PROLOGUE

Ever reflected back on an event and wished you could reenact the exact moment when it hit you.

When you are left wondering if you can pinpoint your precise location or preoccupation at the time, i.e. recreate the moment when the muck hit the fan.

Your intent is not so much to re-live that moment but to freeze your reverie before it all went awry and repress it forever.

Try as she might, Nkiru couldn’t.

Instead she envisaged the day as it could have been, that fateful day 2 years ago which was no ordinary dawn. She could have tarried to get out of bed because there would have been no need to hurry. She might have been cheerful and even hummed a melody underneath her breath. She must have been happy. Just happy? No, ecstatic was more descriptive of her then state of mind.

They had just concluded the ‘iku aka’ or knocking ceremony the previous day and the formal traditional wedding ceremony will follow suit before the church or white wedding. Who wouldn’t have been happy? To cap it all, she and her beloved Obinna were intended to travel immediately afterwards to start a new life in the USA. There couldn’t possibly be a happier couple in the whole town of Ubi. None!

However, her residual memory of the exact moment when her world was overturned was a blur. What remained vivid in her mind was the fall, not a physical fall. You know just like the rug had been pulled from under your feet and you whirl in a free fall. She watched herself declining rapidly as she tumbled down an endless bottomless pit. Bizarrely, she also stood atop the gaping hole while her other self tumbled down. There was two of her, each image more real than the other. An out of body experience it is called.

She recalled plummeting incessantly, thumping down an endless cascade of stairs, her body flailing like a lifeless doll as it went thump, thump from one step to the next. Her eyes ached from watching the spectacle of her simultaneous endless drift while her observer body stood numb and standstill.

She felt drained, hapless, helpless and incapable of movement or reaching out to rescue her counterpart battered ostensibly inert body rattling along in a quick descent down the ditch.

She couldn’t recall when or how the fall broke, much less when or how the two images finally merged back into one. She was engulfed by blankness and was transported to a hollow shell devoid of pain or emotions. She found herself encased in limbo and suspended in time. She stayed frozen to that particular moment in time refusing to feel or acknowledge the prickly thorns that encircled her head.

Maybe if she stayed motionless for long enough, things will change. When she finally gets up, time would have reset itself back to her pre-plunge period. It wasn’t, couldn’t and shouldn’t be true.

She mentally shut herself down in denial refusing to acknowledge that Obinna was gone. In her thwarted troubled mind, she argued that the rest of the world was mistaken.
This was only a bad dream and the nightmare will be over as soon as she wakes up. She was just going to lie in bed, take her time and when she does wake up, it would have been a mere fluke, none of it real.

Alas, if only wishes were horses because she did wake up but it was not a dream. When she emerged from her cocoon, it was no pretty sight. She finally had to confront her reality. The impervious cocoon that she had encased herself in hoping that when she crept out, things will be fine had only offered her but a temporary refuge. Her desire to turn time back or restart from her comfort zone was just wishful thinking.
Life was far from a slate that she could wipe clean and rewrite. It is a master of its own fate; her part is to arbitrate with destiny.
She longed for a clean slate to rewrite her residual life and plug with only laughter, very little of S’s but no T’s of life.

Two years later and the numbness were yet to fully dissipate, the entire period riddled with pure anguish. Her heart threatened to burst out of its seams with sorrow as she contemplated her past.
She had refused to cry throughout that period. Her eyes were wide open but blind, ears receptive of sounds but she was deaf. She learnt how to cry with a smile and her smile was transformed into a smirk.

She had clutched her phone to chest, clung to it as if her dear life depended on it, grasping so tightly that the veins at the back of her hand were visibly outlined. She willed the phone to ring and waited expectantly for his voice at the other end.
“Hello Baby, it’s me.” She’d have heard him say because those are usually his opening line when he calls as if she would have mistaken him for any other.

She was failed by the phone which refused to ring with his name reflected on the interface? Why? Why? She had queried in anguish. Had they not suffer enough? The trials and tribulations they underwent was not enough penitence for their sins? Had they not propitiated the gods enough?
A myriad of questions, doubts, anger and various other different emotions clogged flittingly through her mind, flickering like the embers of a dying candle through her tormented soul.

The series of unrelenting queries flashed one after the other like the pages of a book left flustering in the face of the wind. She still didn’t have all the answers but was healing and trying to fully embrace the realms of her tragedy.
It was against the tenets of her religion to doubt God, query her fate or the powers above. She was supposed to stay complacent to destiny after all the Almighty Savior was crucified to atone for her sins, yet never queried his destiny. Which sacrifice is greater than that? He never uttered a single complaint. She recounted over and over again.

So who was she to complain? She should simply embrace her lot and get a grip but it was just too much. God, unbearable! She suppurated in anguish, albeit no tears or words escaped from her lips, just the blank stare that kept forcing her mother back on her knees praying the rosary while pleading for absolution and beseeching the Lord to intercede before her daughter loses her sanity.
But…but…why? She still remonstrated in vain, knowing no straight answers were forthcoming.
A conflict of emotions continuously ran through her mind but her torment was undiminished.

Time was supposed to be the greatest healer but her pain was raw. It stung worse than the sharp painful sting of a tincture of iodine applied to fresh wound.
She was usually upbeat, thriving on staying optimistic in the face of adversity but not anymore. Life had dealt her too heavy a hand. As if Obinna’s tragedy was not enough, she had to contend with the others too.
Her reoccurring trials beggared the aphorism ‘when it rains, it rains in torrents’ as a relentless torrent of mishaps dogged her very existence, one after the other.
Where does she start to recount her inveterate heartbreaks? The culmination of events that had rocked the root of her equilibrium nearly forcing her senses to desert her. She was still trying to rein herself in but as of yet was en-route to recovery.

Tears filled her eyes as memories of her beloved Obinna came flooding back, trickling down her cheeks as she gazed blindly up at the ceiling.

She momentarily caught sight of the shoddy chandelier in her bed-sit. She observed a little spider dangling precariously at edge of a stringy web from the chandelier. The tiny creature was spinning round energetically forming a webby mesh building a globe around the chandelier. Lucky spider, at least you spin your own world, she pondered enviously as she watched mesmerized by the spider’s adroitness at work. She turned away to glance around her nearly bare typical student digs.

Nothing mattered anymore.

I scanned through your story, and I think I know everything but what actually happened to the heroine.

Well, the above is only an excerpt from the original book so you need to read the book to find out the rest of the story.

More on the prologue is available on www.lulu.com. search for Pathos of a wilting Rose and preview the book.

Cheers!!!!!

lemme guess. . .
she became paraplegic from a spinal cord injury on account of a fall?

@ lamidebaby: No, she didn't become paraplegic. The "fall" was metaphorical - but i guess you know that already.

@ ira: I got 2 things to tell you: one - you got skill with words, but you neglected to tell people what your story was actually about. So I'm going to give you the same advice SMC gave me almost a year ago: try short stories. They are a wonderful way of sharpening your skills without having to work too long on one work. And you can give them away - post in a place like here - and get feed-back from people.
Two - trying to get your work sold by posting short snippets like this won't work at all. People want to know how good you, and that short write-up you posted definitely doesn't do you justice. And besides, you are just starting, a budding author; telling folks to go to your webpage to view the rest of the book is tantamount to telling them to leave you alone. I have published on Lulu, too, but I posted both the prologue and the first chapter here - and got zero sales.
So here's my advice: post at least one chapter, then go back and hone your skills. They may kill a million dollars some day, but that day is still in the future.

@Kay9,
GBAM! spot on!