Òyì nke e mepụtara

The woman who lives behind the gas station lost her face years ago. It started with her nose: the bulb shrinking into the nostrils, the nostrils shrinking into nothing. Then her eyes blinked out one after the other. Before her mouth disappeared she would yell at us across the lot, babble things that didn’t make sense and gulp up the air like water. The kids with bikes used to ride circles around her after school. The rest of us would watch from behind the gas pumps. But they stopped after her mo