Father's Shoes

by NmaHassan Muhammad

He is a writer, a poet, a children’s author. A stage actor. An orator. A singer. A comedian. A union leader. A mentor. A son, a husband, a father of four—two sets of twins, of the same sex. A civil servant in Minna, Nigeria. Twenty-two, broad-shouldered, and already stretched across a dozen lives.

He learns fast that nothing controls time. It moves at will—let loose upon us.

His journey to manhood begins with shoes—his father’s, worn, heavy, inherited. He never imagined trying them on so soon, as the first son. Yet he slips into them awkwardly, startled by their room. He remembers where they pinch.

Then he steps into others: a poet’s battered soles, a singer’s polished leather, a union leader’s scuffed boots.

A chameleon of ambition, he chases down lives and lives them, not just to fill his father’s shoes, but to carry their weight—and still walk his own path in them.