On the morning of his seventeenth birthday, Sani dug his own grave.
He didn’t do it because he wanted to die.
He did it because, in the town of Aroko, tomorrow had stopped arriving.
It had begun with small things. Milk refusing to sour. Candles burning without shortening. Babies staying babies for weeks. Then the clocks froze.
The elders called it a blessing.
The priests called it judgment.
The scientists who came from the capital called it impossible.
Three months later, they all disappeared.
Now, the people of Aroko lived inside an endless Thursday.
No one grew older. No wounds healed. Hunger returned every evening, no matter how much you ate. The same birds crossed the sky at the same hour. The same radio bulletin played every night.
And every dawn, the earth beneath the town shifted a little closer to the old cemetery on the hill.
Sani hated Thursdays.
He hated the way his mother’s smile reset every morning, forgetting the arguments they’d had the day before.
He hated that his little sister still asked when she would finally turn eight.
Most of all, he hated that he alone remembered every version of the day.
Three hundred and twelve Thursdays.
Three hundred and twelve funerals for neighbours who never stayed dead.
Three hundred and twelve failed attempts to leave Aroko.
The first time he crossed the town boundary, he woke up in his bed.
The fiftieth time, he woke up screaming.
By the hundredth, he stopped telling anyone.
Nobody believed impossible things in a town built from them.
So, on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, Sani climbed the cemetery hill with a rusted shovel and dug.
If tomorrow refused to come, he would force it to.
Sweat dripped into his eyes as metal struck something beneath the soil.
Not stone.
Wood.
A coffin.
Freshly buried.
His name was carved into the lid.
SANI DANJUMA.
Born: 14 August.
Died: Tomorrow.
His hands trembled.
Because beneath his own name, someone had scratched a message into the wood with desperate, uneven strokes:
You opened this before.
Whatever happens next, do not let Ada remember.
Oozezi