Ruth's pov
Lagos was noisy. Always. But my little room in Agege had nights that went completely silent.
It was one of those nights, three months after I moved in.
I couldn't sleep. The heat stuck to my skin, and my chest felt tight like it did in the compound. I sat up on the thin mattress, my knees pulled in. I hadn't prayed in years. What was the point?
But that night, the silence got heavy.
Then it changed.
The room dimmed, but not from darkness. It was like someone turned the volume down on the world. The smell of sewage from the street, the hum of a generator down the road… all gone.
And there was light. Soft. Gold, like late afternoon sun, but it came from everywhere at once.
I wasn't afraid. That was the strange part. For the first time in months, my body stopped shaking.
A presence filled the room. I couldn't see a face. Just the light. Warm. Like a hand on my back when I was a child and Mama used to say, "Ruth, breathe, pikin."
I opened my mouth. No words came. Just tears.
Then the images came, fast, like someone flipping pages I didn't want to read.
The compound. The truck. The bridge. Frank's face in the shadows. Mami Jeanne's wrinkled hands on mine at the clinic.
Every night. Every hand. Every boot.
The light didn't look away.
And something in me broke.
The tears dried up. The shaking started again, but different. Hotter.
"Why?" My voice was raw. It started as a whisper and tore out of me.
"Why You?!"
I stood up, even though my legs were weak. I was shouting at the light now, at the room, at everything.
"You were there! You saw all of it! Every night, every day, faces I didn't know, hands I didn't want! I stopped screaming because no one was listening. Were You listening too?!"
My chest heaved. I gripped the edge of the window frame until my knuckles went white.
"If You are God… if You are real… why did You let them take me? Why did You let them beat me until I wasn't human? Why this sickness in my blood now? Why did You watch and do nothing?!"
The anger was ugly. It felt like vomit I'd been holding down for years.
"My mother prayed to You. I prayed to You as a small girl. Was it for this? To end up on a bridge, begging a man not to kill me? To be called 'too sick to work' and thrown away like trash?!"
The light didn't move. It didn't flash or boom. It just stayed.
I slid to the floor, back against the wall, spent. My throat hurt from screaming. My face was wet.
"I'm alive," I choked out. "But God… was it worth it? Was any of this worth it?"
Silence again.
But this time, it wasn't empty. It was waiting.
I didn't get an answer that night. Not in words.
All I got was the quiet, and the gold light fading slow, like it wasn't in a hurry to leave me there alone on the floor.
I was still angry. Still bleeding on the inside. Still Ruth, with HIV and scars and a name I almost lost.
I thought of everything.
The way I screamed into pillows until my throat bled.
The way I begged God to let me die but He stayed silent.
And something in me snapped.
A darkness I didn't know I carried rose to the surface like oil in water.
"If I must suffer," I whispered, "then they will too."
I looked at the prescription in my drawer the one from the clinic. The one that confirmed it.
HIV positive.
A parting gift from that life.
I stared at the paper. Then laughed. A cold, bitter sound that even scared me.
"I will give men this disease," I said to the darkness. "Every last one of them."
It was not revenge.
It was justice. My own kind of justice.
They broke me. Shattered me.
Now I would become the fire that burned them back.
No more .
I kept sleeping with men, sharing the disease with them, watching their lives spiral. Some would cry, beg for forgiveness, but I didn't care. They were paying for what they did to me, for every single man who took something from me, for every night I spent screaming in the dark. They were all going to burn.
I managed to get a job as a sales girl in a store The work was mundane nothing that could hold my attention for long. I hated it. I hated the way people smiled at me like I was just another girl doing her job, unaware of the darkness that churned inside me. I would force myself to smile back, to pretend everything was fine, but inside I was a mess. Angry. Sad. I felt dirty all the time.
Sometimes, I'd walk around the store, scanning the shelves, feeling like I was suffocating in my own skin. I could barely look at myself in the mirror anymore, the reflection of who I used to be was gone, replaced by this hollow shell. I hated her. The girl I once was. The girl who prayed for mercy. She didn't deserve mercy. She deserved nothing.
But the anger it wasn't enough anymore. The darkness inside me kept growing, turning every moment into something unbearable. It wasn't just about vengeance anymore. It was about feeling something anything that could numb the pain. The numbness was all I had left.
Some nights, I'd stare at the moon through my window, wondering if anyone else had ever felt this way. If anyone had ever been pushed so far that there was nothing left but rage and coldness. But then I'd realize, it didn't matter. It didn't matter if I was alone in this feeling. What mattered was that I was surviving. I was still here...