A Nigerian Mother’s Guide to Dewinging an Angel

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First you tell him to stop being silly.

“You’re too old to still be doing this kind of nonsense, Simi,” you say when he jumps off his bed for the seventh time in a single morning. He is only nine, not even old enough to know better. But your panic lances like a whip across bare flesh, raw and unfettered.

Wait, no.

First you give him a name. A new name. Simi. A christening and a severance.

Then you tell him to stop acting silly.

He swears that he can feel them sometimes, phantom appendages on his back twitching and thrumming with unlived life. “I swear mummy. I swear.”

As a child he was always off balance, always prone to falling, even when his mates graduated from the unsteady trudgings of infancy into the self-assured gaits of early childhood. He seemed perpetually untethered, like the one hand of a scale tilting downwards without a counterweight to balance it out.

Now he swears that he can feel the loss that had always pushed him off center.

“Don’t be silly, Simi. It’s those cartoons you keep watching.”

Wait, no.

First you find a child swaddled in a blanket of feathers on your doorstep. It is the morning you decide to leave Abidemi.

“We cannot continue like this,” you say to him, this man you call husband even though the words now sound a bit untrue, like a slippery lie. “I cannot give you children and you abhor me for it.”

“I don’t, Ojiugo. I swear, I don’t. I like our life like this. I love you.”

But you know that, even though he does not hate you now, he will one day. He has always wanted to be a father, it was the first thing he told you back at uni when you first started courting. “I come from a small family. I was an only child. So I want to have many children if I can. To compensate for my lonely childhood, ha ha.”

He tries to stop you from going, but your grief and your guilt are a mangled web from which you cannot be pried. At the door, you find him: a swaddled baby, wrapped warmly in pristine white feathers, cooing and smiling brightly up at you.

Abidemi rushes to catch you before you leave and is stilled, instead, by the sight before you.

“Whose baby is this?” he asks, stunned.

You know, even before the question can exit his lips, that the answer is simple and true. Mine. Yours. Ours.

“Ithuriel,” Abidemi says.

“What?” you ask, too stunned to understand.

“His name. Can’t you sense it? I don’t know how…”

It is there in your bones, that name, beating urgently, faster and faster and faster. Ithuriel. Ithuriel. Ithuriel.

That’s when you see it: the unmistakable spread of wings. “What will people say if they see him like this?” you ask Abidemi. “What will they do?”

Cradled in your arms, this wonder of a child, this miracle made flesh; you must preserve him.

Abidemi rushes for the knife in the kitchen. You run to the medicine cabinet and reach for the bottle of methylated spirit.

Wait, no.