By Moses Kay Fembeh
Theme: Love • Betrayal • Ego • Cultural Heritage (Nigeria & Sierra Leone)
Chapter One: The Return
Aisha stepped off the bus in Freetown in late July 2025. The sea breeze that greeted her felt familiar, salty, soft, and ancient, yet it carried the weight of every step she had taken away. In one hand, she held a suitcase; inside it lay the pillow she had slept on every night in Lagos, folded neatly but heavy with half‑spoken dreams.
Her childhood home in Sierra Leone looked smaller than memory made it. The shutters were painted blue, chipped by time and rainy seasons. Market vendors shouted greetings in mixed Krio and Mende; the compound’s wooden doors creaked like old stories. She inhaled it all, bracing herself for what she left behind and what she hoped to become.
She walked through the gate. Her mother barely looked up from the mortar where she pounded cassava. Words didn’t find her then. So Aisha just stood, suitcase in hand, the pillow wrapped in cloth like a secret. At night, she placed that pillow on her mattress of raffia springs and let the moonlight wash over it. On the best nights, she slept, and for the first time in years, she dreamed.
Chapter Two: Lagos Nights
Lagos had long taught her to trade authenticity for expectation. Tunde Okoye, banker, rising star, polished to fit a skyline of glass and ambition, offered her promises tied to suits and boardrooms. Their wedding combined Krio ceremony and Igbo tradition: kola nuts were broken, there was aso‑ebi for both families, and they danced into dawn.
But soon, Aisha’s laughter became scheduled. The luxury apartment near Ikoyi gleamed and echoed with emptiness. Late nights, she’d wake to the hum of air‑conditioning, the faint click of her own thoughts in those high walls.
One evening, she found the note on the bed:
“It’s not me anymore. Don’t call.” T.
She touched the words like a wound. The pillow beside the note was still her pillow, and still his apartment absorbed the silence. She remembered the day he said, “Okoye will open doors. Fembeh holds no weight.” She said nothing then. Now she felt everything.
She packed her suitcase, retrieved her pillow, and boarded a flight back to Freetown. Lagos, behind her, wasn’t just a departure; it was the shedding of an identity she no longer wanted.
Chapter Three: The Pillow’s Memory
Back in Freetown, the pillow found its place beneath her head once more. But its purpose changed. It became a chronicle of nights she questioned who she’d become and a canvas for hope she forgot.
She accepted a position teaching at St. Mary’s Secondary School, her former alma mater. The classroom buzzed with the energy of youth, voices reciting in unison, uniforms crisp in the morning sunlight. Aisha taught English Literature, introducing *Things Fall Apart* to students whose lives mirrored Chinua Achebe’s stories of identity and change.
Each morning, she stood at the blackboard, chalk in hand, and felt the ghosts of her own past lessons. Lagos nights, boardrooms, and broken promises, they all whispered. She wrote, “Education is freedom.” The children echoed.
She tucked the pillow beside her desk. In the breaks, she touched its pillowcase, embroidered with “Aisha O.” beneath the zipper. Not Okoye. Not someone’s wife. Her own name.
When school closed one morning, she brought the pillow to the courtyard and sat under a mango tree. She opened the pillow, removed its stuffing, and let the dried cocoa pods from her village fall gently into her lap.
Her grandmother’s words returned: *“Roots, even broken, can drink when rain comes.”* The pillow soaked them all.
Chapter Four: The Conversation
That evening, she and her mother sat before the cooking fire. The wood crackled. The smoke rose in lazy spirals. Aisha brought the pillow into the kitchen and laid it on the woven mat beside the mortar.
“What is that?” her mother asked, never harsh, always calm.
“A relic,” Aisha said.
“To what?”
“To the nights I didn’t say ‘no.’ The dreams I traded. This pillow knows everything.”
Her mother nodded. She measured palm oil. She stirred cassava-leaf sauce. She spoke softly: “It is yours again. Rewrite the history.”
And so Aisha cut open the pillowcase. She emptied the worn stuffing. She replaced it with dry cocoa husks, fragrant seeds of patience, of slow growth, of future harvest. She sewed the cover closed. *Aisha Fembeh*. Not Okoye’s shadow. Her own light.
Chapter Five: The Reckoning
She returned to Lagos one last time as a guest, not a wife. She held the pillow wrapped under her arm as she walked through the banking hall. She passed Tunde; his suit was still sharp, and his ambition was still bright. He paused mid‑conversation, eyes landing on the pillow.
“You brought that?” he asked, voice low.
“I kept the witness,” she said.
He found no words.
The next day, she left the pillow at a women’s shelter. They opened the parcel. The note inside read:
“May you rest your head knowing someone stood for you.”
She left without a backward glance. The high-rise faded. The skyline shrank. But the pillow stayed behind, absorbing stories of other women’s quiet courage.
Chapter Six: Legacy
Back home, Aisha held her first class after the vacation. She told her students:
“Your silence isn’t weakness. Your choice isn’t regret. It’s your voice.”
The students listened. She brought in the pillow beside her desk. She told them its story.
“Let it remind you,” she said.
When the rains finally came that August in Sierra Leone, they fell heavily, cleansing. The children danced barefoot in newly formed puddles. Aisha watched them beneath the mango tree, chalk in one hand, hope in her heart.
Because in her two nations, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, she wanted more than status.
She wanted dignity. She wanted a name.
And she used a pillow to keep the record.
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