Read Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction for Free Online Page A

been designed to be a mall. It was my favorite of all the markets, because of this interior coolness. The only movement here is from the stream of customers, and the slow surveillance of the standing fans. The concrete underfoot is curiously soft, tempered with use. Then I emerge to sunlight and the sudden hysteria of car horns and engines. Six roads meet here and there are no traffic lights. Congestion is the rule, to which there is rarely exception. Here, I’m told, is where the boy was killed.
    He was eleven years old. He snatched a bag from inside the market, six weeks ago. I know the rest, even before I’m told: I’ve seen it before. At least, I’ve seen it in its constituent parts, if never all at once. I watched in fragments and was unimpressed, as children are by whatever seems to them to be normal. I was still a child when I learned to stitch the various vignettes into a single story. The desperate grab, the cries of thief—an ordinary cry anywhere else, but in a Lagos market, it thins the blood out with fear—the cry taken up by those who never saw the original theft, but who nevertheless believe in its motivating power. It was like this the day I was at the garri stall with my mother. I could have been no more than seven. Cries of thief, thief. Then the chase that arises organically and with frightening swiftness out of the placid texture of the market, a furious wave of men that organizes itself into a single living thing. And then the capture of the felon—there is nowhere to run—his denials and, when those inevitably fail, his pleas. He’s neverfar into the pleas before he is pushed—all this I’ve seen, more than once—kicked, beaten with what never looks like less than a personal aggravation by other men whom he has never met. The violence is intimate, interspersed with curses. The stolen bag has, by now, made its way back into the hands of the madame, and she has cleared out of the scene. If nothing was stolen, nothing is returned, but the event must always run its course.
    Someone pushes me out of the way. I am daydreaming at the market, making myself a target. This is pure idiocy. I check my pockets, make sure I still have my wallet on me, and push my way into the crowd that has gathered in the intersection. Traffic is stalled. I have come for this, to see with my own eyes where this thing happened.
    The boy is eleven, but he has eaten poorly all his life and looks much younger. He is crying. He is trying to explain something. Someone told me to do it, he says, that man over there. He points. It’s futile. A wiry man steps forward and slaps him hard. It’s not a bag, it turns out; it’s a baby he’s accused of stealing. Everyone knows that you can use a stolen baby to make money, to literally manufacture cash, in alliance with unseen occult powers. An old car tire—from where?—has been quickly sourced. The boy’s clothes are torn off, he is knocked down repeatedly. Space has been created out of the congestion. A gaggle of schoolgirls, in green-and-white uniforms, has joined the spectators. And a new twist: in the crowd, there stands a man with a digital camcorder.The single eye of his machine collects the event: this fragile body, which, shed of clothes, is now like a dark sapling whipped about in the wind. The tire is flung around the boy. He is losing consciousness but revives with sudden panic when he is doused with petrol. From the distance, two traffic officers, the ones they call Yellow Fever, watch. The splashing liquid is lighter than water, it is fragrant, it drips off him, beads in his woolly hair. He glistens. The begging stops. He stops begging and he is not yet lit. The whites of his eyes are bright as lamps. And then only the last thing, which is soon supplied. The fire catches with a loud gust, and the crowd gasps and inches back. The boy dances furiously but, hemmed down by the tire, quickly goes prone, and still. The most vivid moment in the fire’s life passes, and its