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The compound was silent. This was normal because everyone had gone out on their respective businesses, both honest and dishonest. The street where the house was located was equally quiet. The street was not a busy street to start with, and since it was a week day, it was even quieter. A car passed by occasionally, breaking the silence of the environment but the break was temporary. Once the vehicle passed, the silence descended like a heavy blanket once again.

Chilo yawned and stretched like a lazy cat on the floor. She rolled on her stomach and rested her chin on her folded arms. As much as she loved the solitude, sometimes the silence got to her. Lying on the battered settee in the other side of the living room, her three year old brother dozed fitfully. She and her brother were the only occupants in the compound. Her mother had gone to work while her older siblings were away at school. Her parents couldn’t afford her school fees so she had to stay behind and babysit her brother. She tried not to think too much about school and books. She had finished primary school the previous academic year. Mother told her not to worry, that Jss1 wasn’t at all what it was hyped to be. As soon as Daddy got a job, she would enrol in one of the best schools around, so she wasn’t to worry her little head about school and what not.

The problem was Mummy had been singing the same tune for a long time now. The first term of the new academic session had passed, the second term too, and now, the third term was almost rounding up and Mum was still saying the same thing. Well, she didn’t want to make too much of a big fuss about it. They were going through hard times, as Mother reminded them every minute. Most times, the family only ate when Daddy went out to go hustle. Mum was a teacher in a public primary school and to say her salary was peanuts was an understatement. Sometimes Mum didn’t go to work because she couldn’t afford the transport fare. Those days when she stayed home, she sat stone faced in the parlour and waited for Daddy to come home from his job hunting. A lot of the times Daddy came back home very late at night. As soon as he stepped into the house, Mum would ask “how far?” Daddy would wearily sink into the one of the raggedy arm chairs in the living room, sigh and reply “nothing yet”. Mummy would sit still for some minutes, silent and contemplative, then get up and grimly enter into the kitchen to go bring out whatever dinner she had been able to hustle up. On good days, dinner consisted of watery soup with tiny bits of crayfish floating around in the concoction and eba made from sour garri, the type people called Ijebu garri. Whether the garri was truly processed in Ijebu land, she never could tell. One day while grimacing and swallowing the hard mounds, she had asked her mother. Mother had simply told her to shut up and eat before her elder siblings, who were rushing the food, finished the eba. On bad days, dinner was a full cup of water.

Chilo yawned again, loudly enough to wake her brother. He stirred restlessly and went back to sleep.

Yesterday had been a good day. They had had jollof rice and fried fish for dinner. Whenever they had rice for dinner, it meant Mum had just been paid her salary. The salary usually didn’t last more than a few days, most of it going into settling into debts that had been incurred during the course of the previous month. “Give Nne Ebuka this money, tell her I am thanking her and it is for the dericas of beans and garri I bought from her last month”, or, “Here, go and give this money to that shylock Nasiru. Tell him it’s for the soap I bought last week”. Nasiru was the neighbourhood aboki. She didn’t particularly like him, ever since the day she had stood in the burning afternoon heat for thirty minutes pleading with him to sell her a bar soap worth ten naira. “Please sir, Mum will pay you tomorrow”, she had begged. And begged. And begged yet some more. Nasiru had ignored her and when her whining had become too much, he had ordered her to leave his presence, saying that when Mum had the money TOMORROW, she could come buy the soap. Eventually, tired of begging, she had gone back home. When she relayed Nasiru’s message, Mum had hissed with disgust and had gone rooting around the house for loose change. Eventually, Mum had come up with four naira fifty kobo and sent her back to Nasiru to buy Omo measured into nylons instead. They were going to use the detergent for bathing and washing, no matter how little the quantity was. It took another ten minutes of pleading with the unyielding trader to accept the four naira fifty kobo she bore because measured Omo was sold for five naira before the man had grudgingly accepted it and sold the detergent. How Chilo disliked him. Soap, sugar and sachet milk worth two naira and five naira respectively was all he was good for, she thought darkly.

The sound of the gate leading into the compound opening woke her from her reverie. She was a very imaginative child. Most times she lived in her head and had little use for friends. She could stay in her bed and walk to and fro the surface of the earth in minutes while twiddling her toes and drawing imaginary shapes with her stubby little fingers in the air. Mum often called her ‘Ogbanje’, because which normal, healthy, ten year old child would sit down facing the wall and staring into it like as if she was watching a very interesting cartoon, while her peers played under the moonlight? This incident had happened some months back. Mum just refused to understand that she hadn’t felt like playing with other noisy neighbourhood kids and the brick wall of the compound fence which hadn’t yet being cemented by the landlord held more fascination for her than playground games. She had rolled a piece of log hewn out of a fallen tree to the wall and sat on it, facing the wall. She had the used her eyes to trace funny patterns she imagined she saw on the bricks. That stone jutting out from that corner looked like bird poo. The joints between each brick looked like the patterns of strings from Mother’s hair net. She had been wondering where the agama lizards she saw darting into holes in the wall lived. Were their living quarters like the one she and her family shared? Did the lizards have chairs, a centre table and a television set? Did the lizards do That Thing, like she had seen her aunt and uncle doing when she had gone to spend the weekend with them the previous year? She had stared in open mouthed fascination through the key hole until, grunting heavily, uncle had rolled off aunty. Sweating, he had tied a towel around his waist and had been heading to the door where she stood hunched over the key hole like an evil monitor spirit. Suddenly remembering where she was, she had gathered her wits and fled to the room where her and her cousins slept. Uncle must have heard someone running because he had headed straight to their room. He had entered the room, swept the beam of the flashlight he held over the sleeping forms, lingering on her for what felt like HOURS in her fevered mind but in reality was most probably a few seconds, before finally clicking it off. Satisfied he had quietly closed the door and padded to the bathroom. Seconds later, she heard water running. How peculiar . . . She had ruminated on what she had witnessed, but something held her back from asking her parents later on because some how, deep down, she sensed that they might not like it.

She had been in the middle of her musings, her eyes still fixed on the wall when her Mum had walked out of house to take some fresh air. On sighting her still, small form sitting alone, facing the wall, Mum had asked her what she was doing alone all by herself while her mates played outside. Didn’t she want to play? Was she ill? Chilo had shrugged her shoulders noncommittally and resumed staring at the wall. Mum complained that she didn’t quite understand why Chilo always behaved like an Ogbanje child, and on seeing that the little girl refused to budge, had left her to her wall gazing.

Somewhere in the compound that she and her family shared with four other tenants and the caretaker, she heard a door open and close. Idly, she wondered who had come in. It was probably Prince, the caretaker. He usually came in and went out at all hours of the day. Everyone called him Prince. She had always assumed Prince was from a royal family, hence the name ‘Prince’, until the day she had seen him writing with charcoal on a piece of plywood “Prince of Electronics-The master Electrician”. He had been painting a new one because the old sign that hung on a sturdy stick driven into the ground outside the compound had faded off completely, that was why she had never noticed the words written on them.

Her feelings towards Prince were ambivalent. He could be charming, playing and jovially cracking jokes with everybody. Those were the times she liked him the most, the times when he made her mother laugh. Mother would relax and the hard lines on her face would smoothen out, allowing her beauty to shine through. Mum was very pretty when she wasn’t frowning and people often commented that she, Chilo, was the spitting image of her mother.

The times she disliked him were when he wanted things done in the compound and he gave directives like a petty dictator, but he never barked her way. If he wanted something done specially by her, he would hold her hands and whisper to her. Sometimes he held her by her buttocks, or when there was no one around, her b.r.e.asts. His touches made her uncomfortable but she didn’t know how to tell him to stop because she didn’t want to be disrespectful towards her Mother’s age mate. It often embarrassed her because her bre.a.s.ts were rather developed for a ten year old. Full, firm and jiggly. A nosy neighbour had called her mom some weeks back and advised her to buy Chilo a bra because “the child is maturing faster than her age”.

She hissed with irritation. Some people never minded their own business.

She sighed and looked up at the wall clock. It was 12.30pm. Time to go do the dishes. If Prince, who didn’t like the sight of dirty plates, saw the heaps of plates stacked untidily by the tap, he was bound to complain. Father had told her and her siblings not to give Prince cause for complaint because he was doing them a favour by allowing them stay on in the house without paying. Their house rent had long expired but since the landlord was not in the country, he could afford to give them a period of grace until they could find the money for rent. It was almost a year now and they were still ‘living under grace’. Yep, that was Prince alright, Mum often said when he was out of earshot, her mouth puckered like she was sucking on a lime, Tyrant Lord of Grace. O, we must never cross him, or the heavens will fall!

She dragged herself off the floor and headed to the back of the house where the tap was located. She had stacked the plates in an untidy heap by the wall and some had even rolled towards the centre of the compound. This was most likely the handiwork of her baby brother, who imagined himself some sort of soccer star. Another Rashidi Yekini in the making. He was very fond of kicking plates and cutlery around, and not even repeated ministrations from Mother’s Rod of Fire, as she called the hateful rubber hose mother used to trash her and sibs, discouraged him from kicking his way to his dreams, the crockery be damned!

With a sigh of frustration, she set about gathering the scattered dishes. It seemed the little brat had been at his element that morning, because the plates were scattered far and wide. She had just picked the last spoon where it lay in a corner covered with sand like something a lunatic had used to dig trenches, when she heard the door of the room behind her open. She stiffened. Prince lived in the boy’s quarters behind the main building, so it meant she was home alone with him. O shoot, she was going to be subjected to another question and answer session, spiced up with the occasional grope on the more sensitive areas of her anatomy.

“Good afternoon, Uncle Prince”, she greeted turning to face him. “Ehen, nwunyem, how are you?” he answered, smiling at her. This was another thing she disliked about him. She just wished he would stop calling her ‘nwunyem’, which means ‘my wife’ in Igbo language. The thought of being anybody’s wife embarrassed her greatly, and marriage to Prince, with his thick lips, muscular, hairy arms, dark, medicated aviator glasses and conk ‘igbotic’ accent was totally inconceivable. Let him go look for his age mate, she often thought angrily.

She expected him to come sit by her to chat, as he was very fond of doing, but strangely enough, Prince didn’t leave his door post. He stood there like a muscular, hairy apparition, watching her every move with a single minded focus that she found very unsettling. He didn’t utter a word, but stared and stared and stared. As she bent down to start washing the dishes, she was painfully aware that part of her young bosoms were showing through the top of the pinafore she wore. For the first time, she wished Mother had gotten her a bra, but how could she bother with such inconsequential things as female undergarments when they could barely feed?

Under Prince’s intense scrutiny, she washed the plates as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to remain pinned under those reptilian eyes that stared at her from behind semi-transparent lenses. She was gathering the dishes to take back to the house when he broke the silence.

“Nwunyem is anybody at home with you?” he casually asked her.

“Yes,” she replied, wondering why he was asking.

“Who?”

“Oliver”. Her brother’s name was Oliver.

“What is he doing?”

“I dunno o. I left him sleeping”

She lifted the basin containing the stacked dishes and was about to move to the main building when he called her back.

“Chilo, drop those plates here and come back, I want to talk with you”. Reluctantly, she dropped the basin by the tap and moved back. Prince left the door post and sat down on a bench that rested by the wall. He then motioned to her. “Come here,” he said, and stretched out one thick hand to her.

She hesitated, and then forced her feet to move forward. She stopped a few feet from him and waited expectantly. “Come closer,” he crooned softly. She unenthusiastically crossed the remaining feet and stood directly in front of him. “Why are you afraid? I won’t eat you”, he said, chuckling mildly. He took hold of her damp hands, turned her around and sat her down on his laps. His thighs felt unpleasantly stony beneath her buttocks.

“I don’t know why you are always very jumpy around me,” he began. “You have to learn to trust me, because I am your uncle and will never harm you”. Even as he was speaking, he was already rubbing her exposed knees gently. She wanted to ask him what family tie made him her uncle, but she was too discomfited by the hard hand massaging her knee, so she decided to save the question for a more convenient time.

He adjusted himself on the bench ,and between the time it took for her to inhale and exhale, his hand, like a slimy, insidious snake, slithered up her tummy and enfolded it itself on her right bre.a.s.t.

She shuddered . . .

Following. I see the beginning of something great.

Hmm nice story,following thread

Wow! This is pure literature. Weldone, Ishi.

Damn!
I'm so following you like the Israelites and their Moses.

Nwanem again? Carry go! I mount for ya bck like CCTV.

*Following*

Er...

Anything erot¡ca , count me in
But em , this one with a 10 yrs old
.
Following to see what happen to the pervert but I hate sorrowful , poverty stricken stories no matter how the end become better

Lovely thread Ishi

While I acknowledge the highly-captivating nature of your prose, I squirm in great displeasure whenever I get to a scene (or in reality/real live situation) depicting defilement/desecration/taking advantage sexually of young children especially in the context of poverty as we have it here.
I loathe it with inexpressible passion.
It is doing me as if I should be at the scene to break that man's head.
Aaaaah !!!

I came with my chair

Nicely composed, packaged and delivered... Kudos.. Expecting more from you....

Eze Promoe:
Who born you? Patrick Ogbiagbhon?

nna ask am o

Is ishi trying out some p'o'r'n??
I'm seated tight here! If you dare desecrate that child, I will lock this thread and throw its keys into the throat of a thirst blue-whale.
No try me oh

Good write up but the obvious direction, am uncomfortable with.

Mazi_Omenuko: Is ishi trying out some p'o'r'n??
I'm seated tight here! If you dare desecrate that child, I will lock this thread and throw its keys into the throat of a thirst blue-whale.
No try me oh

You of all folks !
Knight of the Order of Desecration himself !
I'm sure you are playing devil's advocate.

MOBBDEEP:

You of all folks !
Knight of the Order of Desecration himself !
I'm sure you are playing devil's advocate.

Ha!! See title wey dem give Mazi
MAZI no nlder go invite u make u come dia family house oh

Quite a bit of you in the main character Good development. Not sure I want to hear what happened next though.

MOBBDEEP:

You of all folks !
Knight of the Order of Desecration himself !
I'm sure you are playing devil's advocate.

I don't do kids! Heck, I don't so teens!

Ihedinobi: Quite a bit of you in the main character Good development.

Choi! #...whispers to ishi...'Is this your biography?'...#

Na wa o!

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and is protected under copyright laws.
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the Moderator of the Literature section of Nairaland.

Reach the author at irawoimole@gmail.com

^^^

Ishi don't mind them at all. This is an open secret in our here country, a big elephant in the room. Sell Say it!

Nice write-up, Ishilove.

Wow! when I see works like this, I get scared. Ishilove, am a lover of your work. You are so good!
*I wish to be like you when I grow up*

Chilo futilely clawed at the groping claws, all the while wondering in aggravation why on earth this nasty man had such a fascination for her bre.a.sts. She couldn’t quite understand why she found what he was doing to her detestable, but some deep, atavistic instinct in her told her that it was wrong. Very wrong.

She tried to wriggle out of the suffocating enclosure of his cloying embrace, but he held on tight.
“Uncle Prince, stop now,” she protested plaintively. Prince seemed to have suddenly become stone deaf. One hand held her firmly pinned to his thighs while the other hand was very busy kneading and moulding the breast it held captive. She wriggled harder but it was like trying to push a stone wall. Unyielding.

When she realised that resistance was futile, she gave a defeated sigh and stopped struggling. This seemed to encourage her tormentor because his hand moved to her second bosom and began stroking and massaging it in earnest. He moved his thumb to the nippple and stroked it in gentle, circular motions. He did it so confidently that the little girl who was at the receiving end of the ministration wondered just how many girls he did this thing with.

She wondered if he did it with the other big girls who had breasts like hers in the neighbourhood, or with his niece who lived in the next street who came visiting on an almost daily basis. She had noticed that whenever the girl, who was roughly a year or two older than her, arrived after school, they would laugh and play for a few minutes, then Prince would lead the child into the boy’s quarters. All would be quiet for about an hour or so, then the child would exit the quarters and make her way home. The child always branched to the compound on her way back from school before going home. Chilo knew this because she and Oliver were always the only occupants in the compound during the week, of course except for those days when Mother stayed away from work because she could not afford the transport fare. Prince’s niece never came visiting during weekends, when everyone was around and school was closed. She used to think the girl and her uncle shared a very especially close relationship, but she was beginning to have doubts.

Somewhere, outside the train of her jumbled thoughts, an awareness of something strange happening within her, descended slowly, like heavy mist, upon her consciousness. She was beginning to feel . . . funny. . . This queer feeling started shortly after Prince’s thumb moved to her nippple.

The feeling started somewhere around her lower abdomen, spread to her ‘tatu’, as Mother called her peepee, and from there was rapidly spreading to her head and the rest of her body. Strangely enough, it wasn’t unpleasant. She had never felt this . . . sensation . . . before, and it was quite curious and . . . stimulating, for want of a better adjective to describe it.

Her rigid posture gradually relaxed. Prince seemed to notice the change in demeanour because he tittered knowingly and shifted his second hand through the open arms of her pinafore and placed in firmly on her second bosom so that the both of them were now firmly engulfed in those hard, work roughened hand.

He no longer tried to hold her back, and she no longer tried to leave the confines of his arms.

Chilo, not understanding what was happening to her, without knowing why, thrust her chest forward. She absently wondered why she was acting the way she was, but she couldn’t ruminate on the question for long because the sensations that was now coursing through her body barely allowed for lucid thinking. Soon enough, every thought in her head was stilled by the surge of these alien vibrations. It grew and grew, peaked, and exploded into a million tiny pulses.

She sat stock still and waited for the tidal waves to pass, and only when the surges had almost subsided did she notice that one of Prince’s hands was inside her panties. When and how it had gotten there, she had no inkling. Chilo’s tender skin broke out in a thousand goose pimples. Gasping in mortification, she grabbed the offending hand out from under her garment and launched out of Prince’s legs like a jack-in-the-box, startling him. She ran to the tap, breathing hard like she had just being chased by Apple Tree, the neighbourhood lunatic. He was so named because folks said his madness had begun one fine evening when he was enjoying the cool evening breeze under the apple tree in his father’s compound many many years ago.

“Come back here!” he ordered.

“No!” she cried, her heart racing. What had just happened? she wondered wildly. This was a question she would ask herself countless times, in near similar situations during the course of her young life, but at that moment, on that sunny afternoon day, her major concern wasn’t the question itself, but the fact that he had put his hand in her most private area. She could endure his dirty touches on her buttocks and even her breasts, but not her ‘tatu’. NEVER. No one had ever touched here there, except those times when she was ill and too weak to bath herself. Then Mother would bath her and help her wash it, but that was beside the point.

Prince changed stance when he saw the fury in her young face. “Come here, nwunyem, please don’t be angry with me. I promise I will be gentle with you. I love you.” he pleaded. “I promise to buy you sweet, chewing gum and coke, and I will take care of you. I promise”.

“Go and love your age mate!” she spat viciously, then turned and fled into the main building. In her hurry to be out of Prince’s hateful presence, she knocked over the bowl of clean plates, spilling everything onto the floor. She didn’t pause to gather them but moved like wind, into the house.

Inside, she ran to one of the battered armchairs in the sitting room and flopped like a rag doll into it. On the sofa, close to the television which was mounted on Father’s beloved Indian cabinet, Oliver slept on, sleeping the sleep of the very young, totally unaware of the upheavals taking place in the world around him, the most recent being the encounter between the forty-three year old caretaker of the house he and his family lived in and his ten year old sister.

Chilo stared up at the ceiling and seriously considered taking Mother’s pestle and pounding Prince on the head with it. That would teach him to go around dipping his hands into people’s ‘tatus’.

No, that would not do. He looked strong, especially with those thick hands of his that looked like those of Conan the Barbarian. She had watched the movie in DBN and had developed a crush on him. Conan and Michael Jackson were the great loves of her life.

She sighed and wished she had the strength of Mighty Igor, that mean looking wrestler in WWF, then she could walk up boldly to Prince and give him the beating of his life for all the things he had been doing to her. His disgusting touches, the way he ordered her parents around just because they couldn’t afford the house rent and were “living under grace”, and worst of all, for putting those his plague addled hands of his in her ‘tatu’.

Alas, she wasn’t Mighty Igor, or Power Mike, or Bulldog Brower, or Andre the Giant, or Power Uti. She wasn’t Conan either, who fought and defeated his enemies with enviable skill and ease. She was just a ten year old girl at the mercy of circumstances and a nasty, dirty, disgusting old man {everyone in her parents’ generation were considered old} who couldn’t, or wouldn’t- depending on which angle you choose to look at it from -keep his hands to himself. It was so frustrating.

God, she felt so dirty; and confused. Why on earth had she behaved the way she had? Those strange, nay, strange AND very pleasant sensations that had flowed through her body while Prince was caressing her and the aftermath had left her feeling oddly light, warm and. . .and . . . . Unclean. Yes, unclean it was. The feeling had come when a dirty act was being performed on her, yet she had had neither the power, nor the inclination to stop it, especially when it had spread to her ‘tatu’ and on to the rest of her body. She was ashamed to admit to herself that she had liked it while it was still coursing through her body, and had only come to her senses when it had…she couldn’t even understand or explain what happened, except that it had risen to a very high point then fallen.

She sighed heavily. Everything was so strange, bewildering, and tiring. She wished she were at school with the rest of her peers. At least then Prince would not have the opportunity to constantly touch her in her sensitive parts.

She let her small body slide off the chair sluggishly, like running oil, and settle on the floor. She lay face down on the worn carpet, and mentally tried to squeeze her frame into one of the tiny squares that patterned it.
After an immeasurable amount of time, her insides still feeling fuzzy, like cotton wool, she dozed off.

*****************************************

“Chilo. Chilo.”

Someone was gently shaking her. The hand waking her was pressed firmly on her buttocks. Bleary eyed, she sat up and wiped the tiny stream of saliva that ran down the side of her face. She yawned, stretched, rotated on her buttocks and to her chagrin, beheld the unpleasant sight of Prince thoughtfully observing her. How long had the man been there, and what on earth was he doing in her living room? Hadn’t he tormented her enough??

“What?” she asked sullenly.

“Sorry for disturbing your sleep. I can see you were enjoying it”.

Sorry for yourself, she wanted to say, but she held her tongue. She didn’t want to get him angry, because Father had said that they were to avoid getting him upset for any reason whatsoever. Instead, she shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

“I brought something for you and Oliver”.

At the mention of her brother’s name, she looked at his direction. He still slept peacefully. Why wouldn’t he sleep, she thought disdainfully, when he had spent the entire morning kicking crockery around and generally being a nuisance?

“Why did you buy us something?” she asked suspiciously.

“Nothing. I just felt like buying you gifts.”

She sniffed with disbelief. Yeah, right. Prince’s stinginess was almost legendary, according to Father. He would live by a river and still wash his hands with saliva, Mother had stated on several occasions. Washing one’s hands with saliva was a rather disgusting prospect, Chilo thought. If he was buying gifts, then who knew, it might be for ulterior motives known only to him.

“Here, won’t you have a look?” He stretched a Mr Biggs nylon bag to her. The bag looked very inviting. She hesitated a bit, then decided that accepting it wouldn’t cause any harm.
Grudgingly, she took it. Inside were pies, cakes and canned drinks. Her mouth began to water as the rich aroma of the pastries wafted up. All the while, Prince was studying her intently, as if watching for her reaction. She ignored him while she rifled through the contents of the bag.

She didn't bother thanking the nauseating creature. “I will show Mum will she comes back”, she said woodenly, trying not to show her excitement. Wow, it had been eons since she had last eaten pastries from Mr Biggs. When things had been better, Father came home occasionally bearing treats such as these, but since they fallen on Hard Times, the only treat available was Ijebu garri with groundnuts or kulikuli. When Mummy was paid her salary, she sometimes brought home oko mola, ekono Gowon, ofio, tanfiri and the rest.

Her reply seemed to alarm him because he shook his balding head vigorously. “Errrr, no need,” he said hurriedly. “I bought it just for you and Oliver, and if you don’t eat it soon, everything will spoil. You wouldn’t want it to spoil, would you?”

She remained mute. Chilo unconsciously tightened her grip on the nylon bag and shifted it closer to her small frame.

He noticed this and eagerly went on. “This is a special treat for you, and I want you to enjoy it. Don’t tell your Mummy or Daddy anything, do you hear?” She nodded solemnly.

“I also don’t want you to tell your Mummy or Daddy about what happened today. I want it to remain a special secret between the two of us. You don’t like it, abi?”

She nodded energetically.

He smiled, oozing saccharine and viscous treacle. ”Okay, I won’t do it again, I promise. If you tell your Mummy, then I will do it every day. Would you want that?”

“No,” she answered in a small voice.

“Okay, that’s a good girl”. His voice fell to those despicable hateful low tones that she so abhorred. The tones that said, ‘ho ho ho, I am your friend!’ (I am not your friend, you nasty old man!!!) “Now let me leave you to enjoy your cake. Remember we agreed, nwunyem that you will not tell this to Mummy, Daddy or anyone else, so be a good girl and keep your promise. Ok?”

She nodded solemnly.

He leaned down and touched her shoulder. She cringed.

With a sigh of exasperation, he turned and took his creepy presence out of the house. As soon as she heard the door shut, she quickly scrambled to the door and hurriedly locked it. Once the door was firmly locked, she rested her forehead on the smooth, warm wood and heaved a sigh of relief. She turned and her eyes fell on the bag lying on the carpeted floor.

She regarded the nylon bag for some minutes from where she stood by the door, then made up her mind. She slowly shuffled to the bag and sat cross legged on the floor beside it. She opened the bag, took a pie out and took a big bite. While she ate, savouring every bite, she pondered on her situation.

She opened one of the canned drinks, took a sip and pondered some more. . .

So na here u come hyd since? Make i read am first before i giving my commented.

the beginning of the end...

He touched it.
Hope gets arrested at the end o

Your sense of description, Ishi, is so poetic...so out of the world. Did Adichie learn from thou?