Runner-boy by Chii Ọganihu
Chii Ọganihu’s “Runner-boy” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2025 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Grant Faulkner. Our editors chose these pieces with particular focus on the power of style, form, and voice within the constraints of flash prose.
“Runner-boy…is for all who have found themselves in tight corners,” Chii Ọganihu writes in her author’s note. This flash has a propulsive quality that effectively matches its subject matter. With little context, dialogue, or characterization, we find ourselves inside Runner-boy’s head, thrust into the action alongside him. We feel his panic of being outnumbered five-to-one, the need to escape at all costs. The prose propels us down the hallway, over the balcony, and even with an injured wrist, over that glass-lined fence. “Phew,” we think. “Safe at last.” And then, the last line arrives with its understated turn from triumph to tragedy.
The author’s use of Nigerian Pidgin in the narrator’s interior monologue offers one of the few clues about where we are. With very few words, she skillfully moves the story from general to specific. Along with the narrator’s abandoned shoes, the story lingers, making us want to know more about the circumstances that have led Runner-boy into and then out of that apartment, the world he inhabits and (hopefully) goes on to survive. —CRAFT
The boy stood no chance, really. They were five against his one, young men like him no older than twenty-three.
He first sensed that something was wrong when one of the boys locked the heavy entrance door, leaned against it, and pocketed the key while another shifted almost imperceptibly behind the sofa where our boy was seated. From the corner of his eye, he saw the guy who’d invited him exchange a loaded glance with the one stationed at the door.
Our boy did not need to be told twice: Yawa don gas.
Quick, he scoped out a bright corridor leading off from the sitting room towards what he gauged was outside light. Without even weighing his chances, he sprang out of the sofa and ran for the corridor. The occupants of the apartment hollered after him and the pursuit began.
When he reached the balcony at the end of the corridor, Runner-boy did not think twice. He held onto the railing—on the top floor of the two-storey building—and leapt. The devil he knew was worse, far worse, than anything lying at the bottom of a high jump.
Runner-boy hit the concrete floor with a thud that would have alarmed him under normal circumstances. When he tried to lift himself, he discovered that one wrist was twisted out of its socket. Fuck the wrist; he dragged himself up, dashed to the big black gate, and found it unfortunately locked. By this time, the five boys on his trail had run down the stairs and were now pouring into the compound. Runner-boy’s eyes darted to the fence: too high with nothing to grip for scaling. Fuck fuck fuck.
He turned towards the only option that remained: right, where stood a water tank elevated by an overhead stand. He made for the stand and wriggled to the top like a lizard. From there, he vaulted over to the fence, holding on with his one good hand and struggling not to slip. It was one of those fences topped off with broken pieces of glass.
The five young men below him ran frantically about the yard, eyeing the fence and Runner-boy’s dangling legs. Mark am, mark am! No let am escape! the main guy was yelling.
Runner-boy steadied himself on the fence and, with one mighty heave, hauled himself over it. He fell in a heap into the bush behind the building. Both his hands were bleeding. Shards of the broken glass that ringed the fencetop had gone through his palms. His clothes were in tatters and his body was quaking. He rose again and began stumbling through the bush, which was when he realised his feet were bare. He had left his shoes in that apartment.
CHII ỌGANIHU was born in Enugu, Nigeria. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in McSweeney’s, Banshee, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. Her work was shortlisted for the 2025 Dream Foundry Writing Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ọganihu has received fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from Brooklyn Poets, the McCormack Writing Center, Seventh Wave, Off Assignment, and Ubwali. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter @chiioganihu.
Featured image by Afiq Fatah, courtesy of Unsplash.
