Zamfara Nights
by
Kolawole Oludare Stephen
Death happens here.
We fight here.
Sometimes we fight for this country. Sometimes we fight just to stay alive.
But we don’t fight all day.
And the waiting… the waiting is worse.
Those long stretches when nothing happens — that’s when the darkness moves.
You stare into it long enough, and it starts staring back until your head gets messed up.
A bush shifts.
A figure crawls.
You blink — gone.
The mind keeps it anyway. Every twitch, every shadow.
Later, when you close your eyes, it replays — sharper, closer, real - you can almost touch it.
The night in Zamfara is quiet but alive. Dust whips into your face. Dogs howl across abandoned compounds. Smoke curls from a far-off hut, faint but sharp. Your ears strain for every whisper of the desert.
A twig snaps underfoot.
Nothing.
Your pulse jumps anyway.
Movement at the edge of your vision — maybe a man, maybe a shadow.
You hold your breath. The darkness folds around you.
Then the smell hits. Iron. Thick. Warm. Wrong.
You follow it with your eyes and see him. Or what’s left.
Uniform torn, flesh marred, boots kicked off. Blood seeps into the dry earth like it’s writing a story you wish you couldn’t read. Limbs bent in ways they shouldn’t be. Silence surrounds him, but the air feels heavier, thicker, like the night itself is holding its breath.
Your stomach twists. Fingers tighten on the rifle. Heart hammers like a drum of warning.
This is Zamfara. The dark doesn’t hide things here.
It keeps them.
And tonight, it’s showing you.
Somewhere below, the village sleeps unaware. Lights flicker, dogs growl, the wind shifts.
You stay on the ridge. Watching. Waiting.
The night whispers in screams, like a demon waiting to be cast out.
And you realize — this is just another night on the frontline.
Bio: Kolawole Stephen is a Nigerian soldier and writer whose first-class frontline perspective shapes his words. In his writing, the silence of the battlefield becomes language, and the unspoken struggles of war transform into vivid, haunting literary imagery.