First-person — August Taye
Rain makes the city forgiving. It dims the sharp edges: streetlights blur into strokes of orange, puddles become mirrors that tell small lies about who we are. I liked to believe rain made mistakes feel smaller. Under the glass of the bus shelter, with my legs crossed like a man pretending he had time, Abigael was doing anything but pretending.
"You should've seen him," she said, as if the story were still happening in the space between her words. "He actually tried to pay with a banana. I'm not joking."
"I refuse to believe a proper market accepts bananas for tuition," I said, because it was my duty to be the reasonable actor in our pair. She scoffed and jabbed my shoulder with one neat finger.
"You weren't there. You missed the drama. More importantly, loser buys fried plantain tonight." Her smile came like bright paint—warm, impossible to ignore. Abigael didn't just tell jokes; she lived in them. That's the kind of person she was: a small sun in a city that liked its lights dim.
My phone buzzed against my leg. I glanced—my supervisor's name, a terse message I'd read this morning and tried to turn into background static. Work had been a bad afternoon; a misfiled report, a client complaint that ate two hours and left me apologizing until my voice scraped. The message had been clinical: We'll have to let you go. I'd told myself it was temporary. Pretending is cheap and everyone knows how to do it.
"You okay?" Abigael asked. She always knew. She had that look that made you feel seen and slightly ridiculous at the same time.
"Fine," I lied. Mama Efua's cough was the first thing that rose to my lips—the old neighbor who raised me, who stitched up my school shirts, who scolded me about manners as if tomorrow depended on them. Her house smelled of sweet tea and soap, and she had the kind of hands that could make small miracles out of torn fabric. My mother was somewhere else—an IV and a hospital bed and a silent clock that I visited once a week. That was the quiet math of my life: rent + meds + a future I was supposed to build.
"So when you're rich, don't forget your friends," she prompted. "You call me before you buy the island, yeah?"
"Which island? The one with mosquitoes or the one with no mosquitoes?" I asked. She laughed and I wanted, stupidly, to keep her laughing forever.
She stood. "I've got to run. Internship interview in thirty minutes. Don't let Kojo make you study alone tonight. Also: plantain."
She looped her arm through mine and squeezed, then was gone—her braid bobbing like a promise. I watched her walk away, and the confession knotted on my tongue like something heated and ready. Tell her, a small, urgent voice said. Tell her now. But the city pulsed around me—horns, a motorbike swish, a vendor calling out the day's bread—and the moment folded like paper.
I went through my pocket for the phone again. There it was: an email preview that I had flicked away at dawn when five bills were all that fit in my head. Estate Notice – Attorney L. Kossi (South Africa) – URGENT: T. August Taye it read, or something like that. I'd thought it was spam. In our world, the mailbox is full of promises that are never meant to be kept.
I should have opened it. Of course I should. But I'd learned that mornings demand too much courage. I slid the phone back and watched the city breathe. A small taxi splashed past and the spray painted the shelter in staccato diamonds. A woman in a bright headwrap hurried by with groceries; a boy ran after a bus with a notebook clutched to his chest. Ordinary moved in a rhythm that made my problems look like a song I could hum and forget.
I got to my feet because home was a place waiting with unpaid tabs and Mama Efua's kettle. Crossing the road, my mind was a ledger—lists that gathered like dust. I wasn't paying attention; I was thinking. The world narrowed to a sound, a horn, an angle of light that found the wet blacktop. Then, as if someone put a palm gently to my ear, something warm and clear spoke without voice.
I have not left you.
It was not a thought that fit the day. It did not belong to me, and yet it settled in the hollows like the right spoon in the right cup. For a second I felt carried the way a child is carried on a night too dark to walk alone. There was no thunder or choir, just the hush of certainty.
A taxi's headlights washed the curb. Someone shouted. The world contracted to a point of white and sound and then—
Blackness took me whole.
---
I woke in a hospital a blur later. Lights that smelled like disinfectant. A man with tired eyes and a name badge said my name. Mama Efua's small face was the first thing I fixed on—her mouth twisting into relief so big I thought she might cry—then Abigael's hand wrapped around mine as if it could stitch me back whole. She smelled of rain and sugar and improbable optimism.
"August." She squeezed. "You gave us a scare."
"I… didn't mean to," I managed. My head was a fog of pain and static. Memories flashed—an impossible shimmer of stars, a name that tasted like iron, my hands knowing a motion I didn't remember learning. For a moment I saw a place that was not Lomé: towers, machines, a sea of light that felt older than prayer. I blinked and the vision was a shuttered window.
Maître Kossi arrived with that kind of professional gravity lawyers admire. He adjusted his papers and sat like someone who always expected a fight. "We found something in the estate of your uncle," he said softly. "A trust. South Africa, yes. I'm here to help."
"Uncle?" Mama Efua asked.
"My uncle… I never met him." The sentence came out thin. The fog in my head thrummed with a memory-fracture: an old phrase in a language I didn't know, the idea of stewardship, a name that meant command.
Later—much later, Kossi would explain the basics: an old man in South Africa who'd amassed wealth in ways August barely understood; a revelation to that man that his distant nephew in Lomé had been chosen for something greater; a clause in a will that admitted August as heir. The details were legal and slow—power of attorney forms, preliminary trust documents, a lawyer's careful language. Right then the important thing was simpler and meaner: bills had been paid, and someone had watched me hit the floor and still chosen to take care of me.
Abigael refused to leave my bed for a long time. She told me about the interview she had missed—how the panel had been polite and how she'd answered every question like a champion—and then she told me about the way the rain had made the city smell that morning like it could start again. She braided a small piece of my hair with hers while she joked, and my chest did that small, traitorous thing again.
When the nurse set a tray of tea on the table, I felt something shift. The whisper—no, the promise—came back, small and patient. I did not understand what it meant. I only knew it had the shape of a question I would come to answer: who was I, and what was I supposed to do with the life that had just been given me?
Outside, a camera flash bobbed beyond the curtains for a second—a journalist, probably, following some small city story. For now the world around the bed was small: a neighbor who nagged like a king, a best friend who guarded my sleep like a sentry, a lawyer who carried a stack of papers with patience. Later would be South Africa; later would be the questions and the lights and the men in suits with smiles that were too smooth.
For the moment there was tea, rain, and Abigael's laugh. And the feeling that a presence—quiet, luminous, impossible to describe—had put its hand on the back of my neck and said, again, I have not left you.
I let the words sit there. They tasted like a promise, like a chore I had not yet learned how to perform.