Uzor Maxim Uzoatu started out as a rural peasant theatre director before venturing into journalism. He was the 1989 Distinguished Visitor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of Western Ontario, Canada and was nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2008 for his short story “Cemetery of Life” published in Wasafiri magazine, London. He is the author of the poetry collection God of Poetry. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria with his wife Chidimma and their four children.

Maxim’s enchanting new short story is entitled “The Antiman”. Read the exerpt below and follow the link to the whole story.

This is Lagos, the city that never says welcome. I rise from a vast ocean, the waters shining and shimmering as the dark and frothy blanket spreads out to the distant dip of a lavender sky. A green eagle rises from among the nearby lilies, flutters about the air and disappears in the white and the blue of the clouds and the ocean. The wind is tender and sweet, and it wafts through in soothing, cooing whistles.

I am on the stone embankment, the warm flow of ebb-tide tickling my feet. The beach teems with men and women and sundry evil spirits: the naked, the half-naked, the quarter-naked, the overdressed, young and old, and so on. I am listless to the doings of the crowd, until a Black Maria of creaky body and worn tyres comes to a jerky halt in the distance. I start as a roar rises in the throng. I nudge a fortyish man, asking him what the shouting is about but his excited involvement in the shouting is total and he takes no notice of me. I try again with another man buried inside a double-breasted coat and I still get no reply. I swallow my disgust, deciding no longer to ask anyone. I use my ample shoulders to ford through the crowd, ignoring a curse here, smothering boos here and there, and generally standing my ground in the face of the disapprovals of those I shove. READ the full story here.