Murphy nodded, a bit out of breath. “I needed you to see, though. Give it a few days and the very air will be flammable. We have more than one oil spill every day here. In an area that’s already polluted,” Murphy said. “These oil companies are so sloppy in their mining of crude oil. They don’t care. It’s not their home. This new spill happened last night! It is not as big as the Exxon Valdez spill, but it is very, very bad. You see for yourself, do you see anyone here? No one is doing anything about it.”

Sunny sighed as she watched, trying not to think of her own problems. As Anatov said, the world was bigger than her. In some parts, the world was literally dying. Her father held his bowl of groundnuts down for her and she took a few. As she shelled one of them, he offered his bottle of beer. “Need a sip?” he asked.

When she looked up and met his eyes, they both burst out laughing. He took a gulp and put the bottle back on the side table, and Sunny popped a groundnut into her mouth.

The only woman interviewed spoke in Pidgin English and had a shell-shocked look about her. But her words made Sunny’s skin prickle and her head feel light. “I come to see the water las’ night. Wetin my eye see na one big thing wey be like animal as it dey descend into the water from air. Like some masquerade tin’. Ah-ah, mek these people stop wetin dem dey do, o . . . Because it don begin to attract evil, o!”

The woman’s words hit Sunny hard. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath. A “masquerade thing” descending into the crude oil-soaked water? Was this Ekwensu? Did that Lamb woman just tell all of Nigeria that she’d seen Ekwensu? Sunny remembered when she’d encountered Ekwensu last year at the shrine beside the gas station, the oily, greasy smell, like car exhaust. Sunny could imagine Ekwensu tearing open a tanker and then bathing in the freshly spilled crude oil, a substance toxic to the flesh of the earth. If Ekwensu had just forced her way into the mundane world, such a “bath” would probably strengthen her.

Sunny moved closer to her father. He took another deep gulp of his beer and belched loudly. “This is not normal,” he said. “Everything in that creek will be dead by tomorrow, the people are getting poisoned, the whole place could go up in flames. It’s not even on international news.”

Sunny slowly got up, her legs feeling like jelly. “I should finish studying,” she said. Her father grunted, his eyes still on the TV where they were now talking about a murder in Lagos.

The next morning, when she received her daily Leopard newspaper, she didn’t find one mention of the oil spill in the entire paper. Her father was right; this wasn’t normal at all.