MAY DAY

Chapter One: Jacobus The letter was still in his pocket. Blood-stained, mud-stained, folded into a square so tight it had become something else entirely — not paper anymore but bone, cartilage, a second ribcage pressed against the first. James Akpabio had written it eleven months ago in handwriting that no longer resembled his own. The words hadn't changed. He had. Dear Grandma, He didn't need to unfold it. He knew every line the way a priest knows liturgy — by repetition, by desperation, by the slow erosion of everything else until only the sacred text remains. I think I've made a big mistake coming here. The trench smelled of laterite and kerosene and something underneath both that none of them named anymore. Naming it made it real. And what was real in the Owerri perimeter had stopped being something the human mouth could hold. Dawn came the way it always came now — not with light but with arithmetic. James counted bodies the way farmers count rainfall. Instinct. Necessity. Forty men had walked into this position. Fifteen remained. The other twenty-five had been subtracted by methods so varied they almost resembled creativity: shrapnel, dysentery, a sniper's patience, one boy who simply walked into the bush and never returned, another who stopped speaking on a Tuesday and stopped breathing on a Thursday, and Emeka — Emeka who caught a piece of mortar casing in the neck and spent nine minutes trying to hold his own blood inside his body with both hands, as though it were water leaking from a clay pot. Nine minutes. James had counted. He counted everything now. Seventeen years old. Fighting for eleven months. Ready to die — not suicidally, not dramatically. Just ready. The way someone becomes ready for sleep after running too long. They called him King James. Not for courage. Not for kills. For the way he read — or had read, before the books ran out — squinting at water-damaged pages of the King James Bible by whatever light the bush permitted. Palm-oil candles. Moonlight strained through perforated zinc. The brief orange flare of a cigarette shared between four men who each took one drag and passed it like communion. Corporal Eze, who had taught Greek at the University of Nigeria before the war ate Nsukka whole, had given him the Latin. Jacobus. "That is you in the old tongue," Eze had said, cleaning his rifle with a rag that used to be his wife's headscarf. "Ya'aqōv. The heel-catcher. The one who wrestles God and does not let go." James had not understood then. He understood now. You wrestled God by waking up. You wrestled God by chewing the half-cup of garri they called a ration and not vomiting. You wrestled God by pressing your spine against the trench wall when the MiGs screamed overhead — Soviet-made, Egyptian-flown, dropping ordnance on a people whose crime was wanting to be a people — and you did not run, not because you were brave but because your legs had forgotten the choreography of running, because your muscles had eaten themselves for fuel two months ago, and what remained was not a body but a structure, a framework of stubbornness wrapped in skin. I'm too stubborn to die. He hadn't written that in the letter. He'd said it to Okafor three days ago, and Okafor had laughed — a sound so foreign that both of them had flinched, as though laughter were a grenade with the pin pulled. Okafor sat four feet away, sharpening a machete against a stone with the slow, circular patience of a man winding a clock he knows is broken. The blade was dull. The stone was wrong. The motion continued. Some rituals survive their purpose. "Nna," Okafor said. Not looking up. The word arrived the way most words arrived now, dropped into silence like a pebble into a well too deep to echo. "The hardest thing I think I've ever done is bury children." James said nothing. "I have already done that three times this week." The sharpening continued. Circle. Circle. Circle. "I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. A Nigerian soldier could be standing three feet in front of me and I wouldn't know if he is the enemy." He paused. The blade caught a sliver of morning light and threw it against the trench wall like a small, useless miracle. "I'm so tired, James." James watched the light move. It trembled. Everything trembled here — the light, the men, the ground itself when the Howitzers spoke from positions they could calculate but never reach. Sixty thousand federal troops encircling three thousand Biafran soldiers. The mathematics of annihilation had no variable for courage. "We get up at five," James said. Not to Okafor. To the air. To the record he was keeping in his skull because paper was for letters and letters were for people who believed in futures. "We hump all day. Camp around four or five. Dig foxhole. Eat —" He almost laughed at the word. "Then put out an all-night ambush or a three-man listening post." "Nobody tells the new ones anything," Okafor said. "Nobody wants to know their names." They sat with that. The unwritten law of attrition: a new man's life is worth less because he hasn't put his time in yet. And the logic — grotesque, irrefutable — whispered beneath every interaction: if you're going to die, better in the first weeks, before the dying costs you something. From somewhere beyond the perimeter, a rooster crowed. Both men turned toward the sound with an intensity that would have been comical in another life — two soldiers, armed, alert, undone by the memory of morning in a village where morning still meant something. The rooster did not crow again. Perhaps it had been eaten. Perhaps it had been imagined. Perhaps it was God, trying the old tricks on men too broken to be fooled. The MiGs came on the fifth day. Not the fifth day of James's war. The fifth day of this — this particular arithmetic, this specific subtraction. They came at midmorning when the sun was high enough to bleach the color from everything and the men had arranged themselves into the postures of survival: some sleeping with their eyes open, some cleaning weapons that had no ammunition, some talking to people who were not there. The sound arrived before the planes — a tearing, a ripping of the sky's fabric along seams no one knew existed. James pressed himself into the earth. The earth did not want him. He pressed harder. The first bomb hit the aid station two hundred yards east. The building — if it could be called a building, if four walls of corrugated zinc and a prayer constituted architecture — folded inward like a man receiving news of his own death. Slowly at first. Then all at once. The second bomb missed. It struck open ground and threw a column of red laterite into the air that hung for a moment, cathedral-shaped, before collapsing into dust and silence and a crater the size of a family compound. The third bomb found the trench. Not James's section. Thirty meters south. But in a trench, thirty meters is a neighbor's wall, and what James felt was not the blast but the displacement — the air itself evicted from the space it had occupied, shoved sideways into his lungs with such violence that breathing became a decision, a conscious act, a thing he had to remember how to do while the world expressed its formal opinion of Biafran sovereignty in high explosive and Egyptian precision. Twelve dead. Thirty wounded. Lunch. Training resumed. He wrote that sequence in his mind. Twelve dead. Thirty wounded. Lunch. Training resumed. It sounded like satire. It was Tuesday. At night, the perimeter breathed. James lay in his foxhole with his rifle across his chest — one rifle shared among five men, rotated in shifts like a sleeping child passed between exhausted parents — and listened to the war's quieter vocabulary. Distant artillery, muffled by distance into something almost musical. The whisper of elephant grass adjusting to wind. A man weeping three foxholes over with the careful discipline of someone who has learned to grieve at regulation volume. Somewhere out there, beyond the federal lines, beyond the blockade, beyond the Atlantic where the world had made its decision — which was no decision at all, which was silence dressed in diplomatic language — somewhere out there, people were sleeping in beds. Drinking milk. Turning off lights without wondering if the darkness would be permanent. Milk. The word surfaced unbidden, and with it a cascade: Vincent. The man they'd heard about through the latrine telegraph — the network of rumor and whisper and half-truth that moved faster than any military communiqué. An educated man. England-returned. Father of twins. Went to find milk for his children and was swallowed by the machine. Conscripted at a checkpoint. Given two weeks of training and a rifle shared among five. James did not know Vincent. But he knew him. Every soldier in every trench in every collapsing perimeter of what remained of Biafra knew him. Vincent was the proof that the war did not care who you were before it found you. It cared only for what you could carry, how far you could walk, and whether your body would stop a bullet meant for someone else. Chukwuemeka. Ikemefuna. Vincent's twins. Names that meant God has done well and let my strength not be lost. James had heard the names repeated like incantation, like counter-spell, like the last theology available to men whose churches were rubble and whose priests were corpses. You name your children for what you refuse to surrender. Corporal Eze appeared at the foxhole's edge. Silhouette against stars. He moved like a man who had been thin before the war and was now something beyond thin — a theory of a man, a rumor of bones. "Jacobus." "Sir." "You know what day it is?" James thought. The calendar had collapsed months ago into a single repeating unit: today. But Eze's voice carried something — not hope, hope was contraband — but weight. Intentional weight. "November thirteenth," Eze said. "They're closing the western gap. Three, maybe four days." Complete encirclement. James understood the geometry. The federal forces had the north, south, and east. When the west closed, Owerri would become a box. And boxes, in this war, became graves. "Sixty thousand against three thousand," James said. "Courage doesn't stop artillery." They let the numbers sit between them. The stars offered no commentary. A gecko clicked somewhere in the dark — the small, indifferent machinery of a world that would continue after all of them were subtracted from it. "I heard something," Eze said. He crouched. His knees cracked like distant gunfire, and both of them paused at the sound, then exhaled. "There's a unit forming. Irregular. Fifteen men. They're going behind federal lines." "To do what?" Eze looked at him. In the dark, his eyes caught starlight and held it the way the machete had held the sun — briefly, uselessly, beautifully. "There are children, Jacobus. One hundred and seventy-seven of them. Trapped." James felt the number enter him the way shrapnel enters — not all at once but in stages, the impact first, then the heat, then the understanding that something inside you has been permanently rearranged. One hundred and seventy-seven. He reached into his pocket. Touched the letter. Blood-stained, mud-stained, folded so tight it had become bone. I'm too stubborn to die. "When?" James said. Eze stood. His silhouette rejoined the dark. "Yesterday."