The Prodigal Father by Uduak-Abasi Ekong

Read a new short story set in Nigeria and written by Uduak-Abasi Ekong. One day, a mysterious man arrives at a family's door, claiming to be their father returning after long years of absence. But there is great unease about him in the mind of one of his children.

'The Prodigal Father' was the winning story from the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2026 and is part of the New Short Stories 2026 anthology, which is out now.

The man who walked in was not the one who left. I knew the moment his head cleared the doorway without stooping. Papa used to duck at that threshold like it was instinct – bend at the waist, tilt the neck and lead with the right foot – but this man, he walked in like the house had never known his height. Mama’s scream tore through the quiet like a rip in cloth when she saw him. Then, she ran towards him and flung herself at him as if her body could sew the lost years back together.

‘Obot! Obot! Is this really you?’ She wept, collapsing at his feet.

She clutched him like a person drowning grabs driftwood while he just stood there, watching.

Then came the singing, ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’. Each word trembled from her mouth as she dabbed her tears with the edge of her wrapper. That was her way. When speech failed, she let worship do the job. She looked at me through her tears, expectant I’d join her. I usually did, like when my WAEC result came in, when she landed that catering gig in Uyo, and when I gained admission to the polytechnic, but not today.

I stood by the shelf of old, damp newspapers, with my arms folded tight across my chest. We weren’t even supposed to be home. We would have missed this man if Mama hadn’t spent half the morning condemning the party we were headed to. It was Papa’s brother, Uncle Udom’s birthday party. While powdering her face in front of the mirror, Mama kept pausing between strokes to talk about how Udom and his wife ruined our lives and how nothing good ever came from their door. She’d been saying so since Papa left.

‘They were always begging your father for money. When he stopped giving them, they chased him,’ she said the year Papa left.

‘How did they chase him?’ I asked, but received no response.

A few years later, she claimed Udom’s wife had tried to trap Papa with juju. ‘Check under her bed, you’ll see feathers, calabash, and your father’s picture,’ she said.

‘Have you seen them before?’ I asked again.

‘They never liked us. Your father said Udom has been jealous of him since they were children. They’re the ones that made him leave,’ she said.

But I was there when Papa left and it had nothing to do with Uncle Udom or his wife. That morning, I was crouched outside beside the firewood stack, waiting for the kettle to boil, while the harmattan air made ghosts of my breaths. Mama had gone out early to cater for a traditional marriage in the next village. Our neighbour, Ikanke, was beside me, cracking palm kernels to soak in garri. That was our morning ritual before fetching water. Papa hated that sound of stone against nuts, but we did it anyway, claiming it gave us energy for our trip to the stream.

‘Be fast before Papa hears,’ I whispered as Ikanke cracked away.

Suddenly, the door opened and Ikanke and I abandoned the nuts to hide behind the kitchen. Papa peeped left and right before walking out.

‘Papa, where are you going?’ I asked, emerging from behind the kitchen.

He looked startled, like a child caught stealing.

‘I thought you’d gone to the stream,’ he said, rubbing his head. Then he bent down, hugged me gently, and walked away. That was it. No bag or a goodbye, just ten years of silence from thereon. I told that story a hundred times, and so did Ikanke, but Mama never believed it. She clung to her version and blamed Udom and his wife.

Now, here stood a man, claiming to be Papa with his arms open and empty, claiming to come back to us. And Mama ran into that embrace like it could save her.

They held each other for minutes before he turned to me.

‘Emem,’ he said, reaching out.

‘I’m Mfon,’ I replied with my arms still folded.

He paused, then smiled like nothing was wrong. His face had aged three decades already in the past ten.

‘Ah, you’ve grown o,’ he said, pulling me into a hug. I let him, but my arms stayed limp.

He looked like Papa but smelled of damp wood, not palm wine and kola like he should, and his skin sagged in places Papa’s skin never did.

‘Where’s Emem?’ he asked.

‘She died,’ I said flatly. ‘She fell while tapping wine,’ I added, a lie dressed like truth to test him.

Papa taught Emem to tap wine before she could speak. She was a legend in Ikot Andom and tapped wine for the chief’s daughter’s wedding, the chief’s funeral, and nearly every high-end occasion in the village. But she died when I was thirteen. A snake bit her when she was plucking mangoes from the tree in our compound, and she fell and snapped her neck like a twig. Her death had nothing to do with palm wine. If he knew her, like Papa did, he’d know my story couldn’t be true.

‘Chai,’ he said, ‘I should have taught her how to climb. Na me do this one,’ he added, clutching his head. And I knew then, whoever this man was, he wasn’t Papa.

He asked for water, and I turned to get him some, but he held my shoulder.

‘I’ll get it myself,’ he said, like a child insisting he’s grown.

I looked at Mama, and she looked back, startled. Papa had never entered the kitchen. He called it an abomination for a man to. But this man wobbled towards the corridor like he needed to prove something. Two doors faced him, left and right, and he opened the left first, peeked in, and stepped back. That was the bedroom he once shared with Mama. Then he tried the one by the right, my room, still wrong. Only then did he drift down the corridor, towards the kitchen at its end, like he couldn’t recognise the same house he’d left.

That night, I tiptoed out of my room and leaned against the termite-eaten door of theirs with my breath shallow and my ear pressed to the wood, waiting to hear the answers I was sure would come. Where had he been? What had he seen? Who had he become?

But there was nothing. Just snoring and the rustle of rats in the ceiling. I waited for half an hour then turned back to my room, defeated.

The window was open and the moonlight beamed in when I returned.

‘Ikanke?’ I whispered, sweeping my phone’s torchlight across the room. She was sitting cross-legged beside my mat with four sachets of Chelsea dry gin in front of her.

‘Oya, give me gist,’ she whispered, rubbing her hands together. ‘Where did he go? Does he have another wife? Other children? Do you think they’ll fight you people for this house when he dies?’ she asked, passing me one of the sachets.

‘Ikanke!’ I hissed, tearing it open with my teeth.

‘What? These are important questions,’ she said, draining hers in a single gulp.

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered. ‘Mama hasn’t asked, or maybe she asked when I wasn’t around. I sha don’t know.’

‘You sef, can’t you just open your mouth and ask him by yourself?’ She rolled her eyes.

‘He won’t answer me. You remember how Papa used to say I asked too many stupid questions,’ I paused, then leaned closer. ‘But, Ikanke …’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think that man is Papa.’

‘Ahn ahn, why?’ She blinked.

Before I could respond, the door creaked open. The man stood there in a sagging white singlet that barely covered his lower half. My torchlight blinked off in my hand as Ikanke silently scurried behind the door.

‘Do you know where I put the green bag?’ he asked.

‘You didn’t bring any green bag. You didn’t bring anything,’ I said.

‘Yes, I did. I bought oranges for you and Emem, and I put them in the green bag,’ he said, scratching his head.

‘You didn’t bring a bag,’ I repeated. ‘And Emem is dead.’

‘If she’s dead, who was I talking to this morning? Ehn? Who collected my bag?’

‘You were talking to me, but I did not collect any bag.’

‘Why are you lying?’ he screamed.

‘What’s happening?’ I heard Mama ask as she stepped into the room with a flashlight. Its beam caught the confusion on his face, fright in mine, and Ikanke crouched behind the door.

‘Ikanke! What are you doing here?’ she snapped.

‘Sorry Ma,’ Ikanke whispered as Mama rolled her eyes at her.

No one knew who fathered Ikanke, and her mother was rumoured to have served half the local council men and a few palace guards too. That legacy disqualified Ikanke from having any friends in my Mama’s eyes.

Ikanke picked up the rest of her drink and dived out the window. 

‘I’ve warned you not to let that girl enter this house,’ Mama hissed. Then, she turned to the man, took his arm gently, and led him away as if she was guiding a sleepwalker. I tried to tell her everything – what he said and what he thought he’d seen – but she didn’t listen. Her rage focused on my friendship with Ikanke and not the stranger under our roof.

Mama wore her Christmas lace in July and dragged the man to church that Sunday. Our pastor, bloated with certainty, claimed it was his prayers that summoned the man home. At the altar, he made us kneel – me, Mama, and that man – and prayed for ‘unity in the family’. Everyone shouted 'Amen' while I stayed silent. When the prayer ended, Mama and I returned to our seats, but the man kept walking, past us and all the pews, and right out the door.

The weeks that followed were like a shirt hem coming loose one thread at a time. The man started calling my Mama ‘Ngozi,’ a name that wasn’t hers and wasn’t even from her tribe. But, Mama didn’t correct him. He also said he’d return to his old job at the village radio station, though it had been shut down since the year before he left. He called me Emem again and again until my name stopped feeling like mine.

One Saturday morning, he stood before the door and kept slamming it with both hands.

‘It won’t open,’ he yelled. ‘Where are the keys?’

‘It’s here,’ I said, showing him the keys in the lock.

‘Ah,’ he said softly as I turned the lock and opened the door. He stood for a few seconds, staring at the mango tree outside, and then he turned around.

‘I’ve forgotten where I was going,’ he said and headed back inside.

When Mama returned from work that evening, I tried to tell her what had happened.

‘That man is not Papa,’ I said.

She pinched my lips shut between her thumb and forefinger. ‘If you say anything that makes your father leave again …’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘I will hold you responsible, so better keep quiet and leave him alone.’

So I did. I kept quiet when he put his palm in the fire while roasting corn, spoke to Emem’s empty chair during meals like she was still alive, dug a small pit by the compound and buried a piece of fried yam wrapped in leaves like an offering, plucked mangoes and said he was taking them to his mother — a woman who’d died before I was even born. I kept the silence Mama demanded.

And then, one Tuesday, Mama returned from the market and found the Bible – her oldest one, the one with oil stains and underlined verses – torn out. She found the man squatting over the latrine, naked, and wiping with the pages of Lamentations.

‘Blood of Jesus,’ she cried.

‘The tissue finished,’ he replied, unbothered.

‘Why didn’t you ask Mfon for paper?’ Tears filled her eyes.

He looked up at her and frowned, ‘Why are you shouting? It’s just paper.’

She stared at him with her mouth wide open before turning to me. ‘You, why didn’t you collect it from him?’

‘You said I should leave him alone,’ I said.

She slapped the back of my head and asked me to call Pastor. That night, when Pastor came to the house, Mama laid the half-torn Bible on the table like it was evidence in a trial. They lit candles around the man like he was in a golden cage, and wax dripped down his knees. When it touched him, he started screaming. For the first time, I saw fear in his eyes.

He tried to run but his legs stumbled, and he tripped on a candle and fell face-first into the fire. When Mama tried to pull him away, he screamed even louder.

‘That is the devil fighting back,’ Pastor said as he continued to speak in tongues while Mama wailed, the man screamed, and I watched. When he was tired of screaming, he fell asleep in the middle of the candles.

That night, Mama smeared anointing oil over his forehead and laid her mat in the living room to sleep, away from him.

‘I think Mama is starting to see it,’ I told Ikanke when she snuck in later. She brought a bottle of palm wine she had tapped herself, and we sat by the window, bathed in the moonlight as we drank.

‘Hmmmm, I’m beginning to worry about you people o,’ she said. ‘I heard what happened when Pastor came. They said he almost burned down the house.’

‘It wasn’t really like that,’ I said, though the truth wasn’t much better.

‘Just follow me to Uyo,’ she said.

Ikanke had been planning her escape to Uyo since her eighth sibling from a different father was born. She was tired of mothering them while her own mother never raised a finger. Uyo was her promised land, where she’d start her alcohol business, and she’d saved ₦500k over ten years, selling alcohol at weddings and funerals.

‘And what of Mama?’ I asked.

‘She can come too, and you people can even take your father to a hospital in Uyo,’ she said.

‘Remember what happened to Eka Adiaha.’

Eka Adiaha was an old woman down our street who used to give us coconut and Edita Iwa. One year, she started mixing up names, misplacing pots, and wandering the streets with her wrapper barely tied. When her daughter threw her an eightieth birthday party, she screamed at everyone to leave and could not even recognise her daughter. They took her to a hospital in Uyo. Doctors said she had something that happened to old people, but we didn’t hear anything about a cure. We never saw Eka Adiaha again.

‘I think the same thing that happened to Eka Adiaha is happening to this man, but Mama will not believe it,’ I said to Ikanke.

‘Just try it. Tell her to carry him to the hospital in Uyo,’ Ikanke said.

The next morning, I passed Ikanke’s advice over to Mama.

‘We don’t take spirits to the hospital,’ she said. ‘Whatever is wrong with him, Pastor will remove it,’ she added, before scolding me for still speaking to Ikanke.

Weeks later, after Ikanke left for Uyo, the man tried to kill Mama. It was after a market trip. Mama had locked him inside the house despite his screams that she was trapping him. The whole time we priced meat and tomatoes, something inside me wouldn’t settle. I knew something bad was waiting for us when we got back.

When we returned, as soon as Mama opened the door, he lunged towards her with a knife and missed by an inch. The blade lodged in the door frame.

‘You left me here. I told you not to leave me here alone,’ he cried.

Mama and I managed to pin him down and lock him back in the room while he screamed until his voice gave out.

I sat in the corridor, staring at the wood trembling on its hinges, thinking of Uyo. If I’d followed Ikanke, perhaps we would have been happy together there. Maybe I would have even met my real father there, the one who would know my name, and I’d ask him why he left Mama and me, and who this strange man in our home was.

That night, I woke to see the man sitting at the edge of my mat.

‘Are you the one who died or the one I left?’ he asked.

‘Where did you go when you left?’ I finally asked.

He didn’t answer, just hung his head low. ‘I’m sorry I left. It’s because of me that you died. Please forgive me.’

‘It wasn’t because of you. Emem died falling from a mango tree,’ I came clean.

He looked past me. ‘Your sister won’t even look at me. She cannot forgive me for leaving you to die.’

I wanted to tell him forgiveness was never about Emem. No one could have stopped her from climbing that tree that day. I hadn’t forgiven him for the day I sat cracking palm kernels, waiting. I hadn’t forgiven the silence that followed him out the door and lingered for ten years, the way Mama blamed Uncle Udom but cried like she already knew the truth. But I said nothing. That truth wasn’t for this man. It was for the real Papa, wherever he was.

That Sunday afternoon, he vanished again. Mama and I returned from evening service to an open door and an empty house. Ikanke’s mother said she saw him walking down the road, muttering to himself. My mother called Pastor and he said the demons had finally taken him. I didn’t argue. Because whatever lived behind that man’s eyes, whatever watched me from across the room and didn’t know who I was, could not recognise his own house, or his own self, was never really my father to begin with.

Cover image: 'Ghost of Hamlet's Father' by Eugène Delacroix