Dante's Fire

The Bird: Chapter Seventy Three

The Bird

Last thing you saw before you died was not the person who shot you, people liked to say. The last thing you saw before you died was a replay of all the things you had done in your life, good or bad, unwinding like a story before your eyes.

Very often, it was people who had never taken a bullet, people who had never been held in the jaws of death that happened to think that. Ayo had not once believed any of that fake shit. There was nothing metaphysical about death. There was nothing spiritual about bolts ripping through flesh in a robbery gone wrong. It was all just science. And art.

Ayo's mother was an immigrant. Nigerian-born, with sticks for fingers and a rib cage for a waist. She had her own peculiar beliefs about death, came carrying them across the Atlantic ocean like luggage, with him curled in her pregnant belly. Ayo had never seen the shores of Nigeria, but he heard its chatter in his mother tongue, and he had tasted its soil in her overly spiced food.

The woman u