When Black Crack

The first time I saw blood on my sister's bedsheet, I thought it was mine. I was eleven, barely grasping what it meant to grow breasts, let alone bleed from between my legs. But when I looked up, Kemi was standing in the corner of the room, face pale and wet, her hands trembling as they clutched the soaked sheet.

"It's not me," I whispered.

She didn't say anything. She just stared at the sheet like it had betrayed her.

I didn't understand it then. But a few weeks later, when Mama dragged her to Iya Bose's chemist and came back shouting words like "belly" and "shame," I began to piece it together.

Kemi was sixteen.

She got pregnant the same week she was supposed to sit for her WAEC.

We lived in the heart of Mushin, where the buildings leaned on each other like tired old men, and the gutters smelled like forgotten dreams. Our one-room apartment, wedged between a mechanic's workshop and a pepper grinder's kiosk, held more secrets than space.

Mama was a hairdresser - the kind that braided for fifteen hours straight, then came home with red eyes and blistered fingers. She never smiled for free. Life had hardened her into a woman whose love was rough but constant. She carried us like a worn wrapper tied around her waist - snug, familiar, and dependable.

Our father had vanished five years before, swallowed by the Lagos hustle. He left for work one morning and never came back. Mama said he had followed another woman to Abuja. I overheard our neighbour, Aunty Yemi, whisper once that he probably died in a motor accident along Ibadan expressway. I preferred that story. Death felt less personal than abandonment.

After the pregnancy came out, the whispers began. On our street, nothing stayed secret for long. The neighbours stared. The boys snickered. Even my classmates at school gave me sideways glances, as if stupidity was something that ran in the blood.

"She open leg anyhow," they would say.

"Na so all of them dey start. This one go follow soon," another would hiss, pointing at me.

But I wasn't like Kemi.

I watched her belly grow like a lie that refused to stay buried. Mama stopped talking to her, except in commands.

"Wash the plates."

"Clean that baby thing you bought."

"Better pray the baby no resemble that useless boy."

She never mentioned the boy's name. But I remembered him. Tall. Dark. Smelled of groundnut oil and mischief. He used to wait for Kemi at the corner of our street, pretending to press his phone. Once, I caught them kissing behind the mosque wall. I never told Mama. I was too young to understand that secrets, like debts, always come back demanding payment.

The night Kemi went into labour, it rained so heavily the roof started to leak in three places. Mama was out braiding in Agege. I was the only one home.

She screamed once, loud enough to wake the dead, then bit down on a pillow to muffle the rest. I held her hand, slippery with sweat and fear, as she groaned and pushed on our old mattress. The candlelight flickered like it too couldn't bear to witness what was happening.

After an hour of pain and panic, the baby slid out like a whispered apology.

It didn't cry.

We stared at the motionless body on the bed, blood pooling around its neck like a collar.

Kemi didn't move. She just kept whispering, "Wake up, wake up, wake up."

I slapped it. Nothing.

I cried. Still nothing.

Then the door burst open.

Mama, soaked to her bones, stood there, her eyes wide and wild. She rushed in, scooped the baby, turned it upside down and slapped its tiny back like she was trying to beat death out of it.

A whimper.

A cough.

Then a scream that ripped through the room like lightning.

The baby was alive.

But something changed in Kemi that night. Her laughter disappeared. Her eyes dimmed. And her body, once filled with teenage hope, became a ghost of itself.

We named the baby Fiyinfoluwa - "give praise to God." But everyone just called her Fifi.

By the time I turned sixteen, Kemi was still stuck in the past, while I had to step forward. Mama got sicker, her coughs turning deeper, wetter. She refused to go to the hospital, claiming, "Na just ordinary catarrh. All these doctors na thief."

So I became the one who ran errands, who cooked, who fetched water from the compound well when the tap stopped running for days. Kemi barely left the house. She only came alive when holding Fifi, singing lullabies I didn't know she remembered.

One day, while sweeping under the bed, I found a crumpled paper - an old WAEC result slip. Kemi had passed.

Maths: B3

English: C4

Biology: B2

I held it like gold.

"Kemi," I whispered, showing her.

She looked at the paper for a long time, then said, "Doesn't matter."

"But it does!"

"She's my school now," she said, looking at Fifi who was playing with a broken spoon.

That night, I stayed awake thinking about escape. Not the kind where you run away and leave everything behind, but the kind where you climb out, one painful inch at a time. I wanted more - not riches, just options. The power to say no. The freedom to breathe.

The next morning, I skipped school and went to the local government office to ask about scholarships. The man at the front desk looked me up and down like I was dirt, then handed me a torn flyer.

"Check that NGO. Maybe dem fit help."

The paper smelled of dust and desperation, but I held it like hope.

That same week, Mama's cough got worse. She started coughing blood.

We rushed her to General Hospital, and after several hours of waiting and prayers, the doctor looked at us and said, "It's tuberculosis. Advanced."

She needed admission, medication, and rest.

We had none of those.

As we stepped out of the hospital that day, Lagos sun blinding and cruel, I knew we were standing on the edge of something. Not quite death. Not quite life. Just that in-between place where hope breaks like cracked glass.

Later that night, as I washed Fifi's feeding bottle in the compound, our neighbour, Mama Chidinma, called me.

"Ehn, I hear say one woman dey look for house girl. She dey pay well. You fit go."

My heart sank.

Was this how it started? One sacrifice at a time?

I looked up at the sky. It was black, cloudless.

But it felt like it could crack at any moment.