Cursed Daughters

The first time Mo² visited the Kenosi house, Kalu's mother⁹ looked her up and down and told her never to return. The second encounter was worse — an invitation disguised as warmth.

Over milkshake and coffee at an Ikoyi café, Mrs. Kenosi⁹ catalogued Mo's² shortcomings: average grades, no career plans, divorced parents, a family curse, and skin that was — in her assessment — too dark. She presented an alternative: Amara,⁸ the polished daughter of a neighboring family, light-skinned and top of her class.

When Mo² finally met Amara⁸ at a restaurant Kalu⁴ arranged, the girl was small, deferential, and bright-eyed with admiration for him. Mo² drank four mojitos and watched Kalu⁴ drive Amara⁸ home after dropping her off first. The distance between who she was and who the Kenosis wanted was becoming unbridgeable.

Terrified of losing Kalu⁴ to his mother's machinations, Mo² surrendered to the superstition she had always mocked. She visited Mama G¹² — the same spiritual adviser she and Ebun³ had once tried to shake down for a refund — and purchased a powder to dissolve in Kalu's drink and a grimy paper on which to write his name and pin to her menstrual pad.

She slipped the powder into his malt. She wore the pad during her heaviest flow. She hated herself, but generations of Falodun women had lost their men, and she refused to be next.

Then Kalu⁴ knocked her bag to the floor — and there was the fabric, his full name in capitals pinned to it. Trust shattered in a single look. He told her she had gone too low, that perhaps his mother⁹ was right. Weeks later, he ended the relationship. Eight months after that, he married Amara.⁸

No job, no photography, no love — Mo² had stalled completely. Then she bumped into Kalu⁴ at a supermarket, him polished as a magazine cover, her in a faded T-shirt and bandana. He drove her home and placed a Haribo gummy heart in her palm.

Two weeks later he appeared at the Falodun gate, confessing she was not just his ex but the friend he missed most. She let him inside. They barely cleared the hallway before years of longing collapsed into urgency. Ebun³ walked in on the aftermath and coolly informed Mo² that Kalu⁴ had a daughter with Amara.⁸

The affair continued — eleven visits over two months — but guilt was corroding Kalu.⁴ He kept saying they should stop. Mo² kept pulling him back. Then she discovered she was pregnant. So was Amara.⁸ Kalu⁴ offered financial support but not himself.

Kalu's mother⁹ and Amara⁸ arrived at the Falodun house to demand Mo² abort the child. Amara,⁸ one hand resting on her own pregnant belly, promised the baby would never be acknowledged. Ebun³ threw them out. But Ebun³ — secretly pregnant herself and refusing to name her baby's father — had decided to terminate.

She invited Mo² to come with her. At night, they went to an illegal provider and each received pills. Mo² took hers alone in the bathroom. She heard something leave her body and wept until dawn. When she called Kalu,⁴ he said they were finished.

Weeks of near-comatose grief followed — and then Mo² noticed Ebun's³ belly, still growing. Her cousin had never swallowed the pill. The sound that tore from Mo² traveled through every room in the Falodun house. Days later, she walked into the ocean.

Eniiyi's¹ thick hair, left-handedness, and knowing eyes made looking at her feel like time travel. At three, she drew two figures and identified them both as versions of herself. Ebun³ tore the drawing to pieces. At four, the sleepwalking began.

Ebun³ followed her one night through the dark house to the courtyard, where Eniiyi¹ sat on the iroko tree's roots, eyes closed, facing nothing. After Eniiyi¹ nearly drowned at a family pool party, Ebun³ enrolled her in brutal swimming lessons — a hundred and fifty sessions that transformed the child into a formidable swimmer.

At twelve, Ebun³ caught her dancing in Mo's² bedroom wearing Mo's² yellow sundress and beat her until Grandma East⁷ seized her wrist. Eniiyi¹ asked to go to boarding school. Ebun,³ understanding the house was poisoning them both, said yes.

Years later, Eniiyi¹ returned to the Falodun house with a master's in human genetics — a grown woman still wearing her aunt's face. Grandma East,⁷ Ebun's mother Kemi,⁷ was ruby-nailed and wrestling-obsessed as ever. Grandma West⁶ — Mo's mother Bunmi⁶ — had dissolved into dementia, calling Eniiyi¹ by her dead daughter's name.

The ancient dog Sango,¹⁴ impossibly, was still alive. At Elegushi beach with friends, Eniiyi¹ spotted a hand vanishing beneath the waves. She dove in and hauled a half-conscious man to shore. He coughed back to life and opened umber eyes that locked on hers.

His name was Zubby.⁵ Weeks later, he found her at a club and touched her wrist. She gave him her number. At the Falodun gate, meanwhile, a persistent air force pilot named Osagie¹¹ kept appearing with flowers for Ebun.³ Eniiyi¹ gave him her mother's phone numbers.

Their first call lasted two hours. She agreed to teach him to swim, and their lessons became excuses for proximity — his arms beside hers in the water, their first kiss while treading the deep end. He introduced her to comics and anime; she taught him bilateral breathing.

But the dreams of Monife² were worsening. From her aunt's old notebook, Eniiyi¹ read the cursed history of every Falodun woman who loved and lost. From Uncle Tolu,¹⁰ she extracted the truth her family had hidden for twenty-four years: Monife² had not drowned by accident.

She had walked into the sea on purpose. Still, Zubby⁵ made Eniiyi¹ feel like herself — not Mo's² shadow but her own person. He took her to a tattoo parlor: his was Latin script behind his ear; hers, a black kite in mid-flight inked beneath her breast, a mark no ghost could claim.

The Kenosi family home was all marble and massive windows — the same grand house Mo² had visited decades before. Eniiyi¹ entered a cream-and-blush reception room and waited. A handsome older man appeared in the doorway, golden-skinned with amber eyes. He froze.

He whispered her dead aunt's name. Zubby's⁵ father was Kalu Kenosi⁴ — Golden Boy⁴ — the man Monife² had loved and lost. Then Amara⁸ entered. Twenty-five years of buried fury erupted: she called Eniiyi¹ a haunting spirit, accused her of destroying their marriage, and attacked — slapping, scratching, pulling hair — until both men dragged her apart.

Eniiyi¹ touched her cheek and felt blood. She finally understood her mother's panic upon learning Zubby's⁵ name. The curse had looped back. Her love story and Monife's² were threaded through the same family.

Eniiyi¹ shaved her head to shed every trace of Monife,² then dug beneath the iroko tree to bury Zubby's⁵ leather bracelet — a gesture she recognized as exactly the kind of thing Mo² would do. Her trowel struck metal.

Inside a Royal Dansk tin were Mo's² buried love tokens: Golden Boy's⁴ handkerchief, his watch, a Haribo gummy sweet preserved across decades. That night, Grandma West⁶ died in her sleep, still calling for a daughter who would never return.

At the funeral gathering, Osagie¹¹ — the pilot courting Ebun³ — noticed Eniiyi's pale birthmark and recognized it as vitiligo, the same genetic condition mottling his own arms. He confronted Ebun³ behind a closed door. Eniiyi¹ heard him declare what she had waited her whole life to hear: that she was his child.

Kalu⁴ arrived at the Falodun house red-eyed and contrite, prostrating flat on the floor. But it was Tolu¹⁰ who detonated the room. He turned on Ebun:³ she had convinced Mo² to terminate the pregnancy, then kept her own baby.

He turned on Grandma East:⁷ the older women had pushed Mo² toward superstition and juju. Then he confessed his own sin — the day before Mo² walked into the sea, Kalu⁴ had left a voicemail saying he wanted the child, that he was sorry. Tolu¹⁰ had deleted it, certain it would only deepen her pain.

But by then, the baby was already gone. Ebun³ fell to her knees. Grandma East⁷ wept. Eniiyi¹ handed Kalu⁴ the tin of buried tokens and Zubby's⁵ bracelet, asking him to return it to his son. The families' tangled grief had finally been spoken aloud.

Before leaving Lagos, Eniiyi¹ slept with Funsho¹³ — her loyal, pining friend — not from desire but from a need to prove she could choose outside the pattern linking her to Monife.² When she told Zubby,⁵ he punched her bedroom wall and asked why. She said she needed to know her love for him was not a dead woman's puppet show. He left, defeated.

Osagie¹¹ offered his empty London flat and promised to visit — the father she never knew, arriving just as she prepared to go. At the gate, Ebun³ took her hand and said she was sorry, that she hoped this next chapter would be Eniiyi's¹ own. Sango¹⁴ licked her face. She looked back at the Falodun house one last time, the place where every woman she descended from had loved and lost, and walked through the gate.