BINTA, SOMEWHERE

Samuel Ajayi

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The walls of Binta’s room smelled of old wood and loneliness. For fifteen years, they had been his entire world – the cracks in the plaster of his rivers, the water stains in his continents. His father had stacked the room with books, their pages brittle with age, filled with stories of places Binta could only dream about. Places where the sun burned golden on savannas, where rivers roared like living things, where forests grew so thick they swallowed men whole.

Each night, Binta would press his ear against the single window, listening to the village sounds he wasn’t allowed to join – children laughing, drums beating, the hiss and pop of cooking fires. The scents of roasted plantains and smoked fish would curl through the cracks, making his stomach growl for flavors he’d never tasted.

“Will I ever know the world outside?” Binta asked his father every birthday, tracing the scars on the older man’s arms – marks he refused to explain.

His father’s answer never changed. “One day, but not today, my son.”

However, on his fifteenth birthday, something in Binta snapped.

— The moon was a sickle blade cutting through the night when Binta began tearing pages from his books. The illustrations came first – maps with their tantalizing coastlines, drawings of baobab trees with trunks wide enough to hide villages inside. Then the words themselves, sentences about monsoons and marketplaces and mountains that scraped the sky.

“Lies!” Binta screamed, his voice cracking. “All lies!”

Paper snow filled the room. He stomped on the pages, grinding them into the floorboards until his bare feet were black with ink. That’s when he saw it – a flickering light dancing across the wall like a trapped firefly.

“Somebody… come get me,” he whispered, reaching for it.

His foot slipped on a torn page of the Niger River. His temple struck the bedpost with a sound like a splitting coconut.

As darkness swallowed him, the light pulsed once – a flash of green so bright it burned his eyelids – then vanished.

—

The wind that came after didn’t sound like wind at all. It chuckled.

It rattled the lock until the mechanism broke, iron pins scattering across the floor like teeth. It peeled back the corrugated roof in strips, the metal screaming as it bent. By dawn, when Binta’s father found the empty room, the wind had already licked away all traces of the boy’s scent.

“Sound the alarm!” his father roared, his voice raw with a terror the villagers recognized immediately.

Old Mama Nkemdilim crossed herself. “The wind took him,” she muttered. “Just like it took the others.”

— Binta woke to pain and motion. His head throbbed where he’d struck it, his vision swimming with dark spots. He was moving, but not by his own power. The world jolted and swayed beneath him in a rhythm that made his empty stomach heave.

A wheelbarrow. Rusted iron and splintered wood, its single wheel squealing like a tortured animal. With each bump, the handles flexed like living things, the wood grain twisting into patterns that almost looked like faces.

The man pushing it was tall – too tall, his limbs stretching like shadows at sunset. His skin had the grayish cast of a week-old corpse, his lips blackened as if by frostbite. When he smiled, his teeth gleamed like obsidian shards.

“Awake at last,” the man said. His voice was syrup-thick, the words sticking to Binta’s ears. “We’ve been waiting.”

Binta tried to sit up, but his body refused to obey. His limbs felt filled with wet sand. The world around them had no color – the grass a dull gray, the sky a flat white void, the trees skeletal hands clawing at nothing. Even his own skin looked leeched of life.

“Where are we?” Binta croaked. His tongue felt swollen.

The man chuckled. “Nowhere. Everywhere. The place between places.” He leaned close, his breath reeking of turned earth and spoiled milk. “You called, little bird. We answered.”

The wheelbarrow moved on its own now, the man’s spidery hands barely touching the handles. The path ahead twisted like a dying snake, cutting through a forest of trees whose bark peeled away in fleshy strips. In the branches, shapes moved – too fast to see clearly, but Binta caught glimpses of too many eyes, of limbs that bent the wrong way.

A shadow detached itself from the ground, wrapping around Binta’s ankle. It wasn’t cold, wasn’t

warm – it was nothingness given form. When he kicked, it tightened, tendrils creeping up his calf like vines.

“Take me back!” Binta screamed.

The black-toothed man threw back his head and laughed. “Back? To your cage? To your books full of lies?” He gestured at the colorless world around them. “This is the truth, little bird. The world beneath the world.”

Something moved in the gray grass – a thing with too many joints, its back arched like a question mark. It scuttled alongside the wheelbarrow, clicking softly.

“The others were too afraid to see,” the man continued. “But you… you burned with wanting. That fire called to us.”

The wheelbarrow hit a bump, and Binta’s vision swam. For a moment, between blinks, he saw flashes of color – the green of real grass, the blue of true sky. Then it was gone.

“Father!” Binta screamed into the nothingness.

Far away, in a world that suddenly seemed like the dream, Binta’s father fell to his knees in the dirt. The wind carried a whisper that might have been his son’s voice. Or just the rustling of dead leaves.

The wheelbarrow creaked onward, its wheel leaving no tracks in the gray dust. The black-toothed man began to hum – a tune that slithered into Binta’s skull and made his teeth ache.

Ahead, the path disappeared into a horizon that shouldn’t exist.

And the wheel kept turning.

Samuel Ajayi is a storyteller by heart, and a writer by profession. I create through a very vibrant thought process. Giving life to the littlest of ideas. I do not shy away from a story that needs to be told, and I am not stopping now. I love working with people, rubbing minds together is by far the most genuine thing for me. I love what I do because it’s the only thing I can do. I get better at it every time and less worse by the day. Theater arts is my lifelong dream from as long as I can remember now.