"The Bird That Cries Mayday" by Olufunke Ogundimu / Prairie Schooner Journal

A continuous journey away from family.

Olufunke Ogundimu’s “The Bird That Cries Mayday” (3,950 words), in Prairie Schooner Journal’s spring issue, starts with a bang.

It’s 1942 and we’re alongside a German warplane that’s “sputtering a dark plume from its distressed engine.” The engine stalls, the plane nose-dives. There’s only a brief mention of the plane’s “three occupants.” Other than that, nothing but intense circumstance.

How often do we get that in short stories? We’re not in someone’s head, in the fraught cupboard of a mind. Instead we’re swept up in story immediately, in a world we’re unfamiliar with. What will happen? Where are we being taken? All in the story’s first paragraph.

Then this:

“The plane flew into the final burst of golden light in the evening, jerking.”

That line stopped me, in a good way (a positive story “bump,” if that’s possible.) I think I appreciated it because all but the last word in that sentence spoke to the promise of literary fiction, the prose just purple enough to point me towards an appreciation of the writer’s choices in depicting the visual…and then “jerking.” The plane is jerking, and we’re being jerked back into the story. It’s a tease that Ogundimu plays with throughout this piece. She toggles back and forth between a conscious, effective artistry (metaphor, theme, clipped dialogue, moral pronouncement) and raw, propulsive story (what will happen?)

In the four paragraph opener, we get an answer. The plane crashes, erupting into a ball of fire and killing those on board. But not before terrorizing the residents of Aramoko, a town a few miles from the crash site in British colonial Nigeria. Children there run from their homes at the sound of the screaming engine, of explosions, “into the streets, crying in fear.”

Then we’re miles away again, meeting a police sergeant who is called on to drop everything and visit with the Baale (the village chief) of nearby Aramoko to address the disaster. The sergeant has been changed by war (“every man bled red and died. Nothing was guaranteed to anybody. Everything seemed meaningless to him now”) but still, he answers the call.

He visits the scene of the crash and is struck by the sight of a swastika on the plane’s broken tail. “Stay away from there,” he tells the men who have accompanied him from the village. “There is evil here.”

We’re left with clues: two burlap sacks that remained at the crash site, which had been emptied of “top secret contents” that were destroyed in the flaming wreck.

What will happen? Where are we being taken?

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Then it’s two years later. We meet a young girl, Amoda, who, having forgotten the fear conjured by the crash, disregards warnings about the forbidden forest site (where the wreckage is now covered by moss and leaves) in order to harvest the juicy oranges that grow there. She sells them at market for cash to take care of her elderly grandmother.

One day, near the grave of the pilot, Amoda gathers her oranges into a burlap sack she finds under a fallen tree nearby.

The second burlap sack winds up in the hands of a young man, nearly Amoda’s age, whose personal history is also closely tied to the plane crash. Those sacks are weighed down with a legacy of evil that endangers the young couple. We can’t help but fall for the pair, to root for them as we hear their stories in the closing quarter of the story, after they board a lorry (truck) that will carry them to the city.

They are both trying to escape grim pasts. They both know there are more things to fear in the forests of their home towns than there are in the city they hope to escape to. A city that promises some hope, but also loneliness, a “continuous journey away from family.”

The German plane was a grey bird that carried evil. In the aftermath of the crash, the people of Aramoko noticed “that when a certain grey bird appeared on their roofs, it heralded evil.” At the close, that bird perches on the roof of the lorry as it makes its way to the city, and for the first time in this masterful story that poses question after question (what will happen? Where are we being taken?), we know the answer.

Prairie Schooner, an international literary magazine, publishes poetry, short fiction, and essays from around the world. Historically, it is one of the nation’s five oldest quarterlies and will celebrate its centennial with the Spring 2027 issue. A project of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department since its debut in 1927, Prairie Schooner is one of UNL’s most important cultural exports and research legacies.

They are currently closed to general submissions, but future submission periods will be announced here, on their social media channels, and in their newsletter, which you can sign up for at the bottom of their submissions page.

For links to more of Olufunke Ogundimu’s work, visit her website.

Many thanks to Olufunke and Prairie Schooner for this gripping story!

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