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You remember that day vividly well. The knowledge Faith shared , the Doom she proclaimed on your kind. The story Tega shared. The reality of it all had made you fall into despair and let fear in. Fear of that very moment, and not the consequences of what next.
You stare down at her body.
She lies there—still, twisted at a wrong angle, her eyes open wide like she was surprised at the end, with dried tears now salty lines. Blood creeps beneath her head, a slow halo staining the cracked floor tiles of the hostel room. Your breath hitches. The weight of it all—what you've done—settles on your chest like cement.
You don't remember who moved first, only that something snapped. A retreat. A pull. Screaming. Strangling. Rage tangled with fear. Now, silence wraps itself around the room, broken only by the hum of a flickering bulb above.
Beside you, she shivers. Her arms wrap around her bare chest, even though modesty left the room long ago. She's trembling—not from cold, but from truth. Her lips are parted, trying to form words, maybe an apology, maybe a plea. But no sound comes out.
You glance down at yourself—still in your bra and panties. Everything else, flung somewhere across the chaos. The intimacy from earlier now feels alien, criminal. Not just because of the corpse on the floor, but because of who you are. What you are. In a world that says your love is a sin, and your existence a mistake, this moment feels like confirmation.
You want to scream. Or run. Or rewind. But you do none of those things.
You just stare. At her. At the body. At the life you've now shattered in more ways than one.
You watch her move.
Slow. Deliberate. Each step across the room echoes like a gavel in your ears. She doesn't say anything—hasn't since the struggle stopped except when the proclaimed good Samaritan came—but her body speaks. The way her arms wrap around herself, the way her eyes twitch from the body to the desk drawer. You know she's retreating into herself, into instinct, into a tunnel where nothing makes sense but everything must be done.
She opens the drawer.
Your mouth parts to ask what she's doing, but the words get caught in your throat like gravel. You already know. You know the way her fingers pause over the half-opened scissor—the one you two used for the GST internship practical last week.
She picks it up, separates the blades. Her fingers tremble more now, but she's moving like she has a script to follow.
You step back, one foot dragging against the rough edge of the floor tile where it's broken. It scratches your heel. You feel it. That's how real this is.
She's crouched now, over the body. The girl you didn't even know that well. Blessing—one of the quiet ones who always looked like she was listening in on someone else's thoughts. She shouldn't have come. She wasn't supposed to be here. She saw too much.
You shake your head. No. No, she didn't just see too much. She heard it—the way you moaned her name, the way you kissed, desperate and wrong and raw.
Maybe she did not. But she barged in and you could only imagine her saying what people who wouldn't understand like her always say: "Abomination." That word sticks like bile in your gut.
Ella has given up trembling —you see the madness in her eyes— she raises the blade. You rush forward.
"Stop."
Your voice cracks in the dead air like lightning. She freezes. Not all the way. Her hand still twitches with the blade, like a puppet deciding if the strings should be cut. She turns her head toward you, her face a battlefield of panic, grief, and something you've never seen on her before: calculation.
"Wetin you dey try do?," you asked. Just that.
You kneel beside her, ignoring how close your knee comes to the pool of blood. You look at the body again. Her eyes are still open. They always leave the eyes open in real life. No one talks about that in movies—how disrespectful it feels to be watched by the dead.
"You think say na movie be this?" you whisper, mostly to yourself. "This is life."
She hears you. You can tell by the way her hand wavers. Her knuckles are white around the handle. And she chuckles. "No be to talk, bring solution". She said, then her expression changes as a deep frown appears on her face and she continues "E be like you no understand the kind wahala wey I don enter so...". "Na only you?" You stopped her with your question. "I no follow dey this wahala?" You asked. " E be like say you no still understand..." Ella said looking at you deeply. "Na because she I dey gum body with you? I be pastor pikin, if them catch us, my papa ministry fit fall". She finished breathing so heavily.
Something in you breaks, as the voices in your head start asking questions. But you know this isn't the time time to get angry.
"If you like vex, that one no concern me. I know wetin you wan do, but no be movie be this". you say, gently reaching out and touching her wrist. Her skin is ice. You can feel her heartbeat through your fingertips—wild and fast, like a cornered bird.
You remember that film. The one you both watched under a blanket when the power was out, on that cracked tablet screen. In an Hostel. A scene where a girl was carved up into pieces and dumped behind the school incinerator. They were lovers too. Or maybe just friends. You never could tell. The scene made you both laugh nervously, curl tighter against each other. But that was a movie. You never imagined finding both of you in this situation.
This is life.
She keeps looking at you. Really looks at you. There are tears in her eyes now, pooling like they've been waiting hours to fall. But she keeps a straight face, as if promising herself, that she wasn't going to break.
"Na kirikri" she says, and it's not fear in her voice. It's certainty. "If them find out. Na kirikiri straight".The scissor clatters to the floor. You watch Ella slowly shift close to the wall. Her legs close to her chest. Dejected and dying of guilt.
You nod. Because she's right. Where you live, where you grew up, they don't just disapprove. They eradicate. Parents cut you off. Pastors make examples of you. Neighbours whisper loud enough to bury you. And now you have killed also. If this comes out, your lives end long before any court case begins.
But still—
"We can't chop up a body" you say. You stare at the scissor like it's a joke someone forgot to laugh at.
A cheap stainless-steel pair, school-issued, the kind used for craft projects and lab rats, maybe dissecting a toad or a pigeon in your second year. Not this. Not her. A full-grown woman, twenty-one, with ligaments that don't yield, bones that do not bend, and a dignity that no blade this dull should dare disturb.
You pick it up. The handle is still warm. Your fingers find the ridges left by hers, the beautiful girl in the corner—the girl you love. The girl who just suggested you cut a body into pieces and maybe bury the pieces before dawn.
You're a medical student.
You've spent the last three years surrounded by anatomy charts, plastic skeletons, and the soft antiseptic stench of dissecting labs. You know how deep to cut through skin before you reach subcutaneous fat. You know that a human body holds six liters of blood, and that only a fraction of it is on the floor right now. You know the shape of kidneys, the blue of veins when seen from within, and the sickening resistance of fascia when sliced the wrong way.
But all of that was theory. Simulation. Cadavers with tags on their toes and no stories attached. Not this.
This is Blessing.
You know her name. Blessing with the chipped blue nail polish and the sharp voice in hall meetings. She walked in at the wrong moment, said the wrong thing, and then—it blurred. Rage. Fear. The sound of her skull hitting the edge of the bunkframe. Her relentless struggle. Now she's just lying there. Still warm. Still whole.
You crouch beside her.
It's not reverence. It's science.
You look at her neck. If you were going to start anywhere, it'd be there. The sternocleidomastoid—thick, ropey, impossible to miss. Beneath it, the carotid artery, the jugular vein. With enough precision and a scalpel, you could sever both. But a scissor? A school scissor? You'd be sawing, not cutting. There'd be mess. Spatter. Bone fragments.
Your stomach tightens.
You glance at her wrists. The radius and ulna are strong—too strong for scissors. You'd have to disarticulate at the elbow joint. That's easier said than done. You'd need leverage, strength, and the tolerance for snapping tendons with a tool designed to cut paper. You imagine the sound. It wouldn't be a clean snip. It would be a crunching, grinding protest.
You know the human body too well.
The layers of skin first. Epidermis, dermis, hypodermis. Beneath that, muscle groups—deltoids, biceps, triceps—all braided like thick cords, strong and stubborn. You'd have to cut through those before you even reach bone. And even then, the humerus won't go quietly. You'd need a bone saw. You'd need hours. You'd need someone other than you.
You put the scissor down.
You can't help the laugh that escapes your throat, dry and cracked. It's absurd. All of it. That she thought this would work. That you ever imagined for a second that it could. It's like trying to butcher an elephant with a teaspoon.
"you know how many bones dey inside human body?" you murmur, not even sure if you're talking to her or to yourself. "Two hundred and six."
You've studied each one. Named them on charts. Identified them in practicals. And now you imagine breaking each one apart, reducing Joy to fragments and meats piles.
The girl in the corner shifts. Her eyes are wide, her mouth trembling with unsaid apologies. She doesn't understand what she asked of you. She's not like you. She didn't take the Hippocratic Oath. She doesn't dream of surgery rotations. She only wants to survive this night.
You should want that too. But instead, you're thinking of Joy's pelvis. It's the hardest part to destroy. The ilium, the ischium, the pubis—three bones fused into a basin designed to bear life. It would take a hammer, at least. Maybe acid. And the smell. God, the smell. Fat sizzling, hair burning, the coppery reek of blood oxidizing under heat.
You cover your mouth.
You're not nauseous. You're ashamed. Because you're thinking like a doctor. You're thinking like a butcher. You're calculating, clinical, detached. But you're still human. You're not supposed to know what it would take to erase another human being.
You rise to your feet and step away from her.
The room is too quiet. The fan hums in the corner, pushing warm air around a space that now feels small, claustrophobic. The walls are watching you. So is the body.
"Oh God, which kind wahala be this?" you asked, to no one in particular.
Your lover doesn't answer. She's hugging herself again, lips moving silently. A prayer maybe. Or a plea.
You almost wish you were less educated. Less trained. Someone ignorant enough to believe a pair of scissors could make this all disappear. But you know better. You know the arteries will bleed even after death. That muscles fight back. That nerves twitch long after the heart stops.
You walk to the window.
Outside, the hostel compound is dim, shadowed by the high walls meant to keep danger out—but they never keep the real one. The one that lives inside you. Inside her. One well seasoned Inside fear.
You turn back. The scissor lies beside Blessing's hand now, like an offering. Or an insult. That she can't do anything.
You slowly collapse on the floor. Not so far from the body. Tired, scarred...
And you're not a surgeon anymore.
You are not one yet.
And if care isn't taken, you never will be.
You're a killer.
Not by your hand, maybe. But deep down, you know you're an accomplise. Faith would call you some else; was it a principal offender, whatever that was.