Sola’s Last Rain

The Lagos sky was heavy with clouds, the air thick with the scent of impending rain. Sola tightened her grip on the tattered edges of her faded yellow wrapper as she hurried through the crowded streets of Mushin. The city was alive with its usual chaos—hawkers shouting, buses honking, children darting between legs—but Sola moved like a ghost, unseen, unheard.  

She had once dreamed of more. At sixteen, she had been the brightest in her class, her notebooks filled with sketches of buildings she hoped to design one day. But dreams were a luxury in Lagos, especially for a girl whose parents had died in a danfo accident, leaving her to the mercy of an aunt who saw her as nothing but a burden.  

By eighteen, Sola was working at a buka, serving plates of amala and egusi to men who leered at her with greasy fingers and greedier eyes. At night, she slept on a thin mat in a room she shared with three other girls, their whispers of hope and desperation blending into the hum of the generator outside.  

Then she met Tunde.  

He was a smooth-talker with a gold tooth and promises that glittered just as brightly. "You’re too beautiful for this life," he told her, brushing a calloused thumb over her cheek. "I know people. I can get you a real job."

Sola, desperate for an escape, believed him.  

The job was not in an office, as he had said. It was in a dimly lit club in Ikeja, where men paid to touch, to take, to break. Tunde became her handler, his kindness replaced by cruelty, his gold tooth flashing whenever he reminded her of the debt she owed him.  

For two years, Sola endured. She learned to numb herself with cheap gin, to close her eyes and imagine she was somewhere else—anywhere else. But Lagos had a way of grinding even the strongest souls into dust.  

One evening, as the first drops of rain began to fall, Sola collapsed outside the club, her body wracked with fever. The streets blurred as she stumbled forward, her breath coming in shallow gasps. No one stopped. No one cared.  

She made it as far as the Third Mainland Bridge before her legs gave out. The rain fell harder now, washing away the kohl running down her cheeks. Below her, the dark waters of the lagoon churned, endless and indifferent.  

Sola closed her eyes.  

And for the first time in years, she felt free.  

By morning, the city moved on, as it always did. Another nameless girl lost to its hunger. Another story swallowed by the roar of Lagos.  

And the rain kept falling.  

AROWOLO ADEYEMI OLASUNKANMI