Obembe was not alone in the kitchen. Mr Bode stood beside him, his hand on his head, gnashing his teeth. Yet there was a third person, who, however, had become a lesser creature than the fish and tadpoles we caught at Omi-Ala. This lay facing the refrigerator, his wide opened eyes still and fixed in one place. It was obvious these eyes could not glimpse a thing. His tongue was stuck out of his mouth from which a pool of white foam had trailed down to the floor, and his hands were splayed wide apart as though nailed to an invisible cross. Half-buried in his belly was the wooden end of Mother's kitchen knife, its sharp blade deep in his flesh. The floor was drenched in his blood: a living, moving blood that slowly journeyed under the refrigerator, and, uncannily - like the rivers Niger and Benue whose confluence at Lokoja birthed a broken and mucky nation - joined with the palm oil, forming an unearthly pool of bleached red, like puddles that form in small cavities on dirt roads.