Thinning Veils

It started with the random shapes appearing out of the corner of my eye, shadows shifting where they shouldn’t, and faces forming in the abstract cracks of a wall that dissolved when I turned my head. At first, I dismissed them as tricks of the mind, a side effect of exhaustion working so late into the night only rolling back to my little workspace by 7:30 in the mornings. But soon, the glimpses became more frequent, more defined, as though something just beyond the edges of my perception was pressing for my attention.

The day my eyes within were opened…spiritual eyes as the others called it, I was walking through Iyana Ipaja Market. It was a blazing 33-degree unforgiving sunny day, the air was thick with the scent of exhausted engine fumes and ripe mangoes and meat being displayed, mixed with the acrid smell of the huge dumpster by the side of the road and sweating bodies maneuvering through the ocean of other sweating bodies polluted with the blasted sound of megaphones playing looped recordings of holistic erectile dysfunction cures. Beggars with outstretched hands, palm readers encroaching your personal space vying for your attention, market women calling out their wares in voices trained to cut through the chaos, and keke riders poking their heads out from tricycles, shouting destinations in rapid Yoruba.

Then, I saw it.

It was just a flicker at first, a wrongness in the space ahead of me. A hunched figure under a torn umbrella, selling tomatoes, but the shadow it cast was moving against the sun. I turned away, my heart suddenly uneasy, but then I looked back. The figure was still there, but now its features were… shifting.

The woman selling catfish across from the tomato seller caught my stare. Her lips tightened, and she shook her head ever so slightly, a warning in her eyes. “No look am” she muttered, barely audible over the market noise. “Be careful.”

Something cold gripped my spine. The hairs on my skin spiked to the heavens. It wasn’t just that I was seeing something unnatural, it was that someone else saw me seeing it.

Then, in the periphery of my vision, the market began to change. Layers peeled away like mist burning off at dawn, revealing something far older beneath. The pot-hole-filled roads, the stalls, even the people… everything seemed to exist in two versions at once. One was the world I had always known. The other… teemed with forms that phased in and out of reality and colors that bled beyond the spectrum, hues that had no name shifting and pulsing like living things. Sounds layered over one another like whispers beneath the wind, low thrums that vibrated through my bones, echoes of voices speaking in tongues older than time and everywhere, surrounding every living thing, were auras… some faint and flickering, others burning bright like dying stars.

Angels walked the market, their forms too vast to fit into the narrow Lagos streets, yet they moved within them like water filling a vessel. They bore multiple eyes, not as grotesque abnormalities, but as the only way they could be perceived by my limited human senses. Their wings did not flap, they unfolded endlessly, stretching beyond what should be possible. They carried out unseen commands, invisible to the world that bustled around them.

Between them moved other beings, figures clad in flowing robes of smoke, their faces veiled in shifting gold, scribes etching unseen laws into the very fabric of existence. Some bore masks of forgotten gods, their presence a ripple in reality, like spirits who had once ruled and were now bound by new laws.

Yet, not all that walked this hidden realm were benevolent.

In the alleys between stalls, where darkness clung like oil, shapes slithered and twisted. Shadows with intent, figures adorned in chains of authority, moving with the weight of dominion. Principalities, powers, territorial rulers whose names had been whispered in fear for generations. They watched, they enforced, they took. Some stood over street corners like gatekeepers, their eyes burning with the weight of ancient pacts. Others drifted through the crowd, unseen tax collectors of debts owed in blood and lineage.

And there, amidst it all, was me… a man who was never meant to see this. A man whose eyes had been forced open under the blistering heat of Lagos, standing in the heart of a market where the physical and spiritual had never truly been separate.

The catfish seller exhaled sharply and turned away, muttering some words under her breath.

That was when I knew. I was not the first to see.

And I would not be the last.