Premonition | Kiisi Adedipe
I notice too much for my own good. The slight shift in someone’s tone, the way their gaze lingers a second too long. Details others ignore lodge themselves in my mind like splinters. So, it doesn’t escape me that Oba has been acting strange.
At Yellow Chilli, he barely touched his phone to check those stocks of his, always in need of resurrection power. Instead, his eyes studied me with an unsettling intensity. He meticulously listed my allergies to the waiter, reciting them from memory as if they were his own. The same man who never fails to tease me that my two years in America as a child weakened my stomach.
“If you stare at me like that one more time, I’ll chook this fork in your eyes.” I tighten my grip around the cold metal, angling it at him, only half-joking.
His laugh doesn’t reach his eyes. He returns to his food, poking the yam porridge until it grows cold, like a child forced to eat.
When we leave, he insists on driving me home with my driver trailing behind. We live in the same estate, so I let him.
The car ride is silent, like the awkward end of a first date between people who already know they’ll never see each other again—not in this life and certainly not in the next.
Soft melodies from our best songs fill the space between us, but neither of us sings along. The silence starts to feel heavier than it should. His fingers drum against the steering wheel a little too hard and slightly offbeat. It’s subtle, but it gets to me.
“You’ve been acting weird,” I finally say, my voice sharper than I intended. “Is it Diana? Are you guys having problems?”
Oba doesn’t flinch at her name. “D and I? We’re good.” His eyes remain on the road, his fingers still tapping that restless rhythm.
“Is it work?”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine, Teni. Really.”
His reassurance does nothing to ease my anxiety. The rest of the drive is quiet, but far from comfortable. I catch him stealing glances at me from the corner of my eye, and I almost blurt out, If you’re not going to talk to me, don’t stare at me. But I swallow the words. They taste bitter, like an unripe fruit.
We pull up to the black gate shielding my home, its rust freckles defying the estate management’s relentless obsession with maintaining an ‘elite’ image.
“Thank you.” The disingenuity in my tone is clear as glass, but I couldn’t be bothered. I was fine on my own, in the backseat of my own car, listening to Peter, my driver, cook up yet another thing in the car that needs fixing.
We’re too grown for this, call me when you’re ready to talk. I want to say it, but I let the door speak for me instead. It slams shut, splitting the night’s silence.
I make a mental note to ask Sola about Oba the next time we speak. If he wouldn’t talk to me, at least he’d talk to his cousin.
I’ve always found them to be an interesting duo, ever since we met nine years ago at a Nigerian Students Association event at our predominantly white college in Lafayette. Oba’s height alone could be every Nigerian parent’s proof that eating beans really does make you taller. Sola, on the other hand, barely reached my shoulders, but what she lacked in height, she more than made up for in presence.
I walked into that meeting reluctantly, half-dragged by my roommate, Ify, who insisted we needed to ‘find our people.’ In my freshman year, the last thing I cared about was a gathering of minorities.
At the front of the conference room were Oba and Sola, going back and forth about something I can’t even remember now. But it’s hard to forget how well they balanced each other, Sola’s curt, fast-paced words clashing against Oba’s slow, deliberate replies. It didn’t take long before I found myself in their orbit.
*
Sola beats me to it. Her call wakes me at a quarter to six, dragging me out of sleep that had barely settled.
I groan, reaching for the phone on my bamboo nightstand. “Sola, it’s not even six.” I say, not hiding my displeasure. My morning voice is gruff.
“Good morning to you too,” she says, entirely too awake for this hour. “I’m outside.”
I sit up instantly. “Ehn? Outside where?” My back stings in response to the sudden movement.
“Your house, madam.”
“This estate will just be letting anybody in,” I mumble, surprised at my early morning humour.
“Girl, my aunt and uncle live two streets away. Come and open your door.”
Sola never shows up unannounced unless it’s urgent or dramatic. With her, the line between the two is often blurred.
When I step outside, she’s leaning against her grey sedan, arms crossed. Her lightly washed denim shorts hang loosely around her waist, and an oversized Manchester United jersey—probably Oba’s—swallows her torso.
The sky is still a deep shade of blue, the air crisp with a fleeting serenity that only exists before the whole of Lagos wakes up.
“What’s up?” I ask, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, suddenly aware of my morning breath and the way one sleeve of my faded nightgown droops off my shoulder.
She studies me, as if deciding my readiness for whatever situation brought her here. Then, without warning, she grabs my arm, her acrylics digging into my skin. “Let’s go inside.”
We barely make it to the living room before she perches on the edge of my sofa. “Why were you in my dream last night?”
“That’s what you came to ask me? This couldn’t have been a text?” I start heading upstairs. “While you’re here, maybe you can make us breakfast? There’s bread in the—”
“Omoteniola.” She draws out each syllable, a command that halts me mid-step.
The usual mischief in her eyes is gone, replaced by something I don’t recognize. “It was a scary dream.”
I’ve seen my friend wade through the most chaotic Lagos traffic, arguing with conductors as if they weren’t twice her size. I’ve watched her negotiate prices in markets with a ferocity that made even the most hardened sellers relent. So if she calls something scary, I know better than to ignore it.
I turn around and head to the armchair across from her, the fatigue in my eyes giving way to worry. “What happened?”
Her voice is mellow like a lullaby. “You were in a car accident.” She speaks slowly, carefully, as if rushing the words might make them real. “There was rain, so much rain. I was trying to get to you, I kept shouting your name, but you weren’t moving, Teni.”
An unwelcome chill rushes through me and settles in my bones. I sit down and lean towards her, my hands folded between my knees. “Where was I?”
“I don’t know. It was dark. There was a white car, I think. It all happened so fast.”
The weight of her words feels like an invisible yoke. “You know it’s just a dream, right?”
“I know. But please stay safe.”
“Yes, ma.” I try to lighten the mood, though I feel anything but light. “Don’t tell Oba and Ify. I don’t want them to worry.”
*
The next morning, Ify calls on my way to work. The roads are expectedly busy and Peter is muttering under his breath as he navigates through the tangled web of early morning traffic. The call interrupts the music playing in my AirPods and I stare at Ify’s face on the screen.
“Are you okay?” Her usually bright voice is laced with worry.
I sigh. “Did Sola tell you about her dream?”
“What dream?” Her voice sharpens.
“Never mind.”
“Teniola? What dream?” She sounds more concerned.
“She had a dream that I was in an accident,” I say reluctantly.
Ify takes a moment to respond. The silence stretches a delicate thread between us. “I had a dream too.”
“What happened?” I ask, dreading her answer.
She adjusts her glasses. They take up half of her petite face. “I didn’t see how it happened. I just knew you were gone.”
I frown. “Gone where?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. I was looking for you, but nobody could tell me where you were.”
“Okay, this is weird now. I don’t like it.”
“But I’ve been praying,” she adds quickly. “I told my fellowship about it, and they’ve been praying too. Nothing bad will happen to you. Not when you haven’t given me my godchildren yet.”
She succeeds in getting me to crack a smile. “In that case, tell your fellowship to pray for a husband for me, too. I can’t make babies on my own.”
“In this day and age, you probably can—”
Peter slams the brake and horn simultaneously, the sudden movement jolting my body forward against the seatbelt. My phone drops out my hand and tumbles somewhere underneath the seat before me. The car swerves sharply to the right, and for a split second, my 28 years of life flash before my eyes. Not in a linear progression but in fragments: my mother’s face, graduation day, last Christmas with Oba, Sola, and Ify. My mother’s face again.
We narrowly avoid the oncoming vehicle, a white SUV with tinted windows that appeared from nowhere. My heart pounds like it’s seeking a way out. The taste of fear is metallic on my tongue. A white car, like Sola mentioned.
“Sorry, Madam,” Peter’s voice breaks through my panic.
Only then did I realize Ify was still on the call. She called out my name enough times for me to find my phone in my daze. Her eyes were widened with alarm. A second longer and she would have bursted out in tears. “Teniola, oh my God, Teniola, are you okay? What was that?”
I try to steady myself, throwing my head back on the headrest. “We almost hit another car. Someone was driving against the traffic. I’m fine, though.” I stare blankly at the phone, sneaking in some deep breaths.
She leans closer to the screen, enough for me to see her tiny freckles. “Are you sure?”
“I’m okay,” I lie. My left hand won’t stop shaking.
*
I leave work earlier than usual because my mind is everywhere but there. I need answers, not more questions, and the only person I haven’t talked to is Oba. The same Oba who’s been acting weird for days.
He is waiting for me at the buka across from my office building. The dusty ceiling fan above our table makes an incessant static noise that competes with the loud chatter around us. I notice the familiar scents of native soups in the air. It is rich and nostalgic.
I tell Oba about the dreams and the white SUV, expecting him to dismiss them as superstitions. I need his reassurance. I search his face for a response, but his broad shoulders tighten, telling me there’s something he isn’t saying.
“I had a dream too.” His words don’t land. They crash, splintering the last of my composure.
I was one more ‘I had a dream’ away from losing what’s left of my mind and here it was. If my mother hears about these dreams, she’ll leave my sister and her baby in America and take the first flight she finds to Lagos. Her first line of action will be to quarantine me indefinitely because only the living can work. Then, she’ll gather my friends for a prayer meeting and scold us all that if we spent half as much time praying as we did planning brunches, they wouldn’t be having dreams straight from the pit of hell.
“And you didn’t say anything?”
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
“So you just decided to hover over me like a hawk?” My voice rises, drawing the attention of an older couple to our left. On a normal day, I would have offered a polite nod and smile, admitting my breach of public decorum. But everything happening has been anything but normal.
“I didn’t know what else to do.” There’s a helplessness in his voice I’ve never heard before. The Oba I know who usually makes sense of chaos is now adrift in the same uncertainty that’s drowning me.
I hesitate. “What happened in your dream?”
He looks down at his hands, now fidgeting with a serviette. “I didn’t see you. I just knew something had already gone wrong. And I knew it was too late.” His eyes meet mine, burdened with grief over what hasn’t happened yet.
“What do you mean by ‘too late’?”
He doesn’t answer. And neither of us pushes further.
*
It is hard to sleep at night. How could I when the three people I trust the most with my life have all warned me that it might be in danger, and there’s nothing any of them can do about it? Each time I close my eyes, I see that white SUV, hear the screech of tires, and feel the jolt forward. The incident in the car doubled my paranoia.
The darkness in my bedroom feels alive, watching and waiting. I hear the distant car horns, the chorus of generators, and the occasional bark of my neighbour’s dog. Life moves on as usual, while mine hangs in limbo.
My phone lights up with a message from my mother: a picture of her cradling her first and only grandchild that I am yet to meet. The thought of not making it to America this summer crosses my mind, and I fight back the pool of tears threatening to fall. I tuck my phone in my nightstand and force myself toward the sleep that refuses to come.
*
The next day brings the kind of Lagos downpour that turns the streets into rivers and traffic into a standstill nightmare. I stare out my floor-to-ceiling office window, watching the rain hammer the ground with a violence.
Peter took my car to the mechanic because of a faulty alternator, and now they’re both stuck there. Sola is my ride home today. I dash through the rain toward her car, shielding my leather bag in a futile attempt to keep it dry. Through the foggy window, I watch as she frantically clears the passenger seat, sweeping away takeaway bags, notebooks, and what looks like half her wardrobe onto the back seat. By the time she unlocks the door, I’m already soaked, my silk blouse clinging uncomfortably to my skin.
“Pele,” She smiles sheepishly, watching me shiver like a dog. “I didn’t know you’d be out so fast.”
My scowl is all the cue she needs to start driving. We’re barely ten minutes into our journey when Sola’s phone rings through the car speakers. Ify’s name flashes on the screen.
“Babe, what’s up?” Sola answers, eyes still fixed on the road ahead, where her windshield wipers battle furiously against the rain.
“Sola,” Ify’s voice is breathless and panicked. “I’m on Lekki-Epe Expressway. There’s been an accident. It’s Teni’s car, same plate number. Peter is being taken to the hospital now, but there’s no sign of Teni yet. They’re still trying to get into the backseat of the car. It’s crushed.”
Sola’s eyes meet mine, wide with the same horrified realization.
“My car?!” I lean toward the speaker. “What’s it doing on Lekki-Epe Expressway? Peter took it to the mechanic here in Magodo.”
Ify heaves a sigh of relief at the sound of my voice. “Teni? Oh my God. Oh my God. Jesus.”
*
The pungent smell of the hospital antiseptic greets us before the cheery nurse does. Her smile is a forced brightness, out of place in corridors lined with grief. The words refuse to fall out of my mouth when she asks how she can be of help, so Sola speaks on my behalf.
My legs are too heavy to move when she tells us that Peter is undergoing surgery and the doctor will be with us after. Sola, Oba, and Ify guide me to a nearby chair, where I stare blankly into space. I watch, again and again, as the standing fan stirs the pages of pamphlets neatly arranged in their stand. The rhythmic flutter of paper becomes something to focus on instead of the crushing weight of possibility.
I think about Peter. The realization that he never took my car to the mechanic strikes me like a physical blow. Where was he going on Lekki-Epe Expressway? What could have been so important that he’d lie about it? Any rage I might have felt over his dishonesty dissolves as I think of his wife and their three-year-old son. No wife should become a widow this young. No child should lose their father; I know that void too well.
I faintly hear the words of Ify’s prayers and manage to mouth an Amen. The sound is hollow and I barely recognize it as my own. Sola takes the role of an affectionate mother and strokes my arm lightly in consolation. And true to his name, Oba paces around us like a lion guarding its pride from an enemy they cannot see.
A door creaks open to our left. Our heads turn as a doctor emerges, walking toward the receptionist. He’s tall and lean, his coat slightly wrinkled. After a brief exchange, the receptionist gestures toward us, and he approaches with measured steps.
I can’t bring myself to move, but the rest do, forming a human barrier between me and whatever truth he brings. He speaks to them, his mouth and hands are a pantomime of information I cannot process.
After what feels like an eternity, Ify turns back to me. A tear rolls down her chin as soft sobs slip from her rose-coloured lips.
My heart sinks first. Then my body follows.
Kiisi Adedipe is a finance professional by day, writer by night, and a child of God every second. She is the co-author of Ife, a collection of short love stories, and the founder and co-editor of Saphar Collective Magazine. Kiisi also runs Talking Faith, a Christian blog where she shares lessons from her walk with Jesus. Her dream is not only to continue sharing her own stories with the world but also to provide a platform for others, especially the younger generation, to do the same.
Cover Photo by Artit_Wongpradu