May It Not Be Us — A short brief on Miracle Ididi’s story

Miracle Ididi's piece is a first-person, episodic narrative that follows a woman trying to keep her family and her daily life intact while a larger, violent reality closes in. The story moves through small domestic images — Sunday hugs with her husband Ogie, sons Onoshoke and Ikpemi being prepared for church or school, the smell of a neighbor's cooking — and juxtaposes them with news of disappearances, blasts, rapes, and a general atmosphere of dread.

• Rain that brings bones and teeth: An unsettling image linking environmental detail to the presence of death in the street.

The narrator reflects on how bodies and minds carry memory. She describes how the body remembers "a long line of grief," how small hurts accumulate and how the mind delays full recognition of loss until horror becomes immediate. The narrative suggests that repeated exposure to violence makes mourning both more likely and yet harder to perform: people oscillate between prayer and mourning, between trying to stay normal and being swept into panic.

Expect spare, evocative prose that alternates domestic detail and blunt descriptions of communal trauma. The effect is to show how ordinary households cope: through repetition, selective hearing, small reassurances, and an eventual, uneasy recognition that national violence can render those strategies inadequate.

The narrator's insistence — that life continue, that the family be spared — is less a confident claim than a fragile protective ritual. The story examines how private and public grief intersect when danger becomes ordinary.