola gasped at the footage of the paper’s office in Kaduna going up in flames as groups of men chanted angrily. 

“That woman who wrote that yeye thing in the newspaper will cause us Christians a lot of wahala o,” Kofi said, folding his hands. “You know how these Muslims are, and still you insulted their Muhammad. Now, see.”

Ebo watched as the groups gathered copies of ThisDay newspaper from other offices and set them on fire. Terror throbbed in the conspicuous veins of his neck. 

“Desola, Pastor…you know the riot will not end with the newspaper. Remember how we almost died two years ago,” he said, succumbing to the desperation flaring in his mind. Adesola shuddered and her husband put an arm around her. Ebo sank to his knees and tried to hold their legs. 

“Where will I go in this Kabala West? We are Ghanaians. You know how it is living in a stranger’s land. Please, for the sake of our friendship, Desola…”

Adesola’s eyes moistened at the spectacle of indignity that Ebo had descended to. She turned and whipped out of the room. 

A bitter chuckle escaped Ebo’s mouth as he rose. 

“You know she doesn’t—can’t—love you, abi?”

“The Lord saved her from her carnal desires. He can do the same for you,” Kofi intoned.

Ebo hissed and barged out, slamming the door behind him. 

---

4

A COUNTDOWN STARTED in Ebo’s mind as he roamed the streets of Sabon Gari, asking if anyone had available space to rent. Sabon Gari’s population consisted mainly of immigrants like him and people from the south, many of whom were Christians aware of his deconversion. Many shook their heads with wary faces, eyes fixed on his amputated hand. They did not have space for him.

In one shop, Ebo watched the timer go off on a clock face: his paranoia mirrored on a TV screen. The ticking of his wristwatch bit at his eardrums. The sun, despite its descent westward, scorched with seething spite. And Ebo knew the nights in November were worse, with their merciless cold that rattled bones. Adesola had told him not to return unless it was to move his belongings. 

The man’s feet trudged ahead to Agya Yaw’s electronics store beside First ECWA Church.

“Eii Apostle, I miss when you used to come here to preach. Always coming here to try and win my soul for your Jesus,” the older man at the store said with a chuckle, following a few pleasantries in Twi. 

Ebo cleared his throat. “I don’t go to church anymore.”

Agya Yaw withdrew the toothpick between his lips and sucked his teeth, his arched eyebrow asking Ebo to elaborate.

Ebo shrugged and stomped his foot on a crawling ant, smearing the squish on the shop’s dusty planks. The wind flapped a newspaper on a nearby stool into a flutter of papery wings, a chick’s futile attempt to flee a preying hawk. On the front page were headlines about the boycott of the Miss World pageant in Abuja and the debacle about Amina Lawal’s stoning. 

“I’ve been chased from my former place because of that. I need a place to rent, Agya Yaw,” Ebo said after the brief silence. 

“Adesola kicked you out?” Agya Yaw’s hands hit his grey afro that sat like a basket on his head and for a split second, Ebo yearned for the ghost of his right hand. 

“The same woman that you’ve helped so much in this Kaduna. So she is a Christian now and has forced you out?” Agya Yaw meandered into a diatribe against Adesola and ignored Ebo’s follow-up question about places that he could rent. 

“Once she finds a place where she is liked, she wants to do everything to prove she is one of them. You, a Ghanaian who grew up with an Asante mother, you call yourself Adesola and speak like a Nigerian so that they think you are one of them. Her father abandoned her until she made money as an adult, yet she claims to be alata ni. I always knew she was the kind of person you couldn’t trust.”

Ebo heaved and supported his chin with his hand. 

“I just want to find a place to rest my head. I have been walking all day.”

Agya Yaw sighed.

“I would have given you our visitor’s room to squat for the meantime but my wife’s sister is around,” the man said, avoiding Ebo’s eyes. 

Ebo nodded quickly. Even before he lost his hand in an accident that claimed twenty lives on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway ten years ago, he had always known that there were spaces he was excluded from because of his mannerisms and affectations. Every morning he stood before a mirror, trying to arrange his body into a more masculine disposition, but femininity seeped out of every limb and word. He had made his peace with the snide remarks and casual cruelties. Adesola’s warmth had cushioned these caustic jolts until her damascene conversion triggered a polar reversal in their friendship. Now, he scurried at the mercy of strangers in a foreign land.

As he walked away from the store, his heart ached for home, for the maternal hug of Ghana.

---

3

EBO’S LAST STOP was an option he hadn’t wanted to consider. However, the sun had weakened into a bloodied eye sinking into the horizon. The edges of the western clouds burnt orange like the stubs of cigarettes, and the sky was an ashtray that greyed into foreboding darkness. Ebo’s left hand hovered in the air before knocking. He heard footsteps now. The key turned, and the door squeaked open. A man’s face peeked out, quizzical. 

“Abu, what are you doing here?” The man asked in Hausa.

Ebo sighed. Danladi’s insistence on mispronouncing his name had always irked him, but he couldn’t complain now. 

“I need your help, Danladi.”

Danladi opened the door with a faintly sardonic smirk that made Ebo shiver as he walked in. 

“What has this apostle come to do in my Sodom and Gomorrah?” Danladi asked with a porcelain cheer. 

“I’m sorry for what I did…” Ebo started in Hausa, shifting his weight between feet as he stood beside a brown sofa. Danladi flicked his hand dismissively as though to say the past didn’t need to be addressed, but Ebo saw the wounded look in his eyes. The host pointed to the sofa, urging him to sit. 

“I need a place to stay. I want to rent one of your flats,” Ebo intoned as he sank into the cushions.

Silence followed. Ebo watched as Danladi gauged the desperation hiding behind the measured tone of his request. 

“Ah-ah, none of them are available, Abu.”

“Please, Danladi,” Ebo begged, trying to calm his shaky breaths. 

“What did you expect to happen when you told your church people that I made advances on you, and then you, Desola, and the rest walked around calling me a pervert?”

Ebo’s eyes dropped to the marbled floor glinting in the ambient lights of Danladi’s living room. 

“I was a different person then.”

Danladi chuckled and, standing, he began to narrate how the outing had upended his life. All the respect people had for him dried up like wells in the harmattan season. 

“The only reason they didn’t burn me was because of my money. I had to move to Sabon Gari because of what you did, Abu.”

“I’m not even Christian anymore, Dan,” Ebo said, rushing to his knees. 

“Danladi,” he corrected with a stern tone. 

“Yes,” Ebo swallowed and smiled like a child eager to please. “Danladi.”

Danladi walked across the room and towered over Ebo who could see the rest of the room through the legs before him. 

“My boys tell me that you’ve been sleeping with many men here. Some come all the way from Katsina, Jos, Minna, and Sokoto. No wonder Adesola had enough of your prostitution.”

Danladi cupped Ebo’s jaws and raised his head upwards to meet his glare. Ebo began to whimper. 

“I’m so tired, Danladi. Please. I just need a place to sleep tonight.”

The elevated Danladi adjusted his shorts, and Ebo’s eyes dropped to the imprint of his erect penis. He flinched and tried to look away, but Danladi kept his head close, firmly, with his right hand. His left hand rubbed Ebo’s wet lips. 

“Please, Danladi.” Ebo’s sobs were punctuated with coughs. 

“Have you seen the news, Abu? There are riots starting like little fires all over Kaduna. And it is very, very cold outside. Do you want shelter or not?”

---

2

DANLADI INSISTED ON sharing his king-size bed with Ebo. 

“I want you to be comfortable,” he said, wiping milky splotches off Ebo’s chin. He licked his fingers and winked. Ebo steeled himself for what was to come next, but surprise pried his lips open when Danladi flopped down on the bed and started snoring seconds later. He settled beside his unlikely benefactor and willed himself to sleep. 

A crueller shock awaited him at dawn when he felt something tearing through him. His eyes darted open, his mind suddenly conscious. Danladi thrust into him, and just before Ebo could will himself to fight him off, the man collapsed with ejaculatory grunts. A faecal smell clung to Ebo’s nostrils and he pulled himself up to the bathroom to clean his body. 

When he returned to the room, Danladi had chosen a jalabiya for him to wear. At breakfast, Ebo broached the topic of rent again. 

“I just want one of the flats in Sabon Gari. I can pay rent immediately. Double, even.”

“You could live here with me. No rent, not even one kobo.”

“I want my place. That’s what I came here for.”

Ebo watched as Danladi squinted, the muscles of his face twitching as he sharpened his next words to hurt. 

“You moan like a woman. Explains why you walk that way.” Danladi’s guffaw echoed in Ebo’s ears. 

“Have I not been humiliated enough?” Ebo barked at him, his body shaking like a tree branch in a storm. 

Danladi raised his hands in surrender. 

“Fine, pay the rent or whatever. I will take you to one of the flats close by,” he said and chuckled. 

After Ebo had inspected the flat beside Betty Queen International School and paid his part payment to Danladi, he walked up to Adesola’s residence in the latter hours of the morning to gather his belongings. Kofi was waiting in a chair in front of Ebo’s door with a radio perched on his shoulder. Adesola descended the stairs and joined her husband with folded arms. The old tenant dangled his new keys before their lips parted. 

“A truck will come for my things soon. Today is the last day you’ll see me here,” Ebo said, his eyes lingering on Adesola before he walked into his old apartment. He closed the door and sank to the floor. He remained in the fetal position for minutes, wanting to feel pain, rage, or fear. Only a crushing loneliness settled over his chest. He was a tiny pebble falling down the abyss. He had lived in this flat for years, labouring towards his dream to become an ultra-successful cordwainer, and now the sudden uprooting had left him a fallen tree, rotting. 

He was still packing his things into bags and boxes when he heard a scream. His chest tightened. 

His Cameroonian neighbour shouted that something was getting closer. Ebo heard the ticks of the clock above him in his veins and in his ears taut with panic. He heard more shrieks and a rushing sound—like rain, like static, or the blaring noise of an expired countdown. The cacophony was as the fluttering of a thousand birds fleeing a bare tree at the sound of a gunshot, their bodies no longer masquerading as leaves on the stark branches. He knew that noise, recalled it from two years ago with Adesola, the two of them barely surviving the clash.

---

1

EBO RUSHED OUTSIDE to see his neighbours darting around the compound. A pregnant woman was explaining to her frightened kids that they couldn’t hide inside else the attackers would burn down the house. Adesola and Kofi jumped into their jeep and sped out of the compound. Ebo ran back to lock his door and then sprinted into the street. Chaos greeted his eyes, and the flames that licked up buildings danced liquid on his eyeballs. 

He had barely paid attention to the growing conflict because of the urgency of his situation, but now everything else contracted beneath the thick smoke pirouetting in the sky above him. The world had a way of shrinking personal strife to make space for large-scale conflicts and blood-curdling headlines. What was his homelessness worth as news value to readers obsessed with the spectacle of tragedy? As he watched the rush of Muslim marauders attacking his neighbours a few metres away, he knew that this, rather, was worthy of a newspaper’s front page. 

Cries of Jesus!, Allahu Akbar and No Tazarene whistled past his ears as he and others ran down the street. Stray dogs barked and fled the pandemonium. The smell of burning flesh pulled at the hair in his nostrils. Glass shattered in a nearby house. Some Igbo neighbours were throwing bottles into fire to repel the attackers. Shards flew like bullets. A machete cracked into a skull three houses away. Crashes, gunshots, and blasts assailed his ears. His heartbeat roared louder than the explosions of families trapped in vehicles.

He ran into a barricade of burning tyres. Some men brandishing clubs and machetes surrounded him, their charcoal-painted faces unrecognisable. Vehicles had been stopped on the road; machetes and axes swung in the air, butchering the ambushed passengers.

“What is your name?” One of them asked, observing the jalabiya Ebo wore. 

“Abu!” he responded quickly. “Abubakar.” He rambled in Hausa that it was unfair that the world wanted to desecrate the holy land with the beauty pageant, and that the infidels thought they could just get away with defiling the sacred name of Muhammad. The boys and men exclaimed and nodded. They gave him an axe warmed by the furious sun. His lips quivered as he watched the men in the throes of slaughter. He tried to hide the tremble in his gait. 

Up ahead, a wine Pathfinder Jeep stopped behind the last car in the queue. His hand tightened around the axe as he saw Adesola’s face register that they had driven into a trap. He started walking towards them and considered his options. Leave them to be killed or kill them to secure his cover. The thoughts came with the whispery allure of revenge. His lips snaked into a smile, pulled into a pucker, then pressed into a line when he remembered the saltiness of Danladi’s semen. 

His conflicted mind settled on a decision when he saw his old friend’s eyes bulge with terror. It had returned, that fear that had coated her black during the riots of 2000, and triggered her conversion after Kofi saved them from getting murdered. 

“Come down quickly if you want to live,” he snarled in Twi. They alighted and nodded as Ebo told them in short snatches of breath to follow his lead once he began running. He charged ahead with his brandished machete, cutting through one of the fanatics ahead of him as he made for a pathway behind Agya Yaw’s electronics store. The percussion of his heartbeat thrummed in his ears when he saw a few of the attackers chasing them. Adesola and Kofi raced right behind him, knowing that to stop was to die. Ebo was no stranger to races; he had run his whole life from bullies who heckled him for his effeminacy. 

He only stopped when he stumbled over a body in a yard. The grey halo was unmistakable despite the battered face. Metres away were the mangled corpses of Agya Yaw’s family. Ebo bent over, trying to catch his breath. He could no longer hear or see the men; they had given up the race to focus on the slaughter that the ambushed vehicles promised. 

Adesola screeched when she identified the faces of the corpses. She wobbled towards Ebo and tried to hold him. He recoiled.

“I’m so sorry, Ebo. Please. Thank you. Nyame nyhira wo, Ebo,” she offered with her hands clasped in propitiation. Kofi lingered behind her and avoided the old tenant’s eyes. 

Ebo watched her for a while in silence and shook his head afterwards. 

“Jesus forgives. Who am I not to?” The sarcasm seared like the scorching midday sun. Ebo told them they weren’t safe yet and started walking. He led them as they soft-shoed to Danladi’s compound. This part of the neighbourhood sat sullen with dead bodies littered all over the street. The chaos had started here and ridden southwards, where it now raged with relentless hooves of violence.

Ebo swallowed and knocked at Danladi’s door. The man peeped through the keyhole. The key turned twice. 

“We have nowhere else to go,” Ebo said in English and switched to Hausa: “I’ll do anything.”

Adesola knelt and held the man’s feet. “We are sorry for what happened the last time.”

Danladi’s lips slithered into a smile that made his eyes twinkle. 

“Allah forgives,” he said, holding the door open.

---

Rigwell Addison Asiedu is a Ghanaian writer and editor whose fiction and poetry have been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2025), Afritondo Short Story Prize (2025), and African Writers Awards (2022). A 2019 Dei Awuku Writer’s Contest winner, his work has appeared in Lolwe, Isele Magazine, African Writer Magazine, Kalahari Review, Akowdee Magazine, Ta Adesa, Ubwali Literary Magazine, The Muse Journal, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the 2024 CANEX Book Factory Creative Writing Workshop, he serves as managing editor of Ojuju Magazine, fiction & nonfiction curator for Nenta Literary Journal, and prose reader at Akpata Magazine.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.