A 5000 word short submitted to Narative.com. Hopin fervently to be, at least, shortlisted for publication on their site

-Beer Sister -

Chapter One

“Who are you?” she queried the dark gloom.
“I am the One” . The voice replied softly like a caress.
“The One?” The girl of ten shrank into herself. She had begun to tremble. Her big eyes searched frantically around the small room.
It was not totally dark.
She can still make out the outlines of three columns of Star Lager beer crates stacked up six inches shy from the ceiling. The fourth column was just three crates high.
The room was windowless.
Dank and reeked with rat’s urine and the acrid sour odour of left over beer.
The forlorn light aiding her vision crept through the crack under the room’s wooden door.
Her father had locked her up in here.
She knew she wont see daylight until breakfast time when he would send her younger sister to slid in the key through the crack. She had been here since 6:30 am.
Breakfast was till 9:30.
Father said she would always wind up in the small store until she stops drawing huge wet maps of Africa and Australia on her narrow bed.
Thrice a week or more, she wets the bed (shows her stupidity, Father would say) and suffers her father’s wrath.
Papa uses his police belt, the thin black one, on her back. It whips through the air in quick arcs and never relents until Mama Favour, the always pregnant neighbour, disturbed by her retching screams intervened.
But Maam favour never stopped him from locking her up in the constricted space.

She had gotten used to the room's gloom over the weeks she'd stayed tenant.
But she will never get along with the rats.
They are furious, always.
They squeaked indignantly. She was an intruder.

Sometimes she cries.
Mostly, she just curled herself up in a ball with her back against the small store's door.

Ma never protests.
Who can stand Papaz anger. Ma was always afraid of Papa, just like her two siblings. And she herself.

Papa’s tantrums gets worse especially after night outs with colleagues at that queazy bar down the street. There, Papa often touches the fat woman owner in places Ma said girls should not allow boys to lay hands on.
Papa was always stupidly drunk when he does that and the fat woman always smiles sheepishly. One of the older gals whispered it at the pump.

She will never tell Mama.
Even if she does, Mama wont do anything. Mama was a coward. Forever at the point of tears. Just like all of them anyway.
Father was strong. He was almost as tall as the disused basketball post at school and he has got the sinewy arms of a mechanic. He was quick with his fists too.
No one ever wants to stand in the way of those furious fists. And then there was that wicked lookin gun. Father fondly named it Putin. The name sound like a dog’s name to her most times.

"I am...My name..." She stuttered.
"Papa". Her voice came thick. Her breath now comin in quick qasps. Her adrenals did their best and she jerked up instinctively, pounding the door with the blind survival intent of cornered rat.

"Papa, let me out. They are here" She screamed in thick strands of saliva. Her unwashed mouth's odour briefly overpowering her and quickly became irrelevant.
Fear wrapped up her slender frame in a tight embrace.

"You name is Papa?" The voice in the dark was incredulous.

" Papa" The girl of ten screamed with all her might.

Rats scurried around in frightened indignation to the noise. Their frenzied movement heightening the gal’s palpable fear.
Her eyes still searched, trying furtively to pinpoint the origin of the voice. Scurrying shadows scamper here and there. The squeaks magnified a hundred fold in her ears.
The disconcerting sounds operated levers of her imagination, igniting Stroboscopes of every imaginable fiend her nascent mind could conjure up from her Freudian wells. A motley of masquerade mouths in deep Boschian yawns sprouted in her vision , dancing on the fringes of her puerile logic.

The Mmawu. The spirits of the dead. The zombies from Micheal Jackson’s Thriller.
They spawned round and around in lunatic circles.

Mama had warned her about that Micheal Jackson’s video. Mama said it was anti-Christ. Such music offends Papa Jehovah. But Chinwendu as well as her siblings had waved off their mother’s fears. MTV showed how the zombies where made all the time. Its all cosmetics and some computer screens.

Right now, she wished she’d listen more to Mama. The spirits certainly are real.
She had never been this afraid.
This fear...was pure and primordial. Different from the ones occasioned by Papa’s thin belt coming down in quick arcs of pain.

She stopped her screams, swallowed huge lumps. “Who’s there?”
Her tongue still felt thick and heavy.

“My name is Ndapu” The Voice reiterated, “How many times will I tell you.”

“Where are you? Papa is coming. He has a big gun” Her voice carried the shivers racking her slender frame.

A mischievous low chuckle serenade the dark room again.
The rodents hushed.

And suddenly, her skin crawled, goose bumps afresh and a rising warm sensation began to envelope her.
“Papa has a gun. He can shoot with no mercy. He is still at home. He’s not gone out yet. You don’t want to see him angry”
Sobs escape her in salivary strands. Snot dangled, viscous, off her nostrils. She would wipe them away only if her hands weren't this heavy - like grinding stones.
The chuckle once again. The sound seeming to originate from everywhere.

“I can’t go away.”
A contemplative pause, and it said, “I like the physics here. Out there is...indifferent.”

The tingling sensation increased. It felt like crawling cockroaches now. Their hairy appendages , prickly and digging into every pore of her skin.
She squirmed and scratched repeatedly, fending off the roaches in her mind’s eye.

“Go away now. Papa has a gun, he’s a policeman.... Please”

Her ears buzzed with adrenaline tainted blood cursing through her veins. She had never felt this hot. The store was relatively cool until now.
Now she feels enveloped in hot damp air. Redolent with the sickening sweet smell of stale beer and rodent excreta. Her pajamas with the huge wet maps clung to her as tight, every pore on her skin was alive and arching dully.
This must be some malarial bout. A thought flashed in her mind. No, this is not Malaria.

Her throat begun to tickle too, as if caked in brittle potash. The room had turned to a hearth with hot charcoals and no fire yet.
“Resistance is hopeless, Sister” The Voice cooed, “I’m here to stay”.

Chapter two.


Emma was six and has bow legs.
Once, Papa said you could score a goal through them.
She had tugged at Mama’s wrapper while she tossed akara balls in the deep charcoal black frying bowl over the mud hearth.

The little gal with the bow legs wanted the akara balls. Mama refused, insisting she will only have one at the breakfast table.

Emma pouts her lips in ways that only small girls her age could do. She would have gone into tantrums, thrash a tattoo on the dirt concrete floor with her bow legs but Papa was washing in the bathroom not far away. You don’t fuss while Papa is around.

She could hear his whistling. Papa always whistles a tune each time he washes up.
The brown akara balls spurted deliciously in that deep charcoal black frying bowl.

But that was not the only sound now getting her rapt attention.
Momentarily she let go of mama’s wrapper and cocked her head to an angle , like an Agama lizard, arched towards the source of the new sounds.

A dreadful quick scream.
And a muffled thud like someone smashing a bag of tomatoes with a plank.

With a rapid intake of breath and a determined tug at her mother’s wrapper, she pointed towards the small store 20 feet away from the cloistered kitchen.
Mama followed her pointing fingers. Immediate concern washed up her narrow fair face with the flexibly wide mouth but she heaved resignedly, knowing that she could offer little help - No matter how strong her maternal instincts prodded.
Only her husband can decree when to release the gal.

No one goes against him. Good Jehovah, she got a a canine out on one occasion of affront and a severe soreness in-between her legs the following night.

The little girl pricked for more sounds - she doddered across the red earth compound, her eyes constantly darting towards the corrugated zinc enclosed space where Papa takes his bath.

“Chinwendu”. She called in a small voice, conscious that her voice might carry across the yard to Papa. She leaned on the lone dying guava tree guarding the store house.
“Are you Okay?”

A rapid pounding of the door jolted her and she fled a meter away from the store.

Chinwendu had since grown accustomed to staying inside there. The girl of six rationalized. At least, she never makes this sort of noise after the first few weeks of been in there. Chinwendu told her the rats scared her to bits but not enough to make her pound frantically at the door. Of course, doing so will infuriate Papa the more.

But why is she making such a flutter now, the little gal of six pondered anxiously.
Had she seen the ominous Ojuju? One of the ghouls that come out of termite’s anthills.
Papa said they sneak out only to drag naughty and bed wetting children screaming down their anthill dungeon.

Another rapid chugging at the door shook her. Her heart began that crazy lurching she associates with Papa looking for his whipping belt. And whats that other sound?

No it was a voice.
Strange. Guttural. Like someone munching roasted breadfruit while talking.

It is the Ojuju. Her little gal of six mind screamed and her instincts to run swelled.
She pushed back further, one part of her puerile mind begging her to bolt and get Papa and the other strangely urging her to go closer to the door. To explore. To make sure.

Whatever could make such munching sound?.
She never wanted to imagine the horrible.

Perhaps Wendu was been torn into meaty chunks by huge and curved razor sharp teeth.
Teeth bigger and more terrible than the canines of that police dog Papa’s friend often brought along on visits.

She watched the small door with the peep hole, thin fingers held tightly over her paper thin chest. Eyes wary with a tepid mixture of fear and the near inexhaustible child’s need to explore.
The peep hole on the small door - Was dark.

She remembered how that hole got to be.

Papa had shot at the door.

He said he hadn’t known there was still a bullet left in his gun’s magazine while high on champagne for his promotion party.
Mama was not amused. She remembered.

Indeed, she got closer, on legs like strands of ogbono soup.
As she stood, a foot from the moss tainted door with decades old paint peeling off at the ragged edges that spared it from the ground, she could hear her Papa’s off-tune bathroom reverie, hear the robins rustling in the mango and guava trees bestriding the red earth compound. Hear the purling of Akara balls in deep oil back in the kitchen.
She could hear the ragged breathing behind the wooden door.

Her sister’s. Definitely.

What happened next...

I hate it when i start readin a good piece, anticipatin a juicy end ....only for an abrupt stop.

kazuna , dont tell me this x d end and pray dont tell me to buy so and so chapter.

Halo, are u on a sabbatical?

Complete the damm story na...

Hope you haven't gone Sabbath