Rain had followed him since birth.
Not the violent kind that tore roofs apart, but the soft, brooding drizzle that made the air heavy and the sky weep without sound. In Port Harcourt, people joked that if the sun refused to shine, it must be because Shango had woken up early.
Femi would smile at the jokes, but Achebe never laughed.
"Rain no just follow person like that," she would mutter under her breath, eyes flicking toward the boy sitting by the window, his gaze lost in the dripping horizon. "E get something inside him wey we no understand."
Shango didn't understand it either. He didn't chase the rain — it came to him. Every emotion seemed to summon it: anger, sadness, confusion. Even his laughter made the air shimmer, like the sky itself was holding its breath.
He was sixteen now, tall, lean, and darker than the color of fresh palm wine. His hair curled stubbornly, refusing to lie flat, and his eyes — Achebe often said — carried storms inside them.
That morning, as thunder rolled faintly over the city, Shango sat with his foster father, Femi, fixing an old transistor radio that hadn't worked since last week's lightning storm.
"Na the coil wire, see am?" Femi said, adjusting his glasses. "E burn small. We go find another for Mile One Market."
Shango nodded, his fingers moving carefully, almost reverently, around the radio. The metal always hummed beneath his skin — like something inside him recognized electricity and wanted to speak through it.
He paused when the radio flickered on for a moment, static and faint voices bleeding through. Then it popped and died again.
Femi looked at him sideways. "You touch am small too hard?"
"I didn't," Shango said quietly. "It just… sparked."
"Hmm," Femi grunted. "You get heavy hands for someone wey dey gentle."
Achebe's voice echoed from the kitchen, where she was stirring ogbono soup.
"Femi, no let him spoil another one! That's the third radio this month!"
Femi chuckled and shrugged. "At least the boy dey try. One day, he go fix things without breaking them."
Shango smiled faintly. He wanted to believe that too.
---
⛈️
School was no different. People noticed the strange things, even when they didn't say them out loud.
Whenever Shango walked into class, the fans above would slow and whine like they were struggling to breathe. Chalk dust clung to him more than others, and the teacher's voice often crackled faintly through the speakers. One day, a lightning bolt struck the field behind the school just minutes after he'd shouted at a bully. No one was hurt, but everyone saw it — and everyone started whispering.
"Na him call the thunder," one boy said.
Another crossed himself. "That one no be ordinary pikin."
They didn't say it to his face, but he heard it. Always.
And sometimes, when he looked at his own reflection in the classroom window, he wondered if they were right.
---
⚡
That night, rain drummed on the zinc roof again. Achebe had long fallen asleep, and Femi's snores filled the room like slow thunder. Shango lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the steady rhythm of the storm. He should have been used to it by now, but something about tonight felt different — heavier, almost alive.
He turned over and saw a faint glow pulsing from the pendant on his bedside table — the small, circular disc they had found wrapped around his neck the day they discovered him as a baby. It was faint before, but tonight it throbbed with light, like a sleeping heart remembering how to beat.
He reached for it.
The moment his fingers brushed the metal, lightning cracked across the sky outside — blinding and immediate — followed by thunder that rattled the window frames. He flinched and dropped it, heart pounding. The rain suddenly stopped. Dead silence followed.
The world held its breath.
And then, in the corner of the room, a low voice — not heard, but felt — whispered in a language he didn't recognize. It wasn't words at first, more like the hum of the air itself speaking through the walls. When he blinked, a shape formed in the lightning's afterglow — faint, a woman's outline made of mist and flame, her eyes bright as dawn.
"Ọmọ mi…" she whispered — my child.
He sat frozen. The words pressed softly against his chest, deep and familiar, like something his blood already knew.
Then, as suddenly as it came, the glow faded. The rain returned, soft and endless, washing away the silence.
Shango lay awake until dawn, clutching the pendant in his palm, unsure if he'd dreamed it — or if the storm had finally learned to speak.
---
💭
When morning came, Achebe frowned at him from the kitchen table.
"You didn't sleep," she said.
Shango rubbed his eyes. "Just couldn't."
"You dream?"
He hesitated. "Maybe."
She looked at him carefully. "Dreams get meaning, my son. No ignore them."
He wanted to tell her about the woman, about the word that still echoed faintly in his chest — Ọmọ mi — but something inside told him not to. Not yet.
Outside, thunder grumbled faintly, though the sky was clear. The neighbors glanced at him as he passed, whispering softly again: the boy who brings the rain.
But today, for the first time, he felt like the rain wasn't just following him.
It was listening.