E.C. Osondu
E.C. Osondu is the author of Alien Stories (2021), which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize; Voice of America (HarperCollins, 2011); and the novel This House Is Not For Sale (HarperCollins, 2015). He is a winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction, among other awards. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic,, n+1, Guernica, Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, New Statesman, and elsewhere. He lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Providence College.
Two Short Stories
The Cemetery Where Pots Are Buried
I once heard from a guy named Mullah Nasredeen that anyone who was gullible enough to believe that iron pots could birth children should also not dispute the fact that pots could die and receive a beautiful funeral oration at their burial.
One fine day I decided to go in search of the cemetery where dead pots are buried.
As I walked through the graveyard of dead pots, I recalled something that someone had said to me while we were discussing punctuations—life is actually a hyphen, he said.
How so? I asked. For I used to ask lots of questions back then.
Life is the dashbetween birth and death, he said.
When I finally arrived at the pot cemetery, to be honest, it did not look any different—aside from the fact that wafting through its length and breadth was the heady aroma of curry, thyme, paprika, cumin, soups, broths etc etc.
Maps
One sunny afternoon when we were sill in elementary school and Maps were still a thing, our teacher strolled to the classroom cupboard and brought out an ornate Map of the World. Sweeping away the rulers, dusters, red, blue, and white sticks of chalk with an impatient left hand—he spread out the map of the world on the table and beckoned on us to gather around it.
As our eager sweaty faces peered at that map we were transported from the stifling afternoon heat of our classroom to places far off—places where some were on their way to bed, while some were at the breakfast table and places with contoured mellifluous geographical words like—fjords, prairies, volcanoes, geysers, mountains and valleys and oceans.
Point on this map where you’d like to go when you grow up, our teacher said.
Our determined little fingers began to crawl all over the map with eagerness.
Turning to the most recalcitrant one among us the teacher asked where he’d like to go when he grew up—I’ll like to go to a place that is not on this map—he said.
Nothing there but Dragons—the teacher said.
That kid from our class has gone on to a glorious career as a dragon slayer and has never looked back.