Fiction

Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the novels Shifting through Neutral and Into the Go-Slow, from which the story “Lagos,” first published by Narrative, was taken. Her feature film, Naked Acts, received the Audience Award for the 2009 African Diaspora Film Festival, and she was a finalist in Narrative’s Winter 2009 Story Contest. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University, Davis is a professor of creative writing and journalism at Baruch College in New York City. A native of Detroit, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Lagos

A Story

by Bridgett M. Davis
October 15, 1983

German and British men sprawl on sofas in the lobby of the Federal Plaza Hotel, copies of the International Herald Tribune folded back as they read, drinks at their elbows. Avery rides up the elevator, knocks on the hotel room door. When it swings open, before her stands a tall woman with cropped frizzy hair and wide-spaced eyes, an open face. She wears a West African–print caftan.

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