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…
I did not actually set out to write a flash story. This was supposed to be the opening scene of a much longer story I’d already mapped out in my head. But midway into it, my vision for the narrative changed and I decided to go in a different direction. I was left with this bit, which I kept returning to and tweaking. As it happened, I was reading some flash stories around that time, and it occurred to me that this might work as a standalone flash, and so I tweaked it some more with that in mind.
Why did this fragment stick in my head? Apart from the heart of the story, which I’ll tell you about in a bit, what kept me coming back to this was its electricity. There’s a current running through it, an immediate sense of tension and foreboding and danger that I found thrilling. I wanted to ride that thrill. The first paragraph, which came much later, captures that note of frisson: “The boy stood no chance, really. They were five against his one, young men like him no older than twenty-three.”
Now to the heart. The seed of this story is the kito phenomenon in Nigeria. Kito is a really insidious form of honey trapping by which homophobic individuals organise themselves into crime rings to target queer people. A man pretends (usually online) to be friendly, gains the confidence of a queer man, and entices him to a prearranged place where they (the honey trap and his gang members) set upon their victim. My original vision for the story was a subversion of the kito ring; that is, a counter-kito ring that targets kitoers. A revenge plot, so to speak. However, in refashioning this bit as a flash piece without the kito element, I chose to leave the possibilities open. We don’t know who Runner-boy is, nor his motive, nor that of his attackers. We only know that a boy has been ambushed, violence is about to happen, and Runner-boy needs to run. Instinctively, we are drawn to the boy. We want him to succeed, to escape, because it’s human nature to root for the underdog.
Runner-boy, then, is for all who have found themselves in tight corners.
I did not want to name any of the characters. They are known by what they do (as in “Runner-boy”), not by some arbitrary names. I found that this added to the tension.
In writing this story, I had to capture a particular way of speaking using Nigerian Pidgin, our common creole, which the boys—or young men—would have spoken. What little dialogue or interior monologue there is had to be in Nigerian Pidgin. I loved playing with it here. There are so many ways to say that trouble has arrived, but I know few as poetic as “Yawa don gas.”
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.
