Maina belched loudly as he explored his teeth with his tongue, sprawled on his recliner, stomach bulging. The hot meal of corn paste and thick, rich soup had weakened him. He loved to eat. Eating was necessary for the huge task he performed for the villagers; that of being the official letter writer. The meal had been payments of sorts for helping a woman write to her brother in the city.

Stupid villagers!

They regarded him with a strange mix of reverence, fear and envy. He was a god, their god! Without him, they would be helpless; deeply mired in the mud of their ignorance, talking about witches and spells and curses. They even called him ‘the one who could send words on leaf’. He guffawed contentedly as his eyes drifted close. Stupid villagers….

His train of thought was interrupted by a gruff voice that intruded into his peaceful ambiance.
“I want you to help me write something”.
“Go away. I am closed for the day”, Maina whined, his eyes still closed.
“This is the fifth time I am coming here. I won’t leave until you attend to me”!

Maina cracked his right eye open in a tentative slit and stared at the stranger. The man’s eyes were red and deep and sunken; but they had a defiant, angry look about them. This look told Maina that the stranger meant what he had said. So with a world weary sigh which culminated in a sulphuric belch, he stood up and went to the inner room to get his exercise book and his biro. “It will cost you five”, he informed the stranger as he made to tear a leaf from the middle of the book.

“No! Don’t tear it, I want to finish talking. Then you can calculate your fee”, the stranger informed him.
“It’s your purse man”, Maina guffawed. “As long as I get paid, it’s alright by me”….

His voice tapered off when he found the man’s hard eyes fastened on his own. The man’s lips had hardened into a cynical smile. Money! The man exclaimed, like someone who had seen a wad of it on the ground. Money! He said again, this time in a soft voice. He snickered. Then his red eyes fastened on Maina’s own again. What I want to tell you is a story, a strange one. I want you to listen and write exactly what I tell you. Not a word more, not a word less…a story about money.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
It was a dusty, windy day. On that day Amuno came to me. I spied him from afar off, watched him as he shuffled towards me with his Danshiki billowing behind him in the wind. He looked troubled, scared even. His hand shook briefly as I handed him the bowl of cool rice and groundnut gruel my younger sister brought to me when he was settled in our little room; a welcoming gift.

When Amuno spoke after a brief sip, his voice quivered tremulously and his face was as weathered and as lined as the rumpled Danshiki he had on. The Danshiki was a dirty brown. Strangely, I found myself wondering about the cloth. Real colour? Age? I couldn’t tell. But as you know, your physical appearance doesn’t matter in Duda village as long as you could get a few morsels of food in your hollow belly and as long as your threadbare shirt is able to reduce the sting of the scorching sun, sun that is liable to burn your bare back dirty black if you went shirtless.
Amuno slurped at the thin gruel before carefully placing the bowl on the ground. “Dende, what would you do if you had the means of changing your situation, your circumstances”?

Amuno looked at me questioningly, his brown pupils cloudy with emotions I couldn’t quite decipher.

I looked back at him thoughtfully, and then I sipped from my cup, noting that as usual, there was no sugar in it. Sugar was a luxury we did without, in my household.

I looked up in thought at the ceiling of our little, squalid room; at the way rice sacks had been used to make a decent roof, at the dry branches that crossed the entire length, with thick, black rubbers used to tie the whole contraption in place. The walls showed off the mud that had for years lain hidden under the cemented walls. Now the cement, dirtied and tired with age, was peeling off in huge, falling chunks.

And then THE crack; it was wide, a rough U-shape of sagging cement. If I lowered my eyelids quite a bit, I could imagine the crack a wide, cynical smile; a mockery of me and my dire straits. It housed a lizard which looked to peep whenever there were people in the room. At this moment, it was peeping at me blithely, like a thief watching closely to know the exact moment to snatch your bag. The lizard nodded at me a few times. In agreement? It nodded again….

Amuno, I sighed, tearing my eyes off the lizard. If I could do anything to get out of this place, I would.

Was there something he wasn’t saying? Hadn’t said yet? Had he by some stroke of luck chanced upon a scheme? A scheme big enough that he needed my help…. a scheme that had the capacity of taking me away from this place where the air itself was oppressively thin and inadequate, like everything else?

He inhaled sharply and leaned back to look at me. I could see his nose hair, made prominent by the brown dust that clung tenaciously within. I sipped my gruel, not taking my eyes off his own.

If eyes were windows to the soul, let Amuno see that I was desperate. Let Amuno see the pain, the determination, the frustration, the sadness, the unhappiness. Let Amuno help me. Let him let me in on whatever it was that could take me away from this place, this hell-hole. Anything that would take me far away from that nodding lizard; which at this very moment was nodding at me again. In agreement?

Amuno brought down his eyes and brought out a dirty cloth from the folds of his Danshiki. The inner pleats that were briefly visible to my curious gaze showed a different colour from what was immediately observable from the outer garments. Obviously, a combination of the sun and far-too-constant use had turned the cloth into the brown I now was seeing. I watched him.
Carefully, he unwrapped the package and brought out a small, mummified head of some kind of animal. I looked on. Disgusted, fascinated. I looked on.

“My uncle, the rich one, gave me this”, Amuno said, his voice low but urgent. “He said it was given to him a long time ago by a medicine man he visited in the evil forest. It grants wishes, Dende. Three wishes to everyone who puts an index finger in its right ear and makes a wish”….

“You can’t be serious, Amuno”, I whispered. “It is just not possible”.

It is possible, Dende, he informed me miserably. Miserably?

But why was he miserable? Didn’t this mean we could at last be free? Be rich? Be all we had ever hoped and dreamed while laying on our mats and smoke filled huts (the smokier the better, to do away with mosquitoes), glancing at the star-filled sky through windows? If it was true, that is….

“Did you wish? Did it work”? I asked, glancing at the dried thing he held in his hand.

“I wished for one thing”, he answered. “I asked to be famous. But it works in strange ways, Dende. The repercussions for changing the natural sequence that has been destined by the fates are severe”, he said with a sigh.
I guffawed.
“I’ll be damned if this thing works! As far as I can see, you are definitely not famous”!
“But I could be”, he muttered weakly. “I could be….”
Impulsively, I took the thing from him and inserted my finger in its right ear. “I am wishing for a Ghana-must-go filled with Gala”, I said quickly before he could stop me.

I had always been fascinated with the snack. When I’d worked as gardener in the other side of town, it had been a daily routine for the my boss’ son to come out of the house every morning, clutching one (half-eaten) in his little hand. My mouth had watered countless times to take a mouthful of the brown dough, with the red filling in the middle. I had never gotten a chance to eat one and I had consoled myself with wolfing down the remnants of his lunchbox every time I went to pick him from school. The boy was a quiet, little fellow who wouldn’t tell, or so I thought. I learnt better when a few weeks later, he peered triumphantly at me from behind his mother’s lappa, while she loudly berated me for eating the boy’s lunch and starving her child. A few days later, I had gone to work to see another gardener watering the flowers I had so painstakingly trimmed the day before. With a sinking heart, I went to see my madam, who brightly informed me that my services were no longer needed.

I yelled as I felt a flash of pain in my finger, the finger in the ear. I pulled it out and examined it. It was intact, but for a dull throb. I looked up at Amuno, a puzzled frown on my bewildered face.
He was looking at me sadly, almost reprovingly. The wind whistled outside as it passed between tree branches….
**************************

A loud screech, a blood curdling bang … screams.

You shouldn’t have….

“Get a bag, get me a bucket! Zara, bring containers”! You shouldn’t have….

With a start, I came awake. Nightmare in the daytime it seemed, intermittently interspersed with the words Amuno had told me reprovingly before leaving that morning: “Dende, you shouldn’t have….”

You shouldn’t have.

My eyes flitted to the crack on the wall and the lizard which was peeping again nodded once, its tiny black eyes seemingly filled with resentment and accusation.

You shouldn’t have….

I stretched my tired limbs. Then the noises filtered to my hearing. My sister hurried into the room, “a trailer just fell on its side” she explained giggling excitedly. “The driver has been taken for treatment”! She ran back, holding whatever it was she came to get.

I lay on the worn-out sofa, turning the events of that day over in my mind. I felt a faint gnaw of hunger. Where was this girl when you needed her to get you a cup of garri and a handful of palm-kernel nuts? As if on cue she hurried in; on her head was a ‘Ghana-must-go’ sack. She dropped it on the dusty floor with a thump.

My heart jumped in my mouth. My voice was husky when I queried shakily: “What is that?”

Maybe I half knew the answer. Maybe I was half expecting that the candidly sad look Amuno had thrown me before leaving couldn’t be amiss. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when I heard the answer. But not being surprised still didn’t stop my heart from skipping in sudden fear.
“Gala, Dende! The trailer in the accident was carrying Gala. There is Gala everywhere on the road…everybody is….”
I looked up at the ceiling, at the rough brown sacks that covered the entire surface and the sticks crisscrossing the ceiling.
"You shouldn’t have…”
*************************************************************************************

It was later in the evening, after the Gala gala, that the news filtered in. A hapless cyclist had been on the receiving end of the falling trailer. Screams rent the air as people, drawn by morbid curiosity, went to peep at the now-congealed blood that had seeped out of the spot where the monstrous weight had descended on the horrified cyclist as he feverishly and futilely tried to ride away from his gloomy destiny.

A young lady wailed as she rolled on the sand a little distance from the fallen killer. Others stood with hands on their heads, the taste of the stolen food still firmly embedded in their tongues.

Dende stood far off. The Gala he’d eaten seemed to be a solid mass in his stomach, as congealed and unmoving as the blood that was on the brown soil.

What he had wished for had led to the death of a man. You shouldn’t have….

He turned and walked back to the room. THE lizard scrambled from the floor to the crack on the wall. It held a scrape of Gala in its mouth; it disappeared into the gaping hole, that hole whose smile now seemed to carry a more sinister meaning if he closed his eyelids just right. Did that mean He was a murderer.

‘Dende, you shouldn’t have….’

Am early. Following.

i m soo following dis story
#nyc strt

Miss lolaluv, your nairaland stalker is back . just got to see ur new story. nice work.
What abt CB?