Hi, i am new here. Glad to have stumbled upon this site. It's nice to see a forum specifically for African literature. I'd like to post the following short story (written a couple of years ago when i first started writing, though i never really bothered to get much feedback on it). Hope you enjoy it (mind you, it's a bit scary).

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Ali came out as he usually did at 6:30 am every Monday morning to wash his car. It was parked at the side of the street just to the right of the compound where he lived. He had been hot during the night and so he didn’t bother to wear a shirt when he came out. He was just in his trousers and slippers. He placed the bucket of soaped water on the ground just next to driver’s side of the car. As he took his keys out of his pocket to open the door in order to take out a rag from the side compartment, he noticed that there was a hand print on the dusty passenger window to his right. It was obviously the hand print of a small child and it was the only print he could see on the windows apart from the random impressions that were normally on them.

Normally, he wouldn’t have thought much of it since there were a lot of children that played around the neighbourhood. But there was something about the attitude of this print that bothered him. The palm and the separated fingers were pointed slightly downwards at an angle from the right. Given how small the hands were and the height of the window from the ground, it wasn’t possible for the child to whom it belonged to have made the print at that angle unless he or she was standing on something or was being carried by someone. Ali reasoned that maybe the child was being carried at the time he/she slapped the window. He turned his attention to what he was doing and opened the door and took out the rag to begin dusting the car. He soon wiped the passenger window that contained the print and was glad to have gotten rid of it for it still bothered him a bit. Then he proceeded to wash the car.

By 8am, Ali was already in his car driving to the accounting firm where he worked. He had only joined the place a year ago as a clerk, though he was not the newest employee there. It was one of the oldest and most respected accounting firms in the city and he was glad to have gotten a job there because it had a measure of employment stability that the previous places where he had worked did not guarantee. Even still, he was ambitious and was not satisfied with his position as a clerk and felt it was beneath him. He had hopes that he would work his way to the top of the organization in due time.

He parked the vehicle at the side of the road at the place reserved for employees of the firm and then got out and went into the building, greeting the guard at the front door. Some of the other employees were already inside but they were standing around and talking just outside their offices. They seemed to be nervous about something. Ali greeted them and asked if anything was the matter. They were two men and one woman. They told him that their supervisor had said that there was going to be a meeting this morning with the director. They didn’t know what it was going to be about. Ali took the notice with a nod and went into the office where he worked and straight to his own desk. At this time, he was the only one there. But during the next thirty minutes, others began to arrive. They waited for the director to arrive at his office and send for everyone.

At precisely 9:15am, Ali got up from his desk, leaving the files he had been working on, and went with the others to the director’s office. When he arrived there, he just stood along with some others, since all the seats in the office, including the long couch on the left, were already occupied. It was a very spacious and neat office. It had a light brown furry carpet and elegant furnishings. There was a flat screen TV at the right and a large potted geranium a few feet from it. The man himself sat behind a very large glass table that was occupied with strewn papers, a desktop and a small file cabinet. He was a fairly large rotund man with glasses. He had a habit of removing his glasses whenever he wanted to read a paper and putting the tip of the left flap of the glasses between his lips.

“You remember the records that were collected from the APM Company last week,” he said to the workers, “the ones that were assigned to us to audit and prepare a financial statement for by their investors. I kept the file folder containing the records in my office on Friday. They were inside that drawer.” He pointed to an iron drawer next to the wall at the left side of the office. “When I came to the office yesterday evening to take something, I discovered that the file wasn’t there. And I have searched for it all over the office to no avail.”

He leaned forward on the table and looked at the rest of the staff with his head cocked downwards so that he was looking at them over the rims of the glasses. “As you know, I often leave my office when I go out without locking it. So anyone could have gone in when I wasn’t there. Did any of you see anyone going to my office when I wasn’t around?” The general response throughout the room was just head-shaking and “no”.

“Well,” the director continued, “I’ll continue to search for it in case I may have misplaced it and misremembered where I put it, though I still feel very sure that I put it there on that day. If I do not find it by Wednesday, you guys will have to go back to the company to bring another batch of copies of the records. You understand?” He was looking at the ones who were responsible for the collection as he said that. They answered affirmatively.

The staff were dismissed and left the office except for a few senior staff who stayed behind to talk with the director. Ali was not a full accounting officer and therefore did not have those kinds of responsibilities. Those positions were already filled. He mainly handled employee tax records of smaller businesses. Therefore the issue did not concern him much.

The day turned out to be really busy, and he had so many responsibilities to take care of that he didn’t even go out for lunch during the afternoon. Normally, he would go to a nearby restaurant to eat. But on this day, he just asked a lady co-worker that was on her way out to buy some snack for him with the money he gave her. He finally left the office at around 5:30pm after a brief meeting with his supervisor.

Ali was one of the last people to leave the building – there were still a few others there when he left. After saying bye to the security guard, he walked over to where his car was, got in and drove off. About twenty minutes later, he stopped over at a market to buy some foodstuff. After purchasing the items, he walked over to his car and put them inside the trunk.

He had just turned the keys to open the door of the driver’s seat when something caught his attention. It wasn’t something that he saw just now; rather, it was something he was reminded of that he thought he had seen earlier but hadn’t taken notice of. He walked round to the other side of the car to inspect the windows and he discovered that he had indeed earlier seen something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was on the passenger window at the right side of the car. His heart was pounding when he moved closer to it. Then it almost came to a stop when he saw what it was. It was a vague impression of the hand print of a small child. Although not much dust had accumulated on the car, it wasn’t difficult to see the impression given that the sunlight was still bright. In fact, it was the pattern of the sun’s rays from the window that had caused him to see it the first time when he crossed the street as he returned to the car after purchasing the groceries. Like the print that he had seen in the morning, this one was also slanted at an angle towards the ground so that it was impossible for the child to have made it without being carried by someone.

Ali’s brain desperately searched for an explanation for this strangeness. He knew it couldn’t have been there in the morning because he had washed the entire car. Therefore, it had to have been made either while he was at work or just now when he went into the market. He asked some of the women that were selling nearby if they had seen any person carrying a child that walked past his vehicle. They all said they hadn’t. In that case, he would ask the security guard at the office the following day if he had seen any such thing. For a brief moment, he had a strange inkling that he might never get to ask him. But he brushed the thought off his mind. For now, he had no idea what to make of it, and a cold shiver ran through him. Was it merely a strange coincidence? Since this was the first day he had ever had such an experience, it couldn’t simply be that this sort of thing happens all the time. Otherwise it wouldn’t have bothered him. He took the small rag out of the side compartment of the driver’s seat and wiped the window clean, looked at all the other windows and then went back into the car, started the engine and drove off.

For the rest of the evening, he tried to put the thought of that small hand out of his mind. But no matter how much he tried to rationalize it, he couldn’t get rid of the strangeness of it, especially the fact that the hand prints were exactly the same size and were made in exactly the same way. He was not married and he had no roommate; therefore there was no one close to him that he could talk about the issue with. And he didn’t want to mention the matter to his neighbours. Fortunately, there was no power outage that evening; so he was able to sit in front of the TV for hours in his armchair and try to get his mind off the strange events of the day. He kept the TV at a local channel and watched the news programs that were being shown. Then he watched a foreign film that was later shown on the channel. Then he watched the sports. It was during this that he dozed off.

Ali woke up to the sound of the door of his apartment opening slowly. He was still in his armchair in front of the television. They were showing a news program which he thought he had already seen before. He looked up at the clock that on the wall at his left. It showed the time to be 2 am. He heard footsteps along the passageway approaching the living room where he was. They were gentle footsteps made by someone wearing slippers. Somehow, he could not bring himself to get up to go and meet the person. He wasn’t even sure whether he was actually awake or if he was dreaming. Everywhere was quiet except for the sound coming from the TV in front of him and the footsteps.

He waited for the person to enter the living room. Then he turned to look at the doorway as the person came in. It was a young woman carrying a toddler on her back. He was about three years old. She greeted him with a smile as she entered.


It was Thursday afternoon about 1:30pm when a locksmith worked the door of Ali’s apartment as two police officers and some neighbours stood behind him. There was a bad odor coming from the apartment which had begun the previous day and was disturbing all the neighboring residents. Ali had not picked up his phone when his landlord rang it. They had not seen him throughout the week either. That’s why the landlord had called the police.

When the door was finally forced open, they all went into the house with cloths covering their noses. One of them opened several doors and windows so as to increase ventilation. When they got into the living room they all started with nasty shock. They found Ali – or what looked like Ali - sitting on a soft armchair opposite his television. He was reclined with his arms resting on both arms of the chair and his head resting back so that his eyes were looking upwards at the ceiling. Even though it was afternoon, the light of the living room was still on. The television was also on and a music video was been played on the channel. His body was badly decomposed and mosquitoes were flying all over it. The residents of the other buildings in the vicinity were greeted with loud screams and cries on that bright sunny afternoon.


Later in the news on that day, it was reported that a Mr. Ali Cosseh had been found dead in his house from what appeared to have been a stroke. He had been dead for a few days when he was found. According to the news, the police had also discovered inside his bedroom a large file folder which matched the description of a folder that had been reported to them by Ali’s firm to have been missing after Ali had not shown up for work on Tuesday without any explanation. They had also discovered a sum of ten thousand dollars in unmarked notes wrapped in a bundle inside his room.

Two days earlier, the police had received a complaint from the firm where Ali worked about some important documents that were missing and that one of their employees was also missing. But before they could go to Ali’s house, they later received a call from the director of the firm that he had found the file. Apparently, he had simply misplaced it in his office. Therefore, they had dropped the case and completely forgotten about it…until today. Now it turned out that there was another folder with similar contents. Investigations by the firm later showed that the one the director had found in his office was actually a fake that contained duplicates and forged documents. The one that was discovered in Ali’s house was the original folder. It was also reported that the CID had begun to look into a probable case of bribery and forgery by the manufacturing company which the accounting records were meant for.

This was not the first time that Ali’s name had appeared in the local newspapers. Four years earlier, his name had been in the news in connection with the death of a young woman who was his girlfriend. They had been living in the same house for some time – a different house from the one he recently lived. The girl had died under mysterious circumstances. Her family suspected that she had been murdered, though her death was officially ruled as the result of a stroke. She had been three months pregnant at the time. What was particularly strange about this case was that the name of the young woman was Aminata Priscilla Macaulay. Her initials were the same as that of the company APM (Agro Products Manufacturers) that the police suspected Ali had been connected to.


It was 10am Friday morning the next day. Mr. Foray sat on his chair at the security post outside the door of the accounting firm, flipping through the newspaper he was reading. He was an elderly man in his late sixties with a grey beard. He had been reading the newspaper article concerning Ali and the company. He was still wondering whether he should tell anyone about what he had seen earlier in the week on Monday afternoon – the day he last saw Ali - and what he had seen the previous evening that had bothered him throughout the night. At the time, that Monday afternoon, he had not thought much about what he saw. That was why he didn’t say anything to Ali concerning it at the time he left the office later that day. And up till now he had not told anyone about it, not even his wife.

At around three o’clock that Monday afternoon, he had just returned from the toilet about ten minutes earlier and was standing outside the building near the fence of the premises. As he stood there and watched the street, he saw a young woman walk casually by at the side of the road. There was a toddler wrapped around her back. What caught his attention for a moment was that, as she passed the car of Mr. Ali, the child at her back suddenly struck one of the windows of the car. Normally, it wouldn’t have meant anything to him, but there was something odd about the way the child struck the window. Rather than swing his arm from back to front or from up to down in the natural way a small child would do, he extended his arm to the front just by his mother’s side and then swung it down to the left with his open palm. He wondered why a small child would hit something like that. After he struck the car, the mother glanced at the security guard. Their eyes met for a second and then she looked away and continued walking on until he couldn’t see her anymore. It really seemed strange to him, but as time went on he forgot about it.

Then last night, when he watched the news coverage of Ali’s death on television, he happened to overhear that his death had been ruled by the coroner in a similar way to that which the death of a pregnant girlfriend he had lived with some years ago had also been ruled; as being the result of a stroke. Later, when he searched through the store where he and his family kept old newspapers, he found the newspapers that were dated at the time of her death four years ago. When he found her picture, he discovered, to his shock and horror, that it was the picture of the very girl that he had seen four days ago as he stood watching the street on that afternoon.

Now, as he sat on the chair thinking, he finally resolved never to tell anyone about it because he was sure that no one would ever believe him.

Following

Nice one OP

No one will believe him

Well done OP