Written in Lagos, September 2019. Typed up today.
The receipt was thermal paper, the kind that curls at the corners and turns soft in humidity.
I arrived in Lagos on a bus from somewhere north and walked to the first guesthouse with a sign on the door. The man at the desk slid the receipt across without looking up. He was watching a match on a small television propped behind the counter.
I tucked the receipt into the back of my mother’s leather cover. I meant to write the amount down properly, note the street, something to anchor the first evening. I never did. There was a cat asleep on the windowsill and I sat watching it instead.
The room upstairs had tile floors and a window onto a narrow lane. At night the television came up through the floorboards. The man shouted once at something during the match. I lay on the bed and listened.
I was taking walks along the cliffs, following the path down toward the water before anyone else was out. The receipt stayed folded where I’d put it.
The ink was thermal. I’d seen it before — the grey print on hospital discharge papers that went blank in sunlight. By October the amount had disappeared. I held the receipt up to the window once. Just a white strip where numbers had been. I turned it over. Nothing on the back either.
I kept it anyway.
That’s all I wrote down.
