The River’s Shirt

My name is Blessing, am a 24 years old girl that cleans toilets at an oil camp in Delta, southern Nigeria. The tools I use for my daily work includes mops, bleach, and buckets. The salary is small, but every month I send half to my younger sister so she can finish senior secondary school. To me, that's enough reason to wake up very early every single day.

One night in April an engineer named Mr Onyeka slipped off the jetty and the river swallowed him before our very eyes. The water was black with crude oil, and the current was impatient. They searched for three days and found only his left boot and a wristwatch that kept ticking, as if time itself refused to drown. The next morning the company packed the rest of his belongings into two cheap duffel bags and forgot about him by the next payroll.

I found his shirt that same evening, a light blueish short sleeves, still buttoned lying alone in the communal laundry basket. I lifted it and the smell hit me first, it was an orange zest mixed with salt and diesel. In that very second, I was sixteen again, standing behind Grandma’s hut while my big brother Stevo peeled an orange into my palm, promising to buy me white shoes when the city spat money his way. He left for this same camp six years ago. The same river took him. No boot, no watch, no goodbye.

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I should have dropped the shirt at the store for disposal, but Instead I rolled it into a plastic bag and hid it under my mattress. That night I unfolded it slowly, like a prayer.

“Stevo, is that you?” I whispered but the cloth gave no answer, only the faint scent of orange and sorrow.

Every night after that I opened the bag, breathed in once, refolded the shirt, then slept. The orange smell was faint, but it kept my brother alive in my imagination. From his laugh, to the way he teases me and the gap between his teeth that stored every secret I told him. To me, as long as the shirt smelled of him, he was still breathing somewhere.

Weeks slid by and the orange and oil smell in the shirt faded and my own sweat took over. One night I buried my face in the cloth and smelled nothing except myself. Panic immediately crept in, if the scent died, my brother died again, I thought to myself. “No, no, come back,” I begged the empty room.

I dipped the shirt in river water, even in leftover diesel, trying to buy back the past. Nothing worked, as the river kept its memories to itself. Then came my dream, as Stevo stood waist deep in water holding an orange.

“You can’t keep me in cotton, little sis,” he said.

“I’m scared I’ll forget you,” I cried.

“Then remember me in colour, not in cloth,” he replied, and the current pulled him under.

I woke with tears and knew the time for holding on was running out. The next morning a supply boat arrived and a boy climbed out with a net bag of fresh oranges.

“How much?” I asked.

“A hundred naira for three,” he said.

I bought them, peeled them right there on the jetty, and it was at this point I realized the past is gone but the present is here. I carried the shirt, cut a little piece of it, and dropped the rest into the water.
“Go and tell the river we’re done,” I whispered. It floated for a while, then sank like a blue fish disappearing into night.

Back in the hostel I slipped the small cloth into an empty perfume bottle, added orange peel and a spoon of clean water. “To Stevo, wherever you are,” I said, corking it after I dabbed one drop on my pillow and slept without dreaming for the first time in years.

I still work at the camp, as shifts are twelve hours, sleep is six, grief is 24 hours but lighter now. When the ache comes, I open the bottle, breathe once, close it. My heart keeps beating, my brother stays free, and the river keeps rolling carrying away what we no longer need to carry alone.

If you ever pass the Bori Camp in Delta and see a girl in orange coveralls pressing a tiny bottle to her nose, don’t call her crazy. She is just talking to the water, to the past, to the scent of love that refused to drown.