Homecoming

Chukwuemeka — Chuck, in Baltimore, where the syllables of his birth name had been sanded down like furniture for an American living room — landed at Murtala Muhammed Airport at six in the morning, when the light was the colour of unrefined palm oil. He had not slept on the flight. He had instead spent eight hours staring at the seat-back screen displaying the plane's progress across the Atlantic, watching the tiny aircraft icon crawl toward a continent he had spent two decades learning to miss from a safe distance.

His brother Obiora was waiting at arrivals with a face that contained multitudes — grief for their father, resentment for Chuck's absence, and beneath both, the stubborn bedrock of fraternal love that no distance or silence could fully erode. They embraced the way Nigerian men do, with backslaps hard enough to dislodge regret. "You look like an oyibo," Obiora said, which was both an insult and an observation, and Chuck laughed because laughing was easier than explaining what twenty years of American winters do to a man's skin and soul.

The drive to Enugu took six hours through a landscape that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Chuck pressed his forehead against the car window and watched Nigeria scroll past — the same red earth, the same impossible green, the same roadside vendors selling plantain chips in recyclednewspaper. But the billboards were new, the petrol stations were new, and the potholes had migrated to different locations, as though the road itself had rearranged its furniture in his absence.