Halo, I have been given the rights to continue with this Work. Parts of this novelette was written by Thepassersby and greeneyes. It is a Work in Progress, initially started by Kazuna Cobalt. Art Work is by Nijabazaar



CHAPTER ONE
Amawbia was El Tredo’s, Ukpaka Ezimezi, Mummy’s pot, Mama Nkechi and a handful of other restaurants were conservative delicacies were menu. It was home for big goggle-decking retirees, the Nouveau rich , Ultra conservatives, mushroom pentecostals and the mundane.

It was sleepy mornings, brilliant afternoons and balmy windy evenings. It was not so spectacular sunset and rusting corrugated rooftops out-of-place with Avant-garde houses pouri-studded in the boring verdant blur of a strangulated forest.

It was a glorified African village thrust forcefully into complicated modern life.
It was goats and chickens straddling along expressways and moping at the latest Acura ZDX zooming by. It was toothless old women munching kolanut and shaking with it. It was fat old men ogling at sophisticated cleavage baring girls, wiggling their tiny buts as they selfie-d to crazy.

Amawbia is Amawbia.

Now a woman was running away from its central avenue.

it’s mid June also. It floods in the gutters too.
Rain in Amawbia rarely falls without some sort of personality. This very morning-it seems to play tricks. Teasing as it eases to sleet, threatening as it pours with caustic indifference on the wiperless Nissan Xterra purring its way through the gleaming Zik’s Avenue.

Elizabeth had murdered someone. She had set a house ablaze, her house, and her husband.

It was 2:50am but thanks to the deluge what used to be a fast lane of whizzing cars , for night crawlers, was deserted. The street lights weren’t functioning, the darkness was wet and heavy - above and around.
She navigates through the torrents only with the help of the car’s single head lamp and fog light and a vision sharpened by the excitement of murder, with which she pierces via the dark miasma.

Overhead, thunder hovers above a canopy of tree silhouettes bestriding both sides of the avenue
An owl hooted once. The sound of it’s flapping wings strangely audible in the clatter of rain and thunder.
Elizabeth’s mind was on the fringes of a single thought. She had to act insane. She had to keep it believable, she had to show proof of insanity unless she could end up....hanged. No, Elizabeth, chief anaesthetic of St Luke’s hospital will not die a common criminal.

In her state of anxiety and pious resolution, Zik’s avenue seemed to sketch on into infinity. Faint streaks of lightening highlighted some parts of the sky above. A cold wind was beginning to wheeze into the speeding Nissan-sneaking up her blouse but not cold enough to kill the urban reek from the gutters bounding the avenue. The shops on both sides of the avenue were encroaching in on her, their dead windows-eyes ominous and intimidating.

She was going to make a U-turn around the roundabout which was just three poles ahead. She would report herself to the police. The Nissan accelerated; her fears dispersing slowly into the urban reek.

She’d begin to relish the intoxicating speed, the slivers of rain hitting the windscreen, the Nissan’s mechanical spur of deviance. What happened at No 4, Amaechi street was a stringent necessity. She would never fall into the traps of regret…

something is cooking....will be right back