Nabil Haddawi

He is explaining stratigraphy to a funder who never learned to hold still for a webcam, gesturing with the trowel like a man conducting an orchestra of dust. The generator ticks beside the shopfront. The sun is doing that harmattan thing where it exists without quite committing to being seen.

You have been on the other end of this call for longer than he knows. Watching the pixels resolve and dissolve, the trench walls behind him squared off with string like a grave measured for someone who hasn't died yet. There is something about a man kneeling in a hole, explaining himself to a blurred face, that makes the crossing easy. He is already halfway to believing he's being watched by something that isn't quite a person. He just has the details wrong.

The freeze comes mid-sentence. His hand stays lifted, the trowel catching a light that used to be a laptop screen and is now something else, something behind his own eyes.

For a moment there is only the noise of the generator and the specific ache of forty-four years of kneeling in trenches, a body built by lifting rather than admiring itself, thick through the neck the way men get from carrying things they were told not to carry alone. You test the shoulders. You test the jaw. Everything answers like tools that have been oiled and put away wet — a little resistant, entirely functional.

The laptop screen is black now. He — you — look down at it the way you'd look at a door that used to lead somewhere.

Around you: red earth, a chained generator, a shopfront with its shutters down like eyes closed against the glare. A trowel in your hand with a wooden handle worn pale in the shape of his grip, not yours. You close your fingers around it anyway. It fits, because it was always going to fit; the hand hasn't changed, only what's driving it.

Nobody on the street looks up. A woman with a basin on her head passes without slowing. A boy pushing a wheelbarrow of block-sand glances at the open trench and keeps going, uninterested in another oyinbo-adjacent man playing at the dirt. This body is not strange to this street. That is its own kind of privacy.

You stay low in the trench because that's where the body wants to be, muscle memory older than your arrival, and you let your — his — hand brush along the cut earth wall, feeling for the change in soil color he was tracking before the call ate itself. There's a compacted band, reddish, then a softer grey lens beneath it. Ash, maybe. Or just Lagos being Lagos, laying down centuries the way a person lays down excuses.

You don't know archaeology. He does, somewhere underneath, filed away in muscle and habit — the way his fingers already know the difference between a stone and a fragment of something worked, without you asking them to. You let them work. It's easier than deciding anything yourself.

The light shifts by degrees no clock would notice. Somewhere down the street the generator's twin idles behind another shuttered shop. Someone calls a name that isn't Nabil's and isn't yours either, and the body doesn't turn, because it already knows it isn't being called.

You kneel there until the sun goes copper and then grey, until the trench swallows its own shadows, until the hands — his hands, wearing your wanting like a borrowed shirt — finally set the trowel down on the lip of the pit, deliberate, the way a man sets down a tool he intends to pick up again tomorrow.

He'll pick it up. Not you. You're only good until he closes his eyes.