Sausage! Sausage! A customer shouted from a blue Toyota Camry. It was the call Akazua and his fellow hawkers waited all day for. Here on the road, their real names didn’t matter; they were called by the commodity they peddled. The sausage hawkers dashed after the car which began to slowly accelerate as the traffic started to ease, their rubber slippers flapped noisily; making slapping sounds as they ran. Akazua preferred selling to parked vehicles and pedestrians; the moving vehicles frightened him, but he ran all the same, till he felt a throb in his thighs and finally gave up when a bigger boy got the upper hand. It was difficult for him to keep up with the pace of his colleagues; they were older, stronger and faster. He sometimes stood awestruck whenever he watched his older colleagues running after fast moving vehicles; exchanging sausage for money in split seconds.

Akazua felt his stomach rumble in protest, he was hungry and weak; the carton of Sausage felt like a ton of brick, it tired his frail malnourished arms. His routine breakfast of Garri and watery Egusi soup usually gave him the strength to cope with the strenuous demands of hawking, but he had forfeited today’s ration, as punishment from his master incensed by his poor sales. He wished he had eaten, he preferred the occasional beating to the forfeiture of his meals—the pain from the whip was not as painful as the hunger pangs that now tormented his stomach.

Dropping the carton of Sausage on a stone pavement, he stretched his arms in a bid to ease his cramped muscles. He longed for his little village, his master’s cruelty made him homesick. He missed sitting with his siblings on the farm and roasting salted yams till they turned brown. He missed the thatched primary school and Uncle Idibia his English teacher. He had enjoyed going to school, now he looked forlorn at kids dressed in school uniforms and chauffeured by doting parents. His master had promised his father he would send him to school in return for his domestic services, but he had since reneged on his promise. Akazua groaned, angry at his father for giving him out to his cruel master for monetary gains.

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