THE SIEVE OF THE RAILWAY
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
The world, when it began for me, was a geometry of rust, concrete, and the unrelenting vibration of the yellow Danfo buses roaring down the Ikorodu Road corridor. Fadeyi was an open-air theater of survival, a narrow wedge of land trapped between the concrete fingers of Yaba and the industrial breath of Mushin. It was a place where the soil did not give life through crops or grain, but through the heavy, grey sand used to mix mortar on the edges of open gutters.
My father was a printer, a man whose hands were permanently stained with the indelible violet and black inks of the Heidelberg presses that clacked like mechanical locusts in the damp ground floors of our street. He would lean his entire weight against the heavy iron flywheels of those printing presses.
Standing in his singlet, his shoulders glistening with a mixture of sweat and machine oil, he matched the rhythmic thud-thud of the machine with the steady swaying of his torso. The sound of that press was the heartbeat of our house; when it stopped, the silence was heavy, filled with the collective anxiety of an unearned dinner.
I would sit on a low wooden stool in the corner of that dark workshop, watching the blank reams of white paper feed into the rollers and emerge bearing the crisp, black architecture of school textbooks, funeral programs, and church hymnals. The smell was intoxicating—a sharp, chemically sweet combination of kerosene, fresh ink, and the damp, rotting timber of the old Brazilian-style face-me-I-face-you tenement we called home. That smell was my father’s essence. When he returned upstairs in the evenings, his fingers would leave tiny, ghostly grey smudges on the white porcelain of our teacups, a silent signature of his labour that no amount of white Joy Soap could ever fully wash away.
***
To grow up in Fadeyi in the late nineties was to understand the precise weight of a crowd. Our street was an artery that never slept, a narrow corridor where the walls of the houses seemed to lean inward, exhaling the heat of the afternoon sun long into the midnight hours. The windows of our room looked directly out onto the swoop of the railway tracks that divided our world from the swampy lowlands of the mainland.
Twice a day, the massive, red-and-yellow iron trains from the Nigerian Railway Corporation would rumble past, their iron wheels screeching against the rails with a high-pitched, metallic scream that set our windowpanes vibrating in their wooden frames.
For us children, the train was a giant, mechanical calendar. We did not count time by hours, but by the morning transit and the evening return. When the train approached, the ground beneath our bare feet would begin to tremble—a low, rhythmic thrumming that started in the marrow of our bones before we could even hear the horn. We would drop our plastic footballs or our games of football and ten-ten, then rush to the edge of the embankment, standing just far enough back to avoid the slipstream of hot air and dust that followed the carriages.
The train carried a human cargo so dense it seemed to spill out of the windows and doors. Men clung to the iron ladders between the coaches like flies on a screen door; others sat casually on the rusted roofs, their limbs loose and dangling, their faces hardened against the flying soot. To watch them pass was to watch the entire geography of Nigeria compressed into a three-minute blur of moving iron. There were market women from the hinterlands sitting on sacks of dried pepper, clerks in frayed white shirts reading the Guardian newspaper, and young boys no older than myself who stared back at us with eyes that had already seen the far side of hunger.
In those moments, the dust raised by the train would hang in the air like a golden curtain, caught in the low, horizontal rays of the evening sun. It was a beautiful, dirty dust, thick with the particles of crushed stone, dried engine oil, and the powdered refuse of a million lives. We would breathe it in, tasting the iron on our tongues, unaware that this dust was settling into the secret corners of our minds, forming the very foundation of our memories. We looked at those men riding the roofs of the iron monsters and saw a terrifying, magnificent dance of human endurance.
***
The domestic center of my world was a small, shared kitchen at the back of our tenement compound, a place dominated by my mother and the other women of the house. If my father’s domain was one of iron and ink, my mother’s was one of fire and water. The kitchen was a narrow lean-to made of corrugated iron sheets that had turned a deep, velvet red from years of smoke and rust. Here, three different families cooked their meals over small kerosene stoves and iron tripods fuelled by firewood charcoal.
The memory that returns to me most vividly is the preparation of the evening eko. Eko was our staple, a smooth, white corn-starch cake that was wrapped in the broad, green leaves of the ewe-eran often called an ‘animal leaf.’ The process was long and demanded an exact, almost religious precision. My mother would buy the raw, fermented corn paste from the Oyingbo market, a sour-smelling white mass that she would tie up in a clean white flour sack to drain overnight.
In the evening, she would sit on a low plastic stool, her knees spread wide to support a massive iron pot. I was given the task of holding the flashlight or the kerosene lamp so she could see the consistency of the mixture as it heated over the blue flame of the stove. The corn paste had to be stirred continuously with a long, heavy wooden paddle called an orogun. It was hard, muscle-straining work. As the mixture heated, it would suddenly thicken, turning from a milky liquid into a heavy, resistant paste that fought against the wooden paddle.
"Hold the pot steady," my mother would whisper, her voice dropping into that low, rhythmic register she used only when she was completely focused.
I would grip the hot iron handles with two pieces of dried cloth, my small knuckles pressing against the rough metal, feeling the immense resistance of the thickening paste through the wood. My mother’s arms would glisten, the muscles in her forearms tightening as she forced the paddle through the stubborn mass, lifting it and slapping it against the sides of the pot to clear any lumps. The steam that rose from the pot was thick, sweet, and sour all at once, a cloud of vapour that condensed on our faces and turned our eyelashes into tiny strings of water beads.
There was a beautiful, unspoken telepathy between us in those small hours. I knew exactly when to lean my weight forward to counterbalance her pull, and she knew exactly when to ease the pressure to let me change my grip on the cloths. We did not speak of the hardships of the week, or of the rents that were due; we spoke only through the balance of the pot and the steady, circular motion of the wooden paddle.
Once the eko was perfectly smooth, she would lift a small portion with a tin spoon and drop it into a bowl of cold water to test its firmness. If it held its shape, the wrapping would begin. My mother would take a green ewe-eran leaf, soften it quickly over the open flame of the stove until it became pliable, and then twist it into a perfect, watertight cone. With a swift, practiced motion of her right hand, she would ladle the scalding hot corn paste into the center of the leaf, fold the top flaps down with her thumb, and tuck the tail underneath.
The resulting packet was a small, green cushion, perfectly symmetrical and completely sealed without the use of string or glue. She could wrap fifty packets in half an hour, each one identical to the last, her hands moving with the swift, unthinking grace of a weaver at a loom. The finished packets were stacked in a large plastic basin, where they would cool and harden, their green coverings turning a dull, olive shade as they absorbed the heat of the paste within. I saw the green leaves, the steam rising like incense in a zinc-roofed shed, and my mother’s ink-stained thumb pressing down the corners of the hot leaves with an authority that no poverty could ever diminish.
***
The perimeter of our childhood freedom was defined by the great drainage canal that ran parallel to the railway line. To the adults, the canal was a dangerous, foul-smelling hazard, an open vein of black water that carried the industrial wastes of the city down to the lagoon. But to the boys of Fadeyi, it was our frontier, our own wild river.
During the dry season, the water in the canal would shrink to a sluggish, oily trickle at the very bottom of its concrete channel, leaving wide ledges of dried, cracked mud along its sides. We would climb down the concrete walls, using the exposed iron reinforcement bars as ladder rungs, to hunt for treasures that had been lost or discarded by the city above. We found everything in that dark ditch: old bicycle gears, broken plastic toys, rusted watch casings, and beautiful, smooth pieces of glass that had been tumbled by the water until they looked like green and blue gemstones.
There was a particular boy named Tunde who lived three doors down from us, whose father was a traditional welder. Tunde possessed a rare, instinctive understanding of the things we found. While the rest of us gathered objects simply for the sake of possession, Tunde gathered them for reconstruction. He could take a discarded wire clothes hanger, a couple of plastic bottle caps, and a piece of rubber from an old inner tube, and within an hour, he would fashion a perfect, functional toy car whose wheels turned smoothly on axles made of straightened nails.
I remember watching Tunde work on the steps of our compound, his small fingers twisting the stiff iron wire with a pair of rusty pliers he had borrowed from his father’s workshop. He did not look up when the older boys shouted or when the Danfo drivers honked their horns at the junction. He was entirely consumed by the problem of the axle, his tongue poking out slightly from the corner of his mouth as he adjusted the tension of the rubber band.
"If the wire is too loose," he muttered to me once, his eyes fixed on the point where the wire met the plastic cap, "the wheel will wobble when you push it on the sand. It must be straight. Like the railway line."
That phrase stuck with me: straight like the railway line. It was our local standard of perfection. In a world where houses were crooked, where the electricity supply faltered and interrupted five times a day, and where the water from the borehole often came out the colour of weak tea, the railway line was the only thing that remained straight, true, and dependable. Tunde’s desire to match that iron standard with a toy made of garbage was my first real lesson in craftsmanship. It was the same impulse that drove my father to square the margins of his printing plates with a steel ruler, and the same impulse that would later drive me to sit before a blank page, trying to arrange letters into a structure that could bear the weight of our shared life.
***
In the mid-nineties, the political landscape of Nigeria was a dark, suffocating room. The country was held in the iron fist of a military dictatorship, and though we were children, the tension filtered down into our street games like grey rain. Fadeyi, because of its strategic location along the main highway connecting the city center to the mainland, became a frequent flashpoint for protests and riots.
I remember one specific Tuesday in the month of May, 1996. The morning had started with an unusual stillness. The railway train did not pass at its usual hour, and the main road, which was normally a sea of yellow buses and shouting conductors, was completely empty. The silence was eerie, a heavy, expectant quiet that made the chickens in the yard stop scratching and huddle beneath the wooden steps.
By noon, the air changed. The smell of burning rubber began to drift across the railway embankment, followed by the distant, chaotic roar of a crowd moving down from Mushin. It was a sound like the approach of a great storm—a low, multi-voiced growl punctuated by the sharp crack-crack of tear gas canisters being fired by the paramilitary police.
My father rushed into the room, his face pale beneath his ink stains, and began slamming the wooden window shutters closed. He barred the heavy door with two long pieces of timber, turning our bright room into a dark, suffocating box. We sat on the floor beneath the bed—my mother, my younger sister, and myself—our backs pressed against the cool plaster of the wall.
Through the narrow cracks in the window shutters, I could see the street outside. A group of young men had dragged several massive lorry tires into the middle of the road and set them alight. The black smoke that rose from the tires was thick and greasy, blocking out the afternoon sun until the street looked as though it were dusk. The flames were orange tongues that licked at the low-hanging electrical wires above.
Then came the soldiers. They arrived in open-top green trucks, their faces hidden behind dark sunglasses, their arms holding black automatic rifles. They did not look like men; they looked like iron entities, extensions of the machinery of state that had no ears for crying or eyes for blood. When they fired their weapons into the air, the sound was a hard, metallic rip that seemed to tear the very fabric of the air above our roof.
My mother pulled my head down into her lap, her large hands covering my ears, pressing my face into the soft, familiar cotton of her buba. In that darkness, beneath the smell of her lavender talcum powder and the sour tang of the eko sheets on her skirt, I could hear the rapid, frantic beating of her heart. It was a wild, trapped sound, completely different from the steady, confident rhythm she kept when she was stirring the iron pot.
We stayed under that bed for six hours, listening to the city tear itself apart outside our door. When the night finally came and the shouting died down into a low, smouldering silence, my father opened the shutters. The air that rushed into the room was heavy with the smell of burnt rubber, tear gas, and something else—a sharp, metallic scent that I later learned was the smell of spent gunpowder on hot asphalt.
The next morning, the street was a graveyard of broken glass and black, circular scars where the tyres had burned. But by noon, the market women were back on the corners, their wooden trays balanced on their heads; the yellow buses were roaring down the road once more; and my father was downstairs, his body swaying in time with the thud-thud of the Heidelberg press. The city had swallowed its grief and its terror in a single night, digesting it into the daily marrow of its survival.
***
There is a specific quality to the light in Fadeyi during the harmattan season, that brief period between December and January when the dry winds from the Sahara desert sweep down across the West African coast. The wind carries a fine, microscopic dust that hangs in the air for weeks, turning the brilliant blue of the Lagos sky into a soft, milky pearl color. The sun looks like a silver disc, its heat filtered and subdued by the dust screen above.
During the harmattan, everything in our world became coated in a thin, pale film of grey sand. It settled on the leaves of the neem trees, on the hoods of the rusted cars parked along the railway line, and on our skin. Our lips would crack and bleed if we did not rub them with white Vaseline, and our shins would turn an ashen grey, showing white tracks if you scratched them with a fingernail.
For me, this was the season of reading. My father, despite his meager income, had an agreement with one of the local book sellers who operated an open-air stall beneath the Fadeyi flyover. In exchange for printing some business cards or flyers, my father would bring home crates of second-hand books that had been imported from England in giant, water-damaged containers.
These books were old, their pages brown and brittle, their covers missing or stained with the ring marks of coffee cups from kitchens thousands of miles away. Many of them were school editions of poetry and classical literature—texts that had been discarded by academies across the ocean only to find their resurrection in the dust of a Lagos slum.
It was in those harmattan afternoons, sitting on the roof of our tenement building with my back against the warm brick of the chimney stack, that I first encountered the power of written words. I read of landscapes where the earth was damp and green and full of ancient, unburied secrets. It was a strange, disjointed experience: my eyes would be tracking lines about winter snows I had never seen, while my ears were filled with the immediate, raucous reality of my own world—the shouting of the water vendors carting their iron drums down the street, the blast of the train horn, and the loud, syncopated rhythm of Fuji music blasting from a record store at the corner.
Yet, instead of creating a division in my mind, those old books acted as a sieve through which I began to view my own surroundings. I realized that the poetic impulse was simply the act of paying attention—of looking so closely at the world around you that the ordinary objects of your daily life began to glow with a hidden significance.
"If a writer could find a universe in a bucket of water drawn from a dark well, why could I not find one in the plastic jerry cans we carried to the borehole every Saturday morning? If an old tool could become an instrument of art, why not my father’s ink-stained wooden ruler, or Tunde’s wire toy cars, or my mother’s polished orogun paddle?" I thought.
***
The final break from the world of my childhood came when I was fifteen, the year the government decided to expand the Ikorodu Road corridor into a modern, multi-lane highway. It was an ambitious project of modernization, but for the people of Fadeyi, it was a sentence of erasure.
One morning, a group of officials from the ministry of physical planning arrived accompanied by three yellow bulldozers and a truckload of armed policemen. They did not knock on doors or issue warnings; they simply took large cans of red spray paint and walked down our street, leaving a giant, crude X on the front walls of every third house. The mark was called the "demolition cross," a modern hieroglyph that meant your home stood in the path of progress.
Our house received its cross directly between the ground-floor window of my father’s workshop and the wooden doorway that led to our stairs. For three weeks, we lived in a state of suspended animation, packing our lives into cardboard boxes and woven plastic bags while the yellow monsters chewed through the neighboring streets.
The sound of the bulldozers was different from the sound of the train or the printing press. It was an irregular, destructive crunch—the sound of seasoned timber splintering, of old mud bricks crumbling into powder, and of zinc roofs being torn from their rafters with a sound like a screaming animal. The dust raised by the demolition was different too; it was a thick, choking cloud of lime and ancient soot that smelled of old mortar and the vanished privacies of fifty years of domestic life.
On the day our house was to fall, my father did not stay to watch. He had managed to rent a small, damp garage in the distant suburbs of Bariga, and he left early in the morning with the Heidelberg press loaded onto the back of a rented Bedford lorry. I stood on the opposite side of the railway line, my feet sinking into the hot slag between the wooden sleepers, and watched the yellow bucket of the excavator swing toward our roof.
The machine hit the upper room first—the room where I had sat during the harmattan reading. The walls collapsed outward with a sudden, heavy sigh, revealing for a brief second the interior geography of our life: the square of blue paint where my sister’s bed had stood, the dark oil mark on the wall where my father used to lean his head after a long shift, and the small wooden shelf where my mother kept her wrapped packets of eko.
As the roof caved in, a massive flock of white egrets—birds that usually lived in the marshes behind the railway—rose into the air, their wings brilliant against the grey dust cloud. They circled once over the ruins of Fadeyi, their long necks tucked back, before flying away toward the open water of the lagoon.
***
Now, many years later, I live in a world that is clean, quiet, and completely devoid of the smell of kerosene or printing ink. I sit at a desk in a room with white walls, my fingers typing these words onto a silent, glowing screen. There are no Danfo buses outside my window, no railway lines to shake the glass, and no smoke from burning tires to darken the afternoon sky.
Yet, when I close my eyes, the grey sand of Fadeyi still rises behind my eyelids. I look at my own hands, clean and uncalloused, and I realize that the pen I hold is my own version of my father’s Heidelberg press. I am still trying to square the margins, still trying to feed the blank white sheets into the machinery of my mind, hoping that they will emerge bearing the crisp, dark architecture of our survival.
We do not leave our childhoods behind; we carry them in the marrow of our bones. My truth is dry, loud, and written in the grease and dust of a Lagos railway line. It is the long, slow work of the mind reaching back into the dark earth of what we used to be, trying to find the small, bright things that remain straight, true, and unbroken by the passing of the train.
I still have that last porcelain teacup from our kitchen in Fadeyi, the only one that survived the move to Bariga.
Sometimes, when the modern world feels too smooth, too empty of friction, I turn it over in the morning light. There, right on the curve of the handle where my father’s thumb used to rest, is a permanent ghost-smudge of violet ink, baked into the glaze by decades of heat and sweat. I press my own clean thumb against it, feeling the slight ridge where the porcelain meets the stain, and I realize the terrifying truth of what I have done.
I have spent my entire adult life writing thousands of words to describe the horizon, while all along, the entire world I was searching for was trapped under the fingernails of a man who never had the time to read a single line I wrote.
The author, Joseph Marcel, Ikhenoba is a Biochemist by profession and a passionate writer. He has published several poems, articles and stories which have been published in Amazon, Poetry South, Active Muse, Short story.net, Poem Hunters, Core Humanity Commons, Academia.edu, Writers Space Africa, Goodreads, Afri-Library and Kinsman Quarterly. Semi-finalist for Black Diaspora Award, shortlisted for Natives Award, and longlisted for Iridescence and Dr. Paul Kalanithi writing awards in 2024. He likes sports, writing and scientific researches.
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