BORN AGAIN by Tunji Akande

BORN AGAIN by Tunji Akande

by | Dec 21, 2019 | CONTESTS, FLASH FICTION

BORN AGAIN

by Tunji Akande

Born Again – First Runner-up of the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (Flash Fiction Category)

My mother screamed nine times in one night, drawing fistfuls of her hair, cursing God, Eve and the earth that produced the fruit. She kicked the nurses and spat on the doctors. When she’d tried six hours straight and I still wasn’t forthcoming, the doctor said, ‘how about an operation?’ And my mother cursed my father because the doctor was asking him and not her. ‘He who is in me is greater than science, I shall deliver like the Hebrew women,’ she said. 

Of course, coming for the second time I had to be great— that’s what my mother said, but I’m not sure I believe her. 

There is my mother. She sits and stands. Back to the ground, legs up, breath held. The instructor passes bottles of water to the women whose bellies are pushed out in different sizes, sweat dripping down their dark and light skin. There is my mother pressing the yellow towel to her skin. ‘My second,’ she says to the plump woman to her left. ‘But it’s different compared to the first. ‘

‘Eh, this is my first,’ the woman says.

My mother says she knew happiness the first time I arrived inside her, but now what’s happening with me. The first and second me, all of me.

I do not have memories of the times I did not exist, but my mother wants me to remember. ‘Where did you go, when you were not here?’ She asks, and I wonder if there are people who know what it means to be dead even while they’re alive. I turn to my friend Google, our teachers say we should make Google our friend. Entry: where do dead children go.

Heaven, at God’s right hand.

No where.

They were born into this wicked, but couldn’t accept Christ, so hell.

They stopped existing.

Sent back to the world as other people’s children.

Entry:  do dead children come back.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

No.

Entry: how do I know I have been born again.

By giving your life to Christ.

Erase, new entry: how do I know I am born into the same or another body again?

You love listening to certain beats, drums especially.

Dreams.

You just know.

When reincarnation happens, you might and you might not know.
 

But this isn’t about reincarnation. I don’t think I’m taking another person’s body. And also, my mother believes this is me from the previous time. Same eyes and nose and complexion and hair.

During her first pregnancy, my mother was happy. She said knowing that another living being growing inside her made her feel like a god. Knowing that your actions didn’t only affect you, but also another tiny being learning to breathe, to live inside of you makes you feel that way. She went to the market and got clothes for the baby, accepted gifts from everyone who offered her one. She was planning to be the good mother. Had a crib made for the baby. Poor baby who wouldn’t stay.

The baby finally came out— no cries— with pale skin and eyes which were closed to the world. She had one look at this dead baby before it was taken away from her.
The Lord gives and the Lord takes.

When she became pregnant with me, my mother had learned how to avoid the sun and people.  Too much evil spirits lurking around, too much evil eyes piercing through her thin satin blouse. She kept me a secret from everybody who wanted to know if she had taken in again. She cancelled family meetings and took a break from her job at the law firm. She didn’t care that they threatened not to take her back. These evil eyes could be lurking anywhere.

‘How do you know I’m the same dead baby?’ I once asked her.
‘You were never dead,’ she said. ‘They tried to kill you, they will continue to try, but you are a strong boy, baby.’

When I was about five years old, I used to have this recurring dream that chased me out of sleep. We are all walking down the street, my parents and I. Maybe returning from church or a family friend’s place. Then we get to this junction were these women and men in long white robes are singing, drumming and dancing. They let my parents go and hold me hostage. My parents go without looking back and I scream my lungs out, screaming into wakefulness.

These dreams would come and go with my mother cuddling me, reminding me that I was strong, that I had done it before.

In school, I fought with other students so much they feared me. The teacher made me sit alone at the front of the class, repeating words I can’t remember. Back home, my mother asked, worriedly, ‘why do you allow this old spirit use your body like this?’

‘Tell me your dreams again,’ she asked. But these days, I hardly remember my dreams.

When my father wouldn’t agree that I go for deliverance, my mother called him a foolish man, and he called her a crazy woman. She took me to a church where the pastor asked me to close my eyes, praying and kept asking me if I could see anything.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just darkness.’

AYOMIDE by Nneoma Mbalewe

AYOMIDE by Nneoma Mbalewe

by | Dec 21, 2019 | CONTESTS, FLASH FICTION

AYOMIDE

by Nneoma Mbalewe

Ayomide – Winner of the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest (Flash Fiction Category)

My body craves water but I have none to give it. I have never stayed this long without water. It’s been forty-five hours or so and I really feel rotten. The human body can live for a month without food but three to four days without water can lead to death. We only have a few more hours. If not, we’d most likely die.
My sister has a higher probability of dying than me. I’m not a pessimist but I have been lying in her blood now for hours and she won’t make it if help does not get here today. The lower half of her body is trapped under rubble and she’s showing signs of shock. Her skin is cold and clammy; her breathing is shallow and rapid.

Masha’s whining pulls me out of my thoughts. I rub my dog’s fur, trying to comfort him. It’s dusty under the bed where we are and I know he really wants to leave. He would have done so hours ago but the truth is that we are trapped here. Not unless someone rescues us.

I remember exactly forty-six hours ago. It was dusk and my sister was preparing Eba and Efo. The healthy meatless, fishless Efo, as she liked to call it. Honestly, we were too poor to put meat in the food. The rain started suddenly and poured without mercy. We were about to eat when we heard something huge and loud fell on the apartment roof, the face-me-I-face-you apartment where we lived. That when everything came crumbling down.

The building was already falling apart but whatever that fell hastened things up and in seconds, the ceiling and the walls began to collapse. We were far from the door so the best thing to do was to hide under something sturdy like they do during earthquakes.

“Under the bed,” I screamed to Aramide, my sister as I grabbed Masha. I crawled under the bed, my sister following close behind. She was halfway in when the ceiling crushed her.

Now, my sister is struggling to stay awake. Thank God she knows that there is no guarantee that when she closes her eyes, she will wake up again. I don’t have to tell her that.

“It was the transformer,” I say. “It’s the only thing high and strong enough to bring down this building.”

“Ayo,” she murmurs. “The periodic table.” She ignores my statement. There’s no use thinking about the past. The future is the most important thing now. Sadly, the past is all I can think of.

I’m smart. I know I am. I’m seven years old and I can recite the multiplication table from one to fifty-seven by heart. I know all the 118 elements of the periodic table and I know a lot more than my fifteen-year-old sister. I help her with her assignments when she can’t solve them and I topped my class last year at grammar school. My headteacher calls me a prodigy even though in Nigeria, no one knows what to do with prodigies.

“Hydrogen, helium, lithium,” I begin. It’s dark but I’m looking at my sister, hoping that when I’m done, she will still be awake. When I’m done, thankfully, she still is. I need to get her talking. That will ensure she stays awake. Although, I think talking will drain the little energy she has left.

“Do you think Daddy knows what has happened?” Even as I ask, I know he doesn’t. He stays away from the house days on end, drinking around with friends. He’d only come back, sometimes, to eat Aramide’s food when he didn’t have enough money to buy food outside.

Aramide doesn’t reply. Her shallow breathing informs me she is still alive. “Don’t sleep, Aramide,” I tell her.

“I’m tired,” she tells me.

“Don’t sleep,” I repeat. I begin my fifty-eight times table. I am almost finished when Aramide murmurs, “You should be a doctor.”

“Why?”

“Doctors are smart. Like you.”

I shake my head, even though she can’t see me. “Doctors are underpaid.” I think back to the doctors who treated mama at the general hospital, who worked grudgingly and couldn’t save mama from her sickness. They never even knew what caused her death, they just left us with debt and my mother’s corpse after injecting all kinds of drugs into her body.

“What do you want to be then?”

“I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

In any other situation, Aramide would have scoffed and said something like, “You have to think about it? You know the answer already.” Now, she doesn’t even make a sound.

My eyes tear up. It is times like this, I wish we were living in a good country like the United States. If something like this happened over there, they would be busy in less than an hour and we would have even forgotten about it by now. However, we are in Nigeria where an entire building of fifty-two apartments collapses and two days later, no one is doing anything about it.

I wonder if other people were still alive. The first thing anyone would have done when the building began to collapse was to run outside. Those on the third and second floors would have never made it down in time. Those on the first and ground floor would have survived if they had gotten as far away as possible from the building when they made it outside.

We live on the second floor. I know people are trapped underneath the rubble like we are and I know that some people are dead. I know my sister will soon join them if we aren’t rescued today. I know I will be next, if another twenty-four hours passes by and I’m still here.

“It’s been forty-six hours,” I say.

“How do you know,” Aramide asks, like she does when I say something smart.

“I just know,” is my reply. The truth is, I have been keeping track.

“Are you hungry?”

I smile ruefully. She’s doing her big sister business even though she’s the one bleeding to death.

“No,” I answer. I know hunger- we both do. Since both parents are out of the picture, Aramide has been the breadwinner. She doesn’t tell me much but I know she gets money from her boyfriends, one of whom, lives in the building, two floors down. She also hawks after school. I don’t do much apart from helping her with her assignments and reading the library books. I help her when I can with the hawking but she never allows me to stress myself. “You will make us rich,” she usually tells me.

“I will be helping you after school to hawk,” I announce. That is, if we both get out of here.

She doesn’t answer. I have to listen closely to hear her breaths because I am fainter than ever. When she first got trapped, she would scream in pain for hours. The screams turned to groans after hours passed and now, I don’t think she can even feel her legs.

Masha whines again. He doesn’t know hunger like us because he is always eating any leftover he finds around the building. He can barely move at this point.

“I love you,” Aramide tells me, out of the blue.

Fear grips my throat. It takes me a while but I say the words back.

“I want to sleep now.”

 I don’t stop her.

I close my eyes and imagine us in a better place. A few days ago, Aramide washed clothes, and I read a senior secondary school textbook on physics. Masha ran around us, playing with the little puddles of water that formed around Aramide’s washing buckets. Sighing, she splashed soapy water on him and on a second thought splashed on me too. “Stand up and play with your dog. Can’t you see he’s distracting me?”

“I’m reading,” I told her.

She dragged the textbook from me and sat on it. “Abeg, go and play. You have your whole life to read.”

I open my eyes and I realize that I am crying. Not the small sobs like I usually do but noisy, heart-wrenching sobs. Neither my sister nor my dog move.

I rub Masha’s fur one last time. I remember two months ago when Aramide gave him to me. She had found him, a newborn puppy, abandoned on the side of the road. “I know how much you love dogs,” she said, as she handed him over to me.

I reach for my sister’s cold hands, the dried blood-forming hard flakes. “I want to be an engineer. I like physics and engineers are rich,” I say, in between sobs.

She doesn’t reply. She never does.

SHIFT, LET HER FAINT by Joseph Olamide Babalola

SHIFT, LET HER FAINT by Joseph Olamide Babalola

by | Nov 24, 2019 | FLASH FICTION, SHORT STORIES

SHIFT, LET HER FAINT

by Joseph Olamide Babalola

She is in a taxi, almost reaching home, fingers caressing her old Android with screen cracks the semblance of the world map. Normally, other things being equal, this is Nigeria, SMS wishes should have started dinging since midnight yesterday. But now the D-day is almost spent, it is nine in the night, the moon has not surfaced, and only Access Bank ever remembered to say a Happy Birthday. Great, isn’t it? Ridiculously great.

She is not on Instagram, doesn’t do Twitter or Snapchat either, but she has two-thousand-plus Facebook friends who amassed over the years, who almost never said anything to her. She knows how things should roll on a day like this, has the full fantasy of how birthdays feel nowadays. She could visit a studio to do some solo photoshoot with the little money she earned from the salon and share it online with a scintillating caption. But she didn’t. Even though she knew the right noise to make to command multiple likes, reactions, and dope comments, still she didn’t. Today doesn’t mean much anyway—all that fun stuff that swells your head and catapults you to cloud nine are meant for her Facebook friends with the time and the means, not her.

Since heaven didn’t fall, she didn’t get today off. She hates today better. Mama G. refused to unhook her from the salon stress. It even seemed Mama G. blindly allotted her some extra work to celebrate her. She did many hairs and hers remain rough, partly combed, packed off-sight in a tight scarf—it was best not to scare customers away.

Someone would ask of her parents, ask what is their job sleeping and snoring under the public cemetery ground while she is here struggling to feed herself. And her only living relative, her Lagos sister, leaves her and returns twice in a year, thrice in a leap year.

Now she reaches home, alights, unlocks the door, switches on the bulbs, drops her bag on the table as though dumping refuse, and hits the sofa.

Who would time-travel her back to 1999? The music blasts, the set dining table, the arrival of august guests, the awesome gifts, the photo snaps, her precious red-and-white gown, the merry. But time rockets past and dumps her in the future, here. Now… no shopping, no outing, no cards, no ice cream, no candle to blow air-plus-saliva into, no cake to cut into sweet slices. Now none seems to care. It is a solo world, a strange one at that. Today lost its meaning years back, now just like any other Thursday in any other month of any other damn year.

She changes her posture and lies back down, trying hard to wade through, to take a nap if possible. But she hears a strange sound. It comes once, then stops. Whatever that is, she knows it can’t be that good. She hates cats but the sound isn’t cat’s. It is something else.

Everywhere remains clothed in deep silence—a silence so calm you can feel it. Now she listens, hears a faint breathing. She listens again and hears again. What?!

She springs up from the sofa as though performing a stunt. Breathing heavily, she mutters, “Who’s there?” and all the bulbs go off immediately. Startled, she takes two steps closer to the table, tries her hand blindly to reach her bag. But heck, it’s not there. Second attempt, the bag is missing still. Wait… is something toying with her sanity? She is sure she put it here the other time. She keeps turning and turning around and around, seeing only black and black and black darkness and nothing more. And worse, it’s hard to trace her way out without finding the bag housing her torch and phone. She stands stock-still, frozen to the heavens.

A gentle footstep creeps in from the dark. It sounds closer by the seconds. Her heart jumps, racing off-beat. No action no words, a concrete pillar is better than her. Things aren’t foreboding well. What if it’s a ghost or something worse? Her bones soften up like a biscuit dipped in a pool of milk. She develops a sharp headache, her stomach threatens to give way, and before she does anything, the footstep stops right in front of her.

J-J-J-Jesus! She screams and shivers, her hands grabbing her chest hard. One second, two seconds, the bulbs come on.

“Happy birthday, Titi!” echoes many voices. Damn! Her eyes fail, but in front of her is her Lagos sister, Mary, holding a birthday present. Kola, the cool guy with a dark acne-ridden face emerges from behind the curtains. Junior, her neighbor’s fifteen-year-old crawls out from under the sofa, holding an iPod. From the kitchen, Lizzy, Toyin, and Emma enter the living room with doughnuts and rolls. Tunde surfaces from under the dining table, pulling out a crate of Coke.

She stands on the same spot, mouth open wide, too stiff to fall. Tofunmi, the semi-friend from her workplace enters with a cake bearing her name and +1 written on it. Mr. Sam, the electrician living next door, enters with a package on his right and a kit box on his left.

Even if she wants to hug Mary tight and cry her shoulders wet till her eyes no longer produces more drops, she can’t. She is way too drained. She slumps backward like a sawn tree and Mary receives her and lays her well on the sofa.

As everyone comes around to check if she fainted, to know whether to pour water on her or not, or to just fan her up, she signals with her weak hand for the party to continue while she tries hard to digest the ongoing.

A soft music starts playing in the background. When Titi regains her strength, Mary would explain why she masterminded the whole scene, the heart-attack surprise—it is simply her creative attempt at making up for the lost days.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Olamide Babalola is a writer and poet whose heartfelt love for literary creativity is unending. He loves to weld words to create beautiful masterpieces. He was shortlisted for 2018 PIN Food Poetry Contest and 2018 African Writers Award. His pieces have appeared in 101words, BNAP Anthology and Poetica Magazine. He lives in South-Western Nigeria.

CRIMSON by Uche Osita

CRIMSON by Uche Osita

by | Aug 6, 2018 | FLASH FICTION, SHORT STORIES

CRIMSON by Uche Osita

October 2008

Adaeze,

Do you remember the way I used to hold your hand? Do you recall how I kissed you the day you told me that your father had finally left your mother? How tender our lips; rubbing off the loss that you knew could only be stayed for so long. Do you remember how we used to hug and hold on for eternity, not wanting, not needing anything else in the world? Do you remember the faint scent of chocolate that filled the room each time you visited? Adaeze, the rhythm of fate’s music has played far too loud and now I am scared. I fear that I am holding on too much, to these things, these feelings, and these memories. Maybe I am unfortunate. Or maybe Mama’s admonitions finally made manifest.

Do you remember the time when you said you would never leave me, was it all a lie?

It is true all I see now is darkness, it is also true I may never be able to live out all the dreams I talked about when there was light but Adaeze, the only darkness I truly see is the one that I know your absence has caused.

****

Adaeze, I love you.
****

I believed in God when I was little. When all Mama could talk about day and night was how wonderful God was, how grateful we were to have a father that stayed home and how kind God had been. Papa stayed home alright, but only because he was jobless. He also had a ferocious temper that hit Mama hard, all the time.

When I finally got a scholarship to study at the University, I felt a deep relief that I could not express in words. I promised Mama I would never let her down. She saw in me, hope, a reaffirmation that her belief in God was not unfounded. She, however, warned me against girls, no girls she insisted, not until you are done. I had agreed. It was so easy agreeing to something I had yet to give serious thought.

I kept her promise until the day I met you. When I first saw you I knew I would never keep her promise. You were so happy and carefree and I was burdened with my background and expected responsibilities. But you accepted me for me. You did not mind that I had quaffed kai kai with the boys in the slum. The fact that my father was jobless, that I had eleven siblings and a breadwinner mother whose only source of livelihood was selling matchboxes, cheap biscuits and sweets.

****

Adaeze, did you know that I have been waiting for 2 years to reach you? You blocked me from calling and you have not been in town all these while. I have been learning to deal with this new condition our love has bought me. Quite frankly it is not half as bad as I imagined. I do not speak as much since I can’t always tell whether I am being spoken to, but I also think a lot. I now take slow measured steps, and I am vaguely aware of time from the heat intensity of the sun and Mama hasn’t completely forgiven me since then.

I started learning to write with an old typewriter papa used to work with in his early days as a typist. It was a very trying experience, having to feel and guess and feel again. I have persevered mostly because I wanted to one day write you this letter. I am sure that you are reading and partly because I suspect that this curse may well not be the end. Adaeze, I am going to become a writer. Ever since I learnt how to type, I have been practicing, day, noon and night. I have written and rewritten ever since and I have strong thoughts to take some of my products for appraisal. Even though for me, there would always remain a vague memory of light -past, this new hope brews a thick fire in my heart and I am determined to guard its flames.

How have you been? I sincerely hope that life has served you a better dish than it did me. But perhaps you suspect my motives. But I assure you, 2 years is a very long time. And writing you is my way of moving on, of trying to forget. I woke up this morning feeling mildly grateful, Mama just got better, she has been down with a fever since last week and the doctor just called. I have in consequence come around to thinking about how much I have undervalued the little things that I have had; life, peace, family. Though, I wish I could have more, still I suppose I should be grateful for the little I have.

The world has changed a lot and me with it. And I have chosen not to allow our past to dictate whatever happens next.

****

How can I blame you? All you did was love me. And sometimes when I remember the times before; the times when there was light; I grope around in the darkness searching for hope, for you…

****

Still, when I sleep at night my dreams are crimson. There is an indistinguishable shadow that I suspect to be you, it reaches out and I come forward. Then I am forced back by another shadow, this one I know to be Musa. It reaches for me, I raise a hand and try to stop it, but it is quicker. It reaches for my eyes and then there is darkness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Uche Osita is a creative writer. His works have been published in Kalahari Review, African writers, Mu-Afrika journal of African literature, The crater library, Nwokike literary journal, and Pulse.ng.

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Imole by Olakunle Ologunro (1st Position – Flash Fiction Category)

Imole by Olakunle Ologunro (1st Position – Flash Fiction Category)

by | Mar 18, 2018 | CONTESTS, FLASH FICTION

Imole by Olakunle Ologunro (1st Position – Flash Fiction Category)

Flash Fiction Category

1st Position –  Imole by Olakunle Ologunro

1.
Here you are, on a mat in your mother’s small, dark living room, wet with your own sweat, burning with an interminable fever. But it doesn’t begin here. Not really. So how does it—this dampness in your soul, this fading of your memories, this pain—begin?
1a.
Let’s say it begins your mother. Your mother, belle of the ball, wanter of things your father cannot provide. If it begins with her, then it must include your father, too. Your father, acquirer of things beyond him, husband of an exotic woman whose maintenance tag his clerk salary cannot settle.
Your parents said that it was love at first sight, that they met each other at the lobby of a banking hall in the nineties and had simply fallen in love with each other and married months later, but you learned later that this was not totally true. “It was your father that fell in love with me first,” your mother told you when you turned fourteen, when she flung a bowl of soup at your father because he could not buy her the imported Carossi shoes that was the new craze among Lagos socialite women.
She held you as she wept for the things she could have had, things your father could of course never afford, your father who answered Yessah! to boys he could have given birth to if he’d married early, your father who owns three shirts, two trousers and one tie, clothes he wears with the pious devotion of a Jehovah Witness persistently knocking on doors that were slammed shut in his face.
1b.
“You are the light of my life.” Your father’s first words when he held you the day you came into the world. But you did not know this, little baby that you were. You did not know that you were, to your father, everything your mother never was.
You, named Imole seven days after your birth, were an avenue for your mother to need more, to stretch your father thin, like elastic. Baby clothes from Macy’s or Kingsway, or nothing. Thirty thousand naira to buy diapers and wipes, or nothing. All these your father provided, sinking steadily into debts.
And then your father, neck-deep in debt, could not afford Carossi shoes to make your mother stay, your mother who was already one leg out the door. So she left, with a bag full of the things she’d bled your father to buy. With you.
End of your father’s chapter. Now, your mother’s.
2.
To leave a man because of a pair of shoes was silly, yes, but your mother didn’t care. She’d always wanted to be set free, to fly, like a bird. So she flew, with you in tow; mother hawk teaching her daughter to walk. She flew straight into the bed of Alhaji Owoseni, pot-bellied, with rings of fat for a neck. And you followed her choicelessly, like a lady-in-waiting for the queen.
Alhaji was, as they say, rich as sekere, and this he clothed your mother in: Yards and yards of expensive lace. Imported hair so soft, so out-of-this-world. Jewelry enough to tempt a robber. Brassieres and panties so flimsy it seemed cut out of mosquito nets. And all these your mother soaked herself in, while your father pined for you, his happiness. And for her, the love he never stopped loving.
And then, Alhaji died while in bed with your mother. They had been going at it that afternoon, your mother yes-yess-yesssing, Alhaji ah-oh-ahhing. All of a sudden, Alhaji began to shiver violently, foaming at the mouth, white froth of saliva and things unknown. Your mother’s scream called you in, to see Alhaji’s penis, short and fat, standing up, like David on a fallen Goliath, to see her too, naked, her vagina fenced with wisps of curly black hair, her breasts already taking the downward slope home.
Your mother picked the nearest dress she could find: her boubou, and fled. The rest of the news you heard in bits: Alhaji was epileptic. Alhaji almost died. Alhaji’s wives would rip your mother apart if they ever set eyes on her. Your mother with her vagina like burial food. Ashewo olobo saara.
2a.
One question: How do you come crawling back into dirt after months of affluence?
2b.
Your mother swore she would not return. Never. So she became a street light, heavily bright by night, and sleepily unadorned by day. Your mother became a woman who pleasured other women’s men. With the money in her account from her time with Alhaji, she got herself a small apartment in town. This you stayed in and waited while she slept by day. And at night when she morphed into a streetlight, you began your own dreams.
3.
Now, you.
You, sweet sixteen, with breasts as round as sweet oranges. You, flower-pretty, a carbon copy of your mother. You swore you would not be her, but would go out and, like your name Imole, be a light unto the world. You would be an actress or a singer or a writer. You would have fame and money so much that even a wave of your hand will rain money. You would bring your father back, make him become the man he had always wanted to be. You would fix your mother too, seal up the hunger in her belly with enough money and she would have all the things she wanted. You would be a light.
4.
Until Sir.
That was what your mother called him the day she brought him home. This is Sir, she said simply. You thought she meant Sa as in Samuel but she said no, Sir as in Yes Sir.
4a.
Sir had legs as thick as tubers of yam. On his chest and up his neck was hair so dense, you could make wigs out of it. Sir enrolled you in college, paid your school fees and bought you underwear and earrings that brought out the glow in your eyes. Sir called you Delight and when you complained, he said that Light, which was the English form of your name was still there. You liked Sir. At least you thought you did, until the day your mother told you while Sir was out that Erm, she needed a car and Sir had promised to buy it for her, but … but he wanted something else in exchange.
What?
You.
4b.
Of course, you would not do it, you said to her and walked away, angry. But your mother, wanter of things beyond her capacity, never take no for answer. You ought to know this.
4c.
It happened while you slept. Your mother herself ground the tablets and poured them in your soup. And when you woke up to the sharp pain between your legs, dried semen on your thighs, you felt your light begin to dim, to fade.
5.
Your mother got the car and you, a pregnancy. All of a sudden, the car didn’t seem to matter anymore. Your mother wept and tore at her braids and said, “Yeh! Temi baje.”
You wanted to stab her with a kitchen knife until your fingers were sticky with her blood.
Afterwards, Sir came and said he was sorry, that perhaps the condom tore or something. Your mother screamed, a scream that died when Sir wrote her a cheque. Minutes of whispered discussion passed, and then, Sir said he would be back. Your mother cuddled the cheque. You waited. One hour later, Sir returned with another man.
He smelled like stale bread, this man. He pulled down your eyelids and gave you a multicolored selection of drugs that looked like sweets. You swallowed, and while you were resting, lumpy blood ran down your legs. Pain shot up your belly and you screamed. Your mother herself drove you to the hospital, where it was said that Sir’s man gave you an overdose of the wrong drugs and these drugs would begin to corrode your womb. They would try their best, they said, but if only you’d not taken those drugs, perhaps things might not be complicated.
A medical way to say: begin to make funeral arrangements.
6.
You lie on a mat in your mother’s house now, your belly too sore to hold anything down. Your dreams are slipping away. You are your own light, but in the harshness of your pains, the world is too dark to see anything. Beside you is your mother, you know that. Your mother, belle of the ball, root of your calamity. “You will be fine, my baby,” she says. You know you won’t. She has called your father, the same man she once swore she would never go back to. Your father will come rushing in thirty-eight minutes from now, eleven minutes and two seconds after you are dead. Your father will not meet any light. He will, instead, meet nothing but darkness.
END