My Husband Pushed Me Down From Helicopter Because I Farted, Unaware That I Survived then I Did This
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My Husband Pushed Me Down From a Helicopter Because I Farted, Unaware That I Survived
I was falling. Wind tore the scream from my throat and flung it behind me like a ribbon. Below, the Lagos lagoon spread open and green, a vast eye watching my descent. Above me, the helicopter’s belly whirled with angry blades. My husband Marcus leaned out of the open door, his face small and hard, as if carved from stone. Just a moment ago, he had shoved my shoulders with both hands, a push so final that it felt premeditated. All this because I had let out a small, embarrassing fart that he claimed disgraced him in front of the pilot.
The pilot had laughed kindly, but Marcus had gone quiet. His hand crushed my wrist as he yanked the door open. “You dirty embarrassment!” he hissed, and my body went light. The world spun, and in the spinning, I saw everything: the slosh of the lagoon, the black stripe of the Third Mainland Bridge, and the specks of boats that looked like silver pins scattered by a careless tailor. My braids whipped my face, and the strap of my life vest, loose because Marcus insisted I didn’t need it, tightened uselessly.
I tried to pull breath into my lungs, but the air felt like stone. I was falling. Then something in me, something my mother called the stubbornness of our blood, stepped forward and took control. Breathe. Think. Choose. I flung my arms wide like a scorched bird and flattened myself, chest to the sky, palms open. The fall slowed a little; I could feel the drag. I kicked my legs and turned my body to face the helicopter again. For half a second, my eyes locked with Marcus’. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t sorry. His mouth curled on one side, the same curl he wore when a waiter mixed up his order or when a child cried near his seat on a plane. The curl that said, “I am better than you.”
Then, like a flicker of God’s mischief, I saw it—a yellow rescue line dangling loose from the helicopter’s side, left over from a beach shoot the company had done that morning. It swung lazily, like a hand waving to me. I reached for it and missed. The line brushed my knuckles and slipped away. Time broke open, and in the gap, I remembered how I got here.
Two years earlier, I met Marcus at a fundraiser in Atlanta. If you had been there, you would have seen us: his suit dark like midnight, my dress the color of ripe mango. He charmed the room with smooth, heavy compliments that melted like butter on warm bread. When he laughed, everyone laughed. When he frowned, the wallflowers leaned forward to catch the reason. He told me he admired my work with community gardens, and I laughed because I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked it. My friends liked him. Auntie Sad liked him.
When he flew me to Nigeria to introduce me to his extended family, the aunties pinched my cheeks and said I had home training. Everyone said he had matured, that the wild ways of his twenties had washed off him like rain off a tin roof. But the truth slipped in early. He didn’t like the way I laughed too loudly in public. “People are watching,” he’d whisper, as if joy needed a permit. He pinched the skin at my elbow when I reached for an extra piece of suya. “Portion control,” he murmured, smiling at the waiter like we were in on a private joke.
He corrected the way I greeted elders, the way I tied my scarf, the way I said tomato instead of tomato. He wanted to refine me because the world respects a refined woman. Sometimes he was gentle when he said it; sometimes he was not. One evening, when a storm rolled in and hammered the roof, I burned the jollof. It stuck to the bottom in a brown layer, that bitter crust everyone pretends not to like but secretly fights over. Marcus tasted it, set down his spoon, and tapped the table twice. “Careless,” he said. “Do it again.” When I told him we could eat something else, he slapped the counter near my hand with a flat palm that made the pots tremble. “Do it again.” He never hit me. He liked to remind me of that. But he hit everything around me.
The first time he squeezed my arm hard enough to leave marks was after a gala in Lagos, where I told a joke he didn’t approve of. I had said it softly to one woman, not even to the whole table. He smiled through the rest of dinner, kissed my cheek for the cameras, and squeezed my arm in the car until I saw a flash of white behind my eyes. “You don’t know when to stop,” he said. “You make me fix you.” I told myself the pain was small. I told myself love was work. I told myself I was safe because he didn’t hit my face.
When he proposed, my mother cried into her scarf and said, “Maybe this is your door to the next room of your life.” I hoped she was right. I wanted that room—light, soft chairs, windows that opened easy. I made lists. I told myself rules. No jokes he didn’t like. No loud laughs. No second helpings. Small steps, I thought. Peace is a small thing you add to your plate like salt. But peace does not sit on plates where fear is eating.
On our first anniversary, Marcus booked the helicopter. “Lagos is ugly from the ground and beautiful from the sky,” he said. I said I was scared. He said, “Courage is like any other muscle. Let me help you strengthen it.” The day was hot and clean. The lagoon glittered like a pot of pepper soup left under the sun. I wore the red dress Marcus chose and a light jacket because the pilot said the air at altitude could be sharp. Marcus made me take the seat near the door, saying, “You’ll see more.” He buckled me in himself, tugging the strap once, then twice, and I thought it was secure.
We rose. The city peeled open beneath us. The pilot shouted facts over the headset in a cheerful, practiced voice. I pressed my knees together and tried to pretend I was amused, but fear made my stomach flutter. Then, quick as a match flick, my body betrayed me. The little puff escaped. The pilot laughed kindly and waved his hand like, “No problem.” Marcus did not laugh. His face went blank, the way a screen goes dark when the battery dies.
He unbuckled my strap with one clean pull. His fingers were sure. He leaned close, and I smelled the cologne he wore for big deals. “You are a stain,” he said, soft enough that only I could hear. Then he opened the door and pushed. I fell. Now back in the bright scream of the present, the rescue line swung close again, as if the wind had changed its mind. I snapped my arms toward it, catching air, catching nothing. I thought of Auntie Sad’s proverb: the river that forgets it started as rain will drown itself. I am rain, I told myself. I can spread. I can choose where to land.
I kicked hard toward the helicopter, not away, because I needed that line. I needed proof. Even in terror, the word proof pressed itself into my mind like a prayer. If I lived, I would need proof of what he had done. Marcus was the type to clean up a mess and make the floor smell like lemon. He would say, “I slipped.” He would say, “I unbuckled myself.” He would say, “I made a scene. The rope licked my arm. I grabbed and missed. Skin burned. I heard myself make a sound like a laugh, which made no sense. But there it was.
I tried again. The line flicked past, and I flung my body after it like a fisherman casting a net one last time before dark. For a heartbeat, I felt coarse fibers rasp beneath my fingers. The line swung away. Below me, the lagoon waited. Above me, Marcus leaned further out, one hand on the frame, the camera fixed under the fuselage, pointed down, recording the low-altitude tour for social media. Proof, my mind whispered again. And for the first time since the shove, a hot, bright anger lit in my chest. If the camera was on, the camera saw. I kicked once more, violent and awkward, throwing my weight toward the helicopter as if I could bend the air itself.
The rescue line swung back, slower now, as if the wind wanted me to have it. I reached with everything: hands, arms, the stubbornness of my blood, and my right hand closed around the rope. It burned. It tore the skin of my palm. It held. My body jerked, and the world snapped tight. The helicopter shuddered as my weight pulled on the line. The pilot shouted. The engine winded higher. Marcus shouted too, his voice finally edged with surprise. I curled my arm, wrapped the rope twice around my wrist the way my grandfather taught me to tie a goat at market, and looked up through streaming eyes. Marcus’s face was no longer stone. It was something else, something new.
He reached for a knife hooked at the inside of the door, one of those safety blades for cutting tangled webbing, and raised it toward the rope. “Let go,” he said. I lifted my bleeding left hand, reached for the metal skid under the door, and felt the cold bite of it against my fingertips. The blade flashed down. The blade came down like a dark bird. For the briefest second, I felt the thud of metal air, and then a cold, sharp pain, like someone pressing ice into the meat of my palm. The rope sang and then went slack as if a giant hand had let it go. I dropped. There was a wet hollow sound when my body hit the lagoon like the world exhaling. Water closed over my head, cool and full of surprising quiet.
For a moment, I lost everything: helicopter, Marcus, the sound of my own name. My ears filled with water and my head did the wild thing it does in panic, imagining that this was the end and that everything would simply stop. But I was not finished. The lagoon did not want me finished either. Fish darted away like small silver secrets. A rush of air from the skid overhead pushed waves and ripples under me. I kicked up, then down, then up again because swimming felt like a language I suddenly understood. One taught by mothers, by grandmothers, by the trick of surviving harsh rains. I breathed when I could and swallowed when I couldn’t, tasting salt and something else: metal, fuel, a faint sweetness of algae.
The pilot had cut the engine now. The helicopter sat like a beetle half ashamed on the wind, blades still. I heard voices above me, the pilot shouting. Marcus panicked, a stranger voice, maybe the cameraman, cursing under his breath. Someone threw a life ring. It sailed past me like a lonely planet. I swam toward it and felt the burn of every stroke. My shoulder ached when I reached for the ring. My fingers slipped over scum and rubber. The pilot leaned out and grabbed my arm with a force that made something inside me hurl up in fear. Then hands, other hands, took hold. The life ring closed around me like a small moon, and they hauled me toward the helicopter skid.
On the skid, Marcus stood like a statue that had lost its marble. His face was wet, not from the lagoon, but from something like fear or rage, or both. For a moment, his eyes searched mine for the last shred of shame he could find. When he did not find it, he turned away. They wrapped me in a blanket. The pilot called for an ambulance because that is what pilots call when things go wrong at this height over Lagos. And because the pilot was a person who trusted the law of care more than the law of power, someone, an older woman with a scarf in her hair, who had been at the helport, kept saying steady things to me, not prayers at first, just steady things that slowed the way my chest climbed.
The next day, I woke to the smell of antiseptic and the sound of murmurs outside my room. News had spread, and my heart raced with both fear and exhilaration. Auntie Sad arrived, her face a mixture of concern and pride. “You did it,” she said softly, her hands clasping mine. “You survived, and now we fight.” I nodded, the weight of the flash drive heavy in my pocket, a reminder of the truth I held.
As the days passed, I prepared for the trial, each moment filled with the tension of what was to come. I knew Marcus would fight back with everything he had, but I also had the truth on my side. The flash drive contained evidence that could bring down not just him, but the entire network he was a part of. When the trial began, the courtroom was packed. Reporters filled the seats, their cameras flashing as I took my place at the stand.
I recounted everything: the push, the fall, the fear, and the survival. Each word felt like a weight lifted, a step toward reclaiming my life. Marcus’s lawyer tried to twist my words, to paint me as unstable, but I stood firm. I had survived the fall, the lies, the pain, and now I would not let him silence me again.
The verdict came swiftly. Marcus was found guilty of attempted murder. The courtroom erupted in cheers, but I knew this was just the beginning. The table was still out there, still powerful, still dangerous. But I had survived, and I would continue to fight. My story was no longer just mine; it was a rallying cry for all those who had been silenced. I would not let fear dictate my life any longer. I would choose truth, even if it meant facing the shadows of the table head-on.
As I walked out of the courthouse, the sun shining down on me, I felt a sense of hope. I was no longer just a victim; I was a survivor, ready to take on the world. The battle was far from over, but I had the strength to face whatever came next. My name echoed in the streets, a symbol of resilience, a testament to the power of truth. And I knew, deep in my heart, that I would never stop fighting.
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