After vigorously refusing to go horse riding with Matthew, Lily sat down to catch her breath. Inadvertently, her mind drifted off to her childhood. Matthew had a point; she, of all people, should be excited to ride a horse. But she wasn’t.

The memory of her childhood home faded in.

“Hurry up, Lily, you’re going to be late!” called out Victoria, Lily’s older sister, as she bustled around the house doing household chores. Lily quickly wrapped up the meal she was having and ran to grab her bag. She was in a disagreeable mood that morning, having earlier had an argument with her father about her mode of transport to school. To her, her father didn’t try hard enough.

Soon the clip-clop sound of horses’ hooves reached her ears, and she looked out the living room window. Sure enough, there was Betty, her neighbor and classmate, who had come by to give her a lift to school. Lily ran out of the house, past her dad who was seated in the reclining chair reading a newspaper, without so much as a goodbye.

“Lily!” her mother called out as she scrambled onto the horse. She angrily refused to answer or look back as the horse trotted out of the large expanse of land that was their front yard.

Her mother turned slowly from the window to face her father. “She had a point, you know.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” he retorted. “We are farmers. Farmers don’t have lots of money or horses. What we have is land. We plant, we harvest, and she always has food, doesn’t she?” Her mother sighed and walked away.

Not long after, Victoria went out the back to do something and noticed horse riders circling menacingly in the woods surrounding their house. She rushed back into the house to warn her father, only to see even more riders in the front. Her father was bracing to engage with the leader of the pack, who was already advancing toward the house.

Their house, though modest, sat on a very large expanse of land—a testament to their family having been farmers for centuries. On this day, it had caught the eye of the Yubantu, a warrior clan famed and feared far and wide for their gruesome banditry.

Her father stepped out of the house and greeted the clan leader with all the bravery he could muster. The clan leader said to him in a booming voice, “My men need a place to camp. We need your land.”

With that, the leader walked toward the back of the house, which was now teeming with riders. The land at the back was even larger than the front; it went on for as far as the eye could see.

“We need the land to farm so we can eat,” her father said stutteringly. “Can you at least leave us a portion?”

“You can have that,” the clan leader said, pointing to a patch his men had cordoned off with sticks for use as a toilet. Her father looked at the patch despairingly; it was barely bigger than the size of a table.

“We are a family of four,” he said. “We need land bigger than that to sustain us.”

“Not if you’re dead,” said the clan leader. With that, he and his men opened fire, killing Victoria, her father, and her mother.

By the time Lily came back from school, the horsemen had left, so she did not immediately know what had happened until she discovered the bodies in the backyard. Shocked, she ran crying to Betty’s house next door. Betty understood immediately; her own parents had disappeared mysteriously in a similar visit. None of the neighbors had told her what really happened, perhaps for fear of reprisal.

None of the neighbors offered to take Lily in. In those parts, any family touched by the horsemen was avoided like a plague. But Betty took Lily in without a thought. She gave her a blanket for her shivering body and prepared dinner.

“Don’t worry,” Betty told her comfortingly as they sat by the fireplace. “You will get through this.”

Author: Modupe Ogunyemi

Email: moshortstories@gmail.com

Modupe Ogunyemi is a fiction writer dedicated to exploring the complex architecture of human agency and the breaking of toxic cycles. Through sharp dialogue and high-stakes narratives, their work examines the precise moment an individual chooses freedom over comfort. They currently reside in Ontario, Canada, where they are developing a series of short stories.