Those were the words of Miss Sophia Herman Tungi, a Suligy by tribe, a scholar by choice, and a ghost by my tragic hand. She was twenty-five, one hundred and seventy centimetres of grace and intellect, a PhD student plucked from the tree of knowledge before her fruit could ripen.
Her death was not just a murder; it was the foreclosure of a dream. Her father, Herman Tungi, a peasant who had sold the very soil from under his feet to buy her a future, now wept a river of dust-suppressing tears. His compound was the only fertile ground in a spiritual drought, watered by a grief so profound it had become a local weather pattern.
And Anita Martin, the architect of this ruin? She became a national monument to corruption. Prison was not her punishment; it was her alumni reunion. The policemen were her former clients from her days as the most luxurious commodity in Port Anipi. She had even, the rumours hissed, milked the Police Commissioner in his own office, a perfect allegory for a state suckled dry by its own enforcers. She was every terrible incarnation the public imagination could conjure—a snake, a hyena, a devil in a designer pantsuit.
My own body had rebelled against our union. I swear my very sperms wept in existential despair, knowing they were being wasted on a woman whose soul was a high-yield bond. Our final argument was a masterpiece of modern miscommunication. She claimed an allergy to condoms, a believer in "natural procedures."
"Is my penis a sugarcane?" I’d asked, a simple man seeking a simple clarification.
She took it as a critique of her life’s philosophy and left me there, naked and metaphorically skinned. She was a master of the pivot, ascending from Marketing Director at a dubious studio to Managing Director of Alexander Zubek & Wives Limited, a company that dealt in drones, domestic robots, and test-tube babies—a trifecta of dehumanization. She sold the future, and she sold it well. The last I saw of her was on the news, a smiling face on the Romata Broadcasting Corporation before she vanished into the ether, a ghost of the living.
But Sophia’s ghost was more substantial. She began to haunt me, not as a vengeful spirit, but as a recurring dream, a persistent regret. My chest was not a warehouse for such grief, so I confessed to my friend, William Little Feng. He, a man of simple solutions, prescribed church. "Thoughts well received," I said, a non-committal nod to the divine.
The cosmic joke continued. My sister, Natasha, arrived as a special envoy from Yellow Dove Island, with my cousin, the Secretary of Defence, in tow. The world was teetering on the brink of World War Three, and I was being asked to navigate international diplomacy while my heart was a crater. I sought solace in a man of God, Prophet Alexander Sango, the Archbishop of Purity Church Worldwide. I found a man whose celestial rank was betrayed by a belly swollen on the tithe of the desperate, a man who blessed paper money and cursed coins. I turned back before he could lay his filthy, prosperity-gospel hands on my head.
That night, Sophia came. Not as a wisp of memory, but in terrifying, tangible form. Her breast was a bouquet of blood, her face a tragic moon in the corner of my room. "Nicholas," she whispered, her voice a romantic echo from the grave. "Hug me, please."
They say you cannot touch a spirit. "They" have never been so desperately, delusionally in love. The room bloomed into paradise—a blinding light, an Arabian scent, my clothes a puddle on the floor. My bed became a raft of diamonds on a sea of mirrors. We made love for two hours. Was it a dream? A possession? A spectral rape? I was a man with not a cupful of magic in me; how could I refuse a miracle, even a damned one?
I woke at dawn, my lips bitter with the taste of poison ivy and eternity. I was not in my bed. I was naked on Sophia’s tombstone in the cemetery, a garden of stone and forgotten promises. The dates on the graves told their own satirical history. "Hon. Philip Kassorobo (MP), born 1500 died 1995." My grandmother’s stories rushed back—he was the original Champagne Politician, a man who promised the poor heaven and delivered them hell. He lived for centuries on a diet of public adulation and private luxury, his NPRD (National Party for Radical Development) ensuring that development was a radical concept indeed. His reign was a masterpiece of absence: no hospitals, no schools, no roads, no justice. Just stones for schoolchildren to sit on and empty promises for them to digest.
I was a naked Adam in this garden of political death. It took me a day to escape, my dignity flapping in the wind, a spectacle for no one. When I finally reached home, I found a circus of concern—neighbours, police, all barking at my empty house. They’d broken the door, thinking I’d committed suicide. The irony was thicker than Prophet Sango’s wallet. To watch a man so closely is not concern; it is a form of slow-motion cannibalism.
I stole a wrapper from a passing woman, a chaotic, humiliating transaction that felt like a metaphor for the entire economy. When I finally stormed into my house, they all fled, thinking me a ghost or a madman. They were half-right.
But the true horror was inside. The house was not empty. It was full of emptiness. It was the house of broken hearts made manifest. The walls hummed with a distant, sexy noise, the sound of love and loss happening on a loop in some phantom dimension. I felt Sophia’s presence in my very neurons, the taste of her on my tongue. A hissing, salivary sensation filled my mouth, and she manifested—first as a crone, then as the gorgeous young woman I remembered. "We are under the ocean," she told me. "It is safer here."
She brought me a meal: four jars of blood, a slice of human flesh. "From recent accidents," she said. "Still full of life." And to my eternal damnation, I ate. I found it delicious. The line between man and monster is not a wall; it is a taste acquired out of desperation.
I was trapped in a timeless, lightless party. Lucifer’s birthday. And the guest list was a who’s who of the world I thought I’d left behind: politicians, businessmen, celebrities, and men of God, all rubbing shoulders in the underworld. I saw the big boss. The system, it seemed, had only one true headquarters.
To earn my freedom, I promised Sophia my eternal love. She released me onto a dark highway. It was 1990. I had been under the ocean for forty years in a single night. Time itself was broken, a sputtering engine in the cosmic automobile.
I returned to my house. This time, it was furnished, but everything was strange. The calendar was broken. Was life moving backward? Was I?
The children were aghast. "Grandpa, you're scaring us! You say not to fear death, but isn't it God's punishment?" The old man looked at them, his eyes holding galaxies of sorrow and hard-won wisdom. "Who told you children do not die? The government? The priest? Live a clean life, and wait for your death. As for Judgment Day… only the dead can testify. Now, go to sleep."
"But we must know more!" they insisted, their fear now a kind of addiction.
In the pavilion, King Rhombus—David Coin—leaned forward, his heart a cold stone. The hissing woman beside him smiled, her form shimmering between a naked body and the walls of a great, golden house.
"You see?" she whispered, her voice the sound of shifting foundations. "His heart is not just broken. It is the blueprint. The house is not a place. It is a state of being. And he is its keeper. To get your life back, we don't just need to kill the man. We need to break the house."
The old man, inside, felt the words as if they had been spoken in his own ear. He looked at the terrified, eager faces of the children. He was not just telling a story of lost love. He was reading the constitution of a crumbling republic, and the final, terrifying lesson was this: We are all living in the house of broken hearts, and the foreclosure notice has already been served.