A View From My Shop

The hoots of the blaring horns of the vehicles going to and from on the Bajulaiye road piercing into my eardrums with the loud sound of the amplified music from the musical shop two blocks away and the noisy salesgirls next shop could be irritating if I did not ignore them. My starry brown eyes regarded the panoramic scenarios of the colourful human traffic. The drama of the busiest road in Shomolu, a suburb of Lagos State, one of the dirtiest cities on earth popularly called Garbage City. Lagos city was decorated with polythene bags of refuse, indiscriminate refuse dumps and other waste littering the whole environment with the most appalling miasma that threatened to engender an epidemic of a deadly airborne disease if the so called Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) continued to carry on their disorganized waste disposal services and Garbage City will continue to be the laughing stock of the tourist world. LAWMA did not impress us, because right in front of me was an eyesore. A small heap of abandoned refuse that had been there for over two months even though the waste disposal trucks of LAWMA always passed by daily, littering the streets with refuse dropping from their open trucks and thereby earning the derogatory appellation Waste Dispersal Authority. And we often laughed at them whenever they passed by. Governor Bola Tinubu's junkies.

“Did you see your sister?” I asked excitedly.
“Did you see her?” She replied with glints in her beautiful brown eyes.
“She just passed by now, on an Okada motorbike,” I said and I could see that she really wanted to see her elder sister.

“I told Chioma to come,” I said.
“What did she say?” She asked.
“She did not give me an affirmative response,” I replied.
Nneka sighed and sat back on the white plastic chair behind the round plastic table inside the shop. A customer munching a snack and drinking a bottle of soda regarded us as we chatted. He was a short chubby man in a brown shirt with short sleeves and wearing baggy black trousers with black leather shoes. He seemed amused by the cheerfulness of my humorous personality as I teased Nneka and I really tickled her fancy. We were fond of each other and those who knew us thought we were in love. We exchanged coded messages known only to both of us. And many people mistook us for a loving couple selling snacks and soft drinks from their big shop. We spent most evenings together after my daily work. I loved to keep her company as she attended to customers in her aunt’s snacks bar and we would sit side by side to look at the passers-by mostly on foot, motorbikes or cars. We also enjoyed rating the looks of the young women and the styles of their hairdos or dresses. And a flashy posh car often got our thumbs up. A delight to sight made us cheer. But an unpleasant sight made us hiss.

Then, I decided writing A View From My Shop. Of course this was not my shop.

Wow, you have written so many stories. I salute you!

Orikinla
Compile all your short stories and make it into a book. I think I would buy it.

Seun,
thanks for the free space.

NSNA,
My Editor Adeleke Adeyemi is still editing them. And I believe in God for a collection of my short stories to become a book next year. He will select the best of the short stories.
You can still enjoy my collection of poems and with some stories written in verse, Scarlet Tears of London.
You can preview it on http://books.google.com/books?q=Scarlet+Tears+of+London&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0