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By Haliru Ali Musa
Like a lot of good stories, the shortlisting of Akinwande Jordan›s ‘So Long Now It›s Starting To Look Like Eternity’, for the 2026 Caine Prize African Writing in the Short Story Category, arrived over an ordinary afternoon of reading submissions with tired eyes and an idle exchange with a friend and colleague, Kingsley Alumona.
We had set out to build an anthology, A House That›s Not a Home, and were somewhere in its long middle, reading through manuscripts the way editors do, half hopeful and half worn down, when Jordan›s story found us.
Fortunately, the hard work invested in the story and the other nine stories in the anthology has paid off with the Caine Prize shortlisting of the story, the feat making Jordan the only Nigerian on the five-writer shortlist. The anthology that featured the story was published in February 2026 by Naira Books, an imprint of Nigerian-based publishing firm, Naira Publishers.
‘So Long Now It’s Starting To Look Like Eternity’ follows the failing marriage of two University of Lagos mathematics and literature professors. The story opens on the mathematics lecturer, at his wife›s laptop, left open on the dining table, reading a poem another man has written to her, and only afterwards giving in to the smaller, sadder compulsion of counting how many times that man›s name turns up in her inbox. That patience, letting the counting arrive second instead of first, told us plainly what kind of writer had crafted the story.
As it turned out, Kingsley and I ended up editing more than ten stories for that anthology, some of which needed real structural surgery, and some of which needed almost none. Jordan›s story belonged to the second group. What struck us, the editors, right from that first paragraph, was the uniqueness of the language, prose that reads like poetry and moves at a pace that is unhurried yet never slack, carrying us into unfamiliar territory, even as it describes something painfully familiar, a marriage coming apart at the seams. It is a theme most readers will recognise in some form, and yet Jordan›s telling of it finds its own grooves rather than the worn ones.
This being so, the premise itself is simple enough to state plainly. Professor Adeyemi, the mathematician, has already suspected for weeks that his wife Ngozi, a literature professor, is sleeping with a man named Chukwuma Okafor, who teaches sociology at the same university, and confirms it one afternoon by reading a poem Okafor has sent her, left open on her laptop. What unsettles him is not the affair, which he tells us plainly he had already suspected, but the poem itself.
The lover was sending her poetry. Bad poetry. This was significant. The quality mattered.» That sentence, arriving so early and so flatly, sets the tone the story keeps from then on – a man who has already resolved to meet heartbreak with the only instruments he trusts: exactness and proof, while the thing actually happening to him refuses every instrument he owns.
And it was here, on a second and third reading, that I found myself admiring the shape of the thing more than I had the first time through. Jordan gives us a man whose entire professional identity rests on the idea that reality resolves, that with the right method one arrives at a clean answer, and then quietly turns that classroom vocabulary, rates of change, derivatives, a value approached asymptotically but never reached, into the emotional structure of the marriage itself.
Adeyemi and Ngozi are forever approaching each other and never quite arriving. The metaphor never announces itself; it simply accumulates, scene by scene, until a reader realises the calculus lecture was never really about calculus at all. As for Ngozi, she is the story›s other achievement, and could easily have been reduced to a symbol of betrayal had Jordan been a lesser writer. Instead he lets her speak with a hard, unsentimental clarity that matches, and in time outpaces, her husband›s.
“I›m not an equation, Adeyemi. I’m not something that resolves,” she tells him, and the line lands as both accusation and diagnosis. Her drift toward Okafor is never romanticised; his poetry really is bad, and the story knows it, but her reason for it, that he notices her enough to write it at all, is a modest want, and a devastating one. Even now, months after Kingsley and I first read the manuscript, what I keep returning to is the story›s refusal to resolve into blame. Adeyemi loves order, and that is not a fault. Ngozi wants to be seen outside of it, and that is not a fault either. The story simply lets two people who once talked long enough to lose track of the hours — first in a conference hall and then in a hotel bar until three in the morning — discover that they have quietly stopped, and it trusts a reader to feel the weight of that without underlining it. Even the smallest details carry this work: a clock left three minutes slow for two months, a fraying bag strap he notices and says nothing about. Jordan understands, with more patience than most stories manage, that marriages end long before the day of the confession. They end in the small maintenances people stop performing.
On a more personal note, editing Jordan’s story taught me something about restraint, about how much trust a story can place in its reader when its author refuses to explain the metaphor he has built.
This is, I think, what Bola Mosuro was pointing toward when, chairing this year›s Caine judges, she called the shortlisted stories poignant, shocking, moving, and even quirky. I would want to add exact to that list, though I suspect Jordan, through Adeyemi, would remind me that being exact and being true are two different disciplines entirely. That tension is the whole story, and it is why we chose it.
Furthermore, I agree with the chair of the Caine Prize Board of Trustees, Ellah Wakatama OBE, when she rightly described the five shortlisted stories as “diverse and dazzling short stories from across the continent,” and commended the dedication of editors and publishers in ensuring the stories have a fighting chance at communicating to the reader what the writers envisioned. I believe Jordan’s story fits Wakatama’s submission well.
The significance of ‘So Long Now It’s Starting To Look Like Eternity’ goes beyond making the Caine Prize shortlist. It holds a greater import for Nigerian local publishers, literary community, and upcoming writers. It confirms something most writers already suspected: that Nigerian short fiction can hold its own without performing its Nigerianness for outsiders. For small presses and upcoming writers, it is proof that rigorous, quiet, formally ambitious work still finds readers and recognition.
Kingsley and I are proud to have had a small hand in bringing this story into the world, and prouder still to watch it travel this far on its own. Whatever October brings, when the winner of the prize will be announced from the shortlist, ‘So Long Now It›s Starting To Look Like Eternity’ has already managed the hardest thing a short story can do. It has made an old ache feel newly discovered.
Musa, a Lagos-based award-winning writer, literary critic, and power engineer, writes via email.
