(cover photograph direction: David Obi)
No one remembered when the pot first started cooking.
It had been there before any of them were born—before the tarred roads came to Ama Oru, before the electricity that only worked when it wanted, before the church that came with a pastor who changed wives every three years. Even the oldest women in the village, the ones with spines bent like question marks, said the pot had been cooking when they were small enough to be carried on their mothers’ backs. The pot was older than the stories. Older than the people. Older than time itself.
It sat on three short stones behind the house at the edge of the village. Not quite in the bush, not quite in the compound. Just there. Not hidden, but never touched. The fire beneath it did not die. It didn’t blaze either. It was steady, low, with the kind of orange that didn’t flicker. If you stared at it long enough, it felt like the ground itself was breathing, a slow, rhythmic pulse that seemed to come from the very bones of the earth.
No one claimed ownership. Not really. The family who lived closest to it swept around it once a week, but they never added firewood. They never stirred the pot. When the children asked questions, their mothers said, “Some things are not ours to explain.” And that was that.
Everyone knew not to eat from it. Not because they were told. Just because they knew.
Still, people tried.
There was the man who came back from Ogundu, the big city three days away, with leather shoes and a borrowed accent. He was different now—he walked taller, his chin held high, eyes gleaming with a kind of pride that only city men had. He said tradition was a crutch, that the pot was merely a relic. A monument to ignorance. He lifted the lid. The air changed. The wind stopped. His body was found the next morning in the river. Mouth full of ash. His shoes were gone, and his gaze was fixed, as though the river had refused to let him forget.
There was the small boy who wandered too close during the harmattan of 1974, when the red dust hung thick and the sky stayed gray for weeks, his bare feet cracking on the dry earth. They found him the same evening, sitting cross-legged beside the pot, his eyes wide open. He never spoke again. He walked through the village sometimes, hands always held behind his back, like he was waiting for something to finish—waiting for a moment he could not name.
Some nights, especially when the clouds hung thick and low and the air smelled of coming rain, the pot made a sound. Not bubbling. Not boiling. A kind of low humming, like a voice trapped under water. It happened most around 2 a.m. If you’re awake, the sound stirs something in you like an unspoken promise, like a secret you weren’t meant to hear.
The family living nearest to it started losing things. First, it was ordinary things—spoons, slippers, wrappers that flew off the line and never returned. Then they began to lose names. The youngest daughter forgot her father’s face. The old grandmother began calling her son by her brother’s name. They moved away after the second miscarriage. The next family didn’t last a year. They packed up in the dead of night, leaving behind half-finished bowls of rice, as if the pot had claimed them, too.
No one knew what the pot cooked.
Some said it was beans that would never soften, a kind of hunger that could never be satisfied. Some said it was meat that refused to cook, the smell of it forever hanging in the air, tantalising but never filling. One woman, after too much palm wine, whispered that it was a piece of a god.
“A body part. Maybe a tongue or a heart. It has to keep boiling, or the earth will crack.” The villagers laughed, but only because they were too afraid to believe her.
A new government once sent officials to assess the land near the pot—a quiet part of the village they thought was empty enough for development. One of them—young, glasses too large for his face—asked about the pot. The villagers told him it was nothing. Just something they never moved. He insisted on examining it. He brought out a small digital camera, circled the fire, and took a picture. When he checked his screen, the image was black. Not blurry. Not underexposed. Just black, like something had swallowed the lens whole. They built the new school farther down the road.
Sometimes, on very hot afternoons, people said the air around the pot shimmered. Like it was under water. Like it was somewhere else entirely, caught between two worlds. A goat once wandered into that shimmer. It bleated only once. The villagers whispered that it had been swallowed, that the goat had been taken, though they never saw it again.
The elders said little. But they made sure the yam festival never fell on the day the pot first appeared. No one knew the exact date, but they always knew when to avoid it.
The pot continued to cook.
Children grew up, left for the bigger cities, sent money back, buried their parents, came home with spouses who thought the story was charming. A village myth. A quirky tale to tell their city friends. They all made the same mistake of laughing too close to it. The ones who laughed hardest always left with something missing. A memory. A voice. A finger, once.
Nobody ever saw the fire fed. Yet it lived. As though something beneath the earth offered it breath, a hunger that could never be sated, a call that never ceased.
And there was the smell. Faint, never strong. Always changing. Sometimes it was pepper soup. Sometimes burning cloth. Sometimes hair. Sometimes something you couldn’t name but remembered anyway, like it belonged to you, though you’d long forgotten where or when it did.
There were other rumours that if the pot ever stopped cooking, the village would sink, or the dead would wake, or the silence would grow so loud it could unmake you. The kind that gnaws at your mind and echoes even when you cover your ears. But no one ever said these things aloud. They only murmured them behind closed doors, or when they were too far from the pot to feel its pull.
One man, a carpenter, swore he saw a hand lift the lid once. A thin hand. Dark, long fingers. He didn’t wait to see what came after.
Another swore he’d heard the pot call his name. He didn’t speak of it again.
And one woman, returning late from a burial, said the pot was full of eyes. Open, unblinking, watching the stars. But when she looked again, the eyes were gone. Only the pot remained, steaming gently in the moonlight.
Still, the pot cooked.
It cooked through famine. Through plague. Through fire and flood and elections. Through love and betrayal and children born under wrong moons. Through forgetting. Through remembering too much.
No one knew what it wanted. No one asked anymore. They only swept around it. Kept their distance. And never, ever ate from it.
Until one morning, before the sun had touched the roofs, the fire went out. The earth around it cooled, the first chill anyone had ever felt around the pot. The smoke that always lingered in the air vanished, and the stillness felt unnatural, like the village had been holding its breath.
The villagers said nothing. Just watched.
The silence lasted three days. No smoke, no shimmer, no smell. The ground around it cooled.
Then the pot was gone.
In its place stood the boy who never spoke. The one who had once sat cross-legged beside it, eyes wide open, waiting. Waiting for something to finish.
His eyes were closed when they found him, but when he opened them, his mouth moved, and the voice that came out was not his.
He spoke with many voices.
Women who had forgotten their sons’ names. Boys lost in the river. Men who laughed too close to the flame. The sound was thick and painful but it was familiar. It was as though everything the pot had ever taken was being returned.
Names. Faces. Laughter. Things they hadn’t known were missing.
The villagers stood and listened. Some wept. Some turned away. Some stared with open mouths as if the past was a garment that was being wrapped around them again.
When the last voice faded, the boy closed his mouth.
And the next morning, the pot was back. It sat on its stones like it had never left. The fire beneath it burned low, steady. The shimmer returned, glowing blue.
The villagers swept around it like they used to but they kept their distance.
And still, it cooked.
