a boy buys an ice-cream cone and loses everything
The premise to my first story, written at seven years old in a primary school notebook. A boy on an errand spends grocery money on ice cream. His mother disowns him. A police officer picks him off the street. Armed robbers kill the police officer. The boy’s mother takes him back. Even in the earliest swaths of memory, in an era preceding anxieties about craft and skill and affairs of the heart, I find myself enamored by the consumption and creation of stories.
a woman reduces four planets to rubble / 100 Rubik’s Cubes turn in tandem
Secondary school. Puberty comes with startling revelations. One of them, I will untangle my whole life. Another says “math is seductive.” Order reigns supreme. Questions have answers. The truth of this will take me to national math contests and international olympiads where we are granted nine hours to solve six problems. Outside exam halls, students from various countries probe cultures unknown and dissect optimal solutions for Rubik’s Cubes in a cavernous event space. When attempts to align the cube’s colors frustrate me, I return to my room and lay on the carpet and resume Sagittarius. Taylor Swift plays in the background. Sagittarius will span ages 11 to 15. 2000 pages of vibes-driven handwritten sci-fi. A collection of star systems ruled by the corrupt Cosmotic Federation. And a woman who reduces four planets to rubble. She has a reason. Not far away, her sister is hellbent on destroying her. She has a reason too. My classmate Chikemka devours every page. Two years after Sagittarius is completed, I leave Nigeria for USA, a freshman studying Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I sign up for creative writing electives. Professor Helen Elaine Lee likes my prose. She teaches me about theme and resonance. She says I can do the work.
a coder engineers sentient teeth
Graduation is scary. Life seems more real. Death, too. I’m 21 then, a software engineer at Google Canada. The winters are rough. For two years, my mandate is simple: don’t get fired. I work my ass off. Make new friends. Nights are restless. Something is missing. When I can’t sleep, I Netflix and Playstation. I rub my finger on my palm and imagine that the flesh there suddenly sports sentient teeth. Aggressive, too. Calculating. How do I get rid of them? I get to my laptop and start writing. Spring 2020, first time in forever. I don’t want to lose the spark again. I write new short stories. Send them out. Rejections pile up in a mountainous stack. Acceptances trickle through. Including one for the story about sentient teeth. Either way, there’s no running from it. I am a writer.
Vincent Anioke is a software engineer at Google. He was born and raised in Nigeria but now lives in Canada. His short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Split Lip Magazine, Carve, and Pithead Chapel, among others. He is the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize Winner and was also shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic Agency. Find him on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.