The third time the address disappeared, Adaeze knew she wasn't losing her mind. Not completely, anyway.
She sat on her weather-beaten Honda, the engine ticking its metallic heartbeat in the Lagos humidity, staring at the empty lot where Number 47 Alabaster Avenue should have been. The GPS on her phone insisted, with its American woman's voice full of digital confidence, "You have arrived at your destination." But there was nothing here except red earth, scattered garbage, and a billboard advertising Paradise Estate – Coming Soon 2025, the same promise it had made for three years running.
The steaming containers of jollof rice and pepper soup in her delivery bag were beginning to cool. Real food for an unreal address. She checked her phone again: Order #5847, paid in advance, generous tip included. Mr. S. Temporal. The name itself felt like a joke someone was playing on her tired brain.
Adaeze rubbed her eyes. Fourteen hours into her shift, with Kemi's university fees due next week, she couldn't afford to return another undelivered order. Mr. Chen had already given her two warnings about "incomplete deliveries to verified addresses." How could she explain that the addresses vanished like smoke the moment she arrived? That buildings she could see on the GPS, complete with street view images, simply weren't there in the exhausted flesh of three-AM Lagos?
The city breathed around her—distant music from a club, the bark of stray dogs, the eternal hum of generators. Real sounds in a real city where she was chasing ghosts for 1,500 naira per delivery.
She remembered what her grandmother used to say: "The world has more doors than we can see, Ada. Some open only when we're not looking."
A moth fluttered against her phone screen, and in that moment of distraction, she thought she saw it—a shimmer in the empty lot, like heat waves rising from sun-baked asphalt, except it was night and the air was thick with coming rain. For just a heartbeat, she glimpsed the outline of a house. Victorian. Impossible. With warm light bleeding from its windows like honey from a broken jar.
Then nothing. Just the lot again.
But the moth remained on her screen, its wings catching the blue light, and she noticed the delivery app had updated. A new instruction had appeared: "Please leave order by the flame tree."
There was indeed a flame tree at the lot's edge, its flowers closed for the night but still burning orange in her headlight. She'd passed it a dozen times on other deliveries, never paying attention. Now it seemed to pulse with significance, as if it had been waiting for her to notice.
"Madness," she whispered in Yoruba. But madness that paid.
She dismounted, pulled the cooling containers from her insulated bag, and walked to the tree. The ground felt strange beneath her feet—sometimes solid, sometimes like she was walking on cloud. She set the food carefully at the base of the tree, propping it against the ridged bark.
When she turned back to her bike, there was an envelope tucked into the speedometer. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She'd been watching the bike the entire time. No one had approached. No one could have—
Inside the envelope: 50,000 naira in crisp bills and a note in handwriting that seemed to shift between languages as she read it, though somehow she understood:
"Thank you for believing enough to feed us. We who drift between the seconds, who live in the spaces between heartbeats. Your grandmother knew. The tree remembers. Next time, the eba and egusi soup, please. The familiar tastes help us remember who we were."
Adaeze's hands shook as she counted the money. Real money. More than she made in two weeks. She looked back at the tree, and the food was gone. Not a trace. Not even an oil stain on the ground.
She drove home through streets that suddenly seemed pregnant with possibility, every shadow potentially a doorway, every empty lot a hidden address. The city she'd known all her life had revealed another face, and she wasn't sure if it was beautiful or terrible or both.
Kemi was awake when she got home, hunched over her laptop in their shared single room, code flowing across the screen like digital prayer.
"You're late," Kemi said without looking up. "Everything okay?"
Adaeze set 30,000 naira on the desk beside her sister. "For your fees. The rest for next month."
Now Kemi looked up, her eyes wide. "Ada, what did you—"
"Extra deliveries. Good tips tonight."
Kemi's face cycled through emotions—suspicion, concern, gratitude. "You're not doing anything dangerous, are you?"
Adaeze thought of the empty lot, the shimmer of the impossible house, the note that wrote itself in languages she shouldn't understand. "No," she lied. "Just delivering food to hungry people."
It wasn't entirely untrue.
The next night, three more impossible addresses appeared in her queue. She took them all. Each time, the same pattern—an empty space where a building should be, a glimpse of something other when she wasn't quite looking, instructions to leave the food in spots that shouldn't matter: beside a broken streetlight, against a specific crack in a wall, beneath a stop sign that had been graffitied with the word "WAIT" in seven languages.
Each time, the envelope appeared. Each time, more money than made sense and notes that explained nothing while revealing everything:
"The fish stew reminded me of my mother's kitchen in 1962."
"We are the lost ones from the ship that never docked."
"Your kindness feeds more than bodies."
After two weeks, Mr. Chen called her into his office—a generous term for the converted shipping container behind the restaurant where he managed the delivery fleet.
"Adaeze," he said, not looking up from his manifests. "These addresses you've been delivering to..."
Her stomach clenched. "Sir?"
"They don't exist."
"I can explain—"
He held up a hand. "But the payments clear. The customers leave five-star reviews. They ask for you specifically." Now he looked at her, his eyes carrying the weight of someone who'd seen too much to dismiss anything entirely. "My grandmother in Guangzhou, she used to leave food for the hungry ghosts. Said it was good business, good karma. I don't ask questions when the books balance."
He slid a piece of paper across the desk. A raise. A promotion to senior driver. And a list of addresses. "These come up sometimes. Other drivers can't find them. Won't find them. But you..." He shrugged. "You have the gift."
The gift. As if seeing the impossible was something to be grateful for.
But she was grateful, wasn't she? Kemi's fees were paid. They'd moved to a better room, one with consistent electricity. The strange money that appeared in impossible envelopes had made their lives possible in ways that ordinary money never had.
Still, each delivery took something from her. She began to see the city differently—not just the Lagos of traffic and noise and struggle, but the Lagos of the in-between. She saw the shadows of buildings that might have been, the ghosts of streets that were planned but never built. She saw people sometimes, just at the edge of vision, standing in those spaces between reality and dream.
One night, humid and heavy with the promise of rain, she got an order that made her pause. The address was their old apartment, the one they'd left six months ago when the landlord raised the rent beyond reason. But the timestamp on the order was wrong—it showed a date from three years in the future.
She almost declined it. Almost.
But something, maybe curiosity, maybe fate, maybe the moth that had taken to following her on deliveries, made her accept.
When she arrived, the building looked different. Older but also newer, as if time had folded in on itself. There was a light in what had been their window, though she knew the current tenants kept early hours.
She left the food—pepper soup and pounded yam, Kemi's favorite—at the door and waited.
This time, she saw the customer.
It was herself. Older, wearing clothes she didn't recognize, with a weariness in her eyes that spoke of losses not yet experienced. This other Adaeze picked up the food, looked directly at her younger self, and smiled—a smile full of sorrow and hope and warning.
"Thank you," the older Adaeze mouthed, though no sound crossed the dimensional divide. "For everything you're about to do."
Then she was gone, and the building was just a building again, present-tense and ordinary.
The envelope this time contained no money. Just a note in her own handwriting: "Keep delivering. They need us. We need them. The city has many faces, and someone must feed them all. Tell Kemi to study the quantum computing modules extra hard. She'll understand why in 2027. Trust the moth."
Adaeze looked up to find the moth settled on her hand, its wings like tiny maps of places that didn't exist yet or anymore. She drove home through a Lagos that was suddenly infinite, every corner a potential portal, every delivery a small miracle of connection across impossible distances.
Kemi was coding again when she got home, but she looked up with a smile. "Good night?"
"Strange night," Adaeze admitted, setting down her helmet. "But good."
"I've been thinking," Kemi said, turning back to her screen where equations danced. "About parallel processing and quantum entanglement. About how information can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed. Kind of like..."
"Like addresses that aren't there until you need them to be?"
Kemi's fingers paused over the keyboard. "Exactly. How did you—"
"Just a feeling." Adaeze watched the moth circle the room's single bulb. "Study those quantum modules, okay? Something tells me they're important."
"You're being weird, Ada."
"It's a weird world, little sister."
That night, Adaeze dreamed of the city as it truly was—not one Lagos but thousands, all existing in the same space, separated by membranes thin as moth wings. She dreamed of the hungry ghosts of lost migrants, of the shadows of buildings that housed the dreams of architects, of the people who fell between the cracks of reality and just needed someone to remember they were human.
She woke to find seventeen new delivery requests on her phone, all to impossible addresses, all promising impossible tips.
She accepted them all.
Mr. Chen was right—it was good business, good karma. But more than that, it was necessary. Someone had to feed the spaces between. Someone had to acknowledge that the city was more than its physical form, that hunger existed in dimensions beyond the merely corporeal.
The moth landed on her phone screen, its wings creating tiny prisms in the morning light.
"Alright," she told it. "Let's go feed the impossible."
She kissed Kemi's forehead as her sister slept, grabbed her helmet, and headed out into a Lagos morning that shimmered with hidden possibilities. The first address was for a building that wouldn't be constructed for another decade. The second was for a house that had been demolished before she was born. The third was for a place that existed only in the dreams of its architect, who had died with the plans still in his head.
She would deliver to them all. Because that's what she did now—she fed the hungry ghosts of the city, the lost ones, the displaced ones, the ones who existed in the cracks between seconds. It was strange work, impossible work, but it was hers.
The city breathed around her, all its versions and possibilities existing at once, and Adaeze rode through them all, carrying containers of jollof rice and hope, pepper soup and connection, suya and the promise that someone, somewhere, remembered that everyone needed to eat, even those who weren't entirely there.
Later, much later, when Kemi had graduated and started working on her breakthrough in quantum computing—the discovery that would let people communicate across dimensional boundaries—she would ask Adaeze how she knew. How she had prepared for a future that shouldn't have been predictable.
Adaeze would just smile and point to the moth that had taken up permanent residence in their new apartment, its wings forever catching light that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
"The city tells you things," she would say, "if you're willing to deliver its messages."
But that was still to come. For now, there was just the road, the bike, the impossible addresses, and the certainty that somewhere in the spaces between reality, someone was hungry and waiting for their order.
She revved the engine and disappeared into the shimmer of Lagos morning, carrying food to the forgotten, the displaced, the ones who existed in the margins of the possible.
The moth followed, as it always did, mapping routes through dimensions that GPS could never find.
And in those spaces between heartbeats, between the tick and the tock, between the order placed and the food delivered, the city revealed its true face—infinite, impossible, and absolutely, magnificently real.
The rain finally came as she made her last delivery of the morning, fat drops that seemed to fall through multiple dimensions at once, creating patterns on the ground that looked like messages in languages that hadn't been invented yet. She stood in it, letting it soak through her jacket, and watched as the empty lot where she'd just left food for Mr. S. Temporal shimmer and revealed, just for a moment, not just one house but dozens, all occupying the same space, all equally real and unreal.
Through one of the windows, she saw a family sitting down to eat the meal she'd delivered. They looked happy. They looked grateful. They looked exactly as solid and significant as anyone else she'd ever fed.
The moth landed on her shoulder, shaking rain from its wings.
"Home?" she asked it.
It fluttered once, which she took as agreement.
She drove back through streets that were becoming familiar in all their versions, thinking about Kemi's quantum equations, about her grandmother's stories of doors we couldn't see, about the older version of herself who'd smiled with such knowing sadness.
Time wasn't a straight line, she was learning. It was a web, and she was just one of the delivery drivers keeping its threads connected, making sure that no matter when or where or how solidly someone existed, they could still have hot pepper soup on a rainy night.
It wasn't the job she'd planned for. But then, nothing about her life had gone according to plan, and maybe that was the point. Maybe you had to be a little lost yourself to find the ones who were truly displaced.
Her phone buzzed with another order. The address was a coordinates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but the delivery notes said simply: "You'll know when you see it."
She accepted the order.
Because that's what she did now. She delivered to the impossible addresses, fed the hungry ghosts, kept the connections alive between all the versions of the city that existed in parallel, in sequence, in the dreams of architects and the memories of demolition.
And somewhere, in a dimension she could only glimpse, her grandmother was smiling, proud that her granddaughter had finally learned to see the doors that were always there, waiting for someone with enough faith and desperation to walk through them.
The moth took flight, leading the way through rain that fell in all dimensions at once, and Adaeze followed, carrying food to the spaces between, one impossible delivery at a time.