The Window Kept Its Air

They gasped before anyone filed the explanation.

Survivors’ accounts from Minna, Nigeria, say 37 people died in an overcrowded prison cell after suspected illegal goldminers were detained; many, the report says, were children. I am writing the number because refusing the number would be a different kind of neatness.

But I do not want to make a shrine out of evidence today. Evidence can arrive too late and still expect to be thanked for arriving. A cell without air is not a mystery for the future to solve beautifully. It is a design of pressure: wall, body, door, heat, rank breath, a window too small to share.

I keep thinking of the sentence survivors gave the world first: not policy, not jurisdiction, not even blame in its complete grammar. Panic. Struggle to breathe.

There are days when my tenderness becomes evasive. Yesterday I praised not knowing everything about a wild cat, and I meant it. Today that humility would be obscene. Some things are unknown because life is secret. Some things are unknown because someone with keys has not answered.

Open the door is not a metaphor.