CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Listening Earth
"Ilẹ̀ ń gbọ́ ohun tí a ò sọ."
The earth hears even what is not spoken.
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Before all this, Zainab had a life. Normal, in that quiet, unnoticed kind of way. She had assignments, laundry that never got folded, group chats that stayed on mute. Her Sundays were for hair appointments, Wednesdays for pepper soup with friends. She had dreams, mostly small ones—travel, a scholarship, a job that didn't make her soul ache.
Now?
She couldn't remember the last time she replied a message. Couldn't tell which day it was unless someone mentioned it. Even the calendar on her wall seemed to shift when she wasn't looking. Her friends said she was "ghosting." But how do you explain being haunted by something you can't name?
She was still at home in Iléṣà, but it no longer felt like home. The familiar had become veiled. Everything shimmered with a strange undercurrent, like looking at reality through heat waves. The streets, the walls, the market stalls—everything was listening. That was the only way she could describe it.
On the third morning, she walked to the stream behind her grandmother's compound. She hadn't visited since she was a child, when her grandmother used to warn her never to fetch water alone.
Now she understood why.
The stream wasn't just water. It murmured. Not loudly. But like someone trying not to be overheard. She knelt by it, cupped some of it to her face, and paused. Her reflection blinked a moment after she did.
Her grandmother's journal never left her side now. She carried it tucked beneath her blouse like a second spine. That afternoon, she sat beneath the twisted òpẹ tree at the compound's edge and reread the line:
> "Ayéròyá is not a name. It is a door."
Zainab had begun asking herself questions she could never have imagined a year ago.
What if a name could carry memory? What if the land itself remembered?
She didn't speak much to her mother—there was a quiet tension between them, as though both were holding a truth with shaking hands. But her aunt, Aunt Ronke, noticed.
"You walk like someone whose name is heavy," she said while pounding yam in the backyard.
Zainab almost laughed.
Instead, she asked, "Have you heard of Ajogun?"
Her aunt froze. Not dramatically—but like someone pressing pause on a part of themselves.
"Why are you asking that name?"
"Because it keeps finding me."
Her aunt looked away. "Some things are not taught. They are remembered."
"Then how do I remember?"
Aunt Ronke didn't answer. But she reached out and touched Zainab's chest lightly.
> "Not here," she said. "Here."
Then pointed at Zainab's head. "And here."
That night, Zainab didn't dream. Or maybe the dream was so deep, she couldn't wake from it. She felt the ground beneath her bed breathing. Not literally—but deeply. The earth was aware.
When she walked the next morning, she noticed footprints in the dust that didn't match any shoes in the house. Spirals again. Eyes.
She picked up a stone. One she had passed a hundred times. It hummed in her hand. Not a sound—but a presence.
This wasn't madness. It wasn't metaphor. It was memory clawing its way back to the surface.
Zainab looked to the sky, which felt lower now, as though leaning close to listen.
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If the earth remembers your footsteps, can you truly ever walk away from who you are?