LIFE SOLUTIONS.

Enitan was crying bitterly

'Someone had upset my baby girl', Morayo fumed.

"What's wrong" she had asked her teenage daughter.

The next statement that came out of her daughter's mouth sank her hearts to the undergrounds.

"Aunty Bejide said you are not my mother, she said you found me inside the bush".

"Oh God" she exclaimed!

Sometimes she wished she could silence her only sister.

Bejide is a very loose mouth runner.

She had always wanted to tell Enitan about this story.

In fact she had been pinning to do it.

Sometimes she wishes Bejide was not her sister.

This saga of telling Enitan where she was originally from has been on ever since Enitan was as little as 3 years old.

Enitan is thirteen years old now.

Thanks to Bejide, Morayo knew she will barely get a good night sleep today.

'She has a story to tell now', she thought tiredly.

Many years ago.

Morayo was driving home from work.

Her work was with a popular conglomerate.

They were mainly known for their production, distribution and wholesaling of fast moving consumable goods.

She was the regional sales coordinator of Lagos Island & Epe Environs.

She was recently divorced after having been married for seven years with no child.

Her husband having insisted on wanting his own children, could not imagine staying on in the marriage when the doctor had finally disclosed their last findings.

Morayo's uterus was inverted, positioned in such a way that she cannot not ever get pregnant through the conventional way.

He was devastated and was not even ready in the least for any hospital assisted processes.

So they went their separate ways.

The love did not survive the blow.

She was not ready for a repeat, so she had stayed single.

This day, she was driving out from Epe township when it happened. She was stopped by some police men at their checkpoint.

They had asked for her car papers. while she was responding to the officer on her driving side.

The one on her left side had opened her front passenger seat side and sat beside her.

He had swiftly placed something like a white handkerchief on her nose.

That was all she remembered.

She woke to find her self inside a very big expanse of wooded lands.

The huge trees were extremely tall,

but that was about it.

No birds flying high in view

No land animals walking past.

Just the tall trees

Her head ached

Her eyes hurts badly

Her stomach was rumbling

She recalled that she was going to have dinner when she gets home.

So she tried to take in everything happening around her.

There were so many people in view, multitudes actually.

They were sitting on the floor like her, some still fast alseep, some just waking up and looking disoriented.

Men, women, old, middle aged, young, very young and even babies.

The realisation suddenly hit her.

'We were all kidnapped one way or another and brought here'.

Jeez! Whatever for?

While her mind was racing its marathon, her head pounded faster as her eyes continued to look around.

At the farthest side she noted several more of the hefty men incharge of the large group on the expanse.

They all had wrapped around their waist, red and black clothes, with plain black head ties.

A teary eyed, local looking, but overly dejected woman spoke from beside her, crying still,

"I am a single mother, my husband died from car accident five months before I delivered my baby.

These people here are ritualist, I don't know how I got so unlucky", she lamented.

"Please ma, hold my baby for me. I want to go and urinate in the bush".

So she held the baby, and as the woman got up on shaky legs , with paralysing fear written all over her tiny worn frame;

She had made to speak, to ask permission, but one of the fierce looking ritualists threw her a knife, it landed on her chest and she fell down in one swoop.

The woman untinated on her body as she dragged her self slowly to Morayo, then she whispered

" If you survive from here, my baby is yours, please keep her safe and care for her like she is yours. May God almighty keep and protect you from this harrowing death."

She breathed her last.

That was when she confirmed fully that she had somehow found her self in a human slaughter field.

Everyone was being wrapped in red clothings, even the young.

It looked unbelievable to her that the woman dead on the ground in front of her was just talking to her right now, and that she had just given her, a baby of about three months old to carry while she go take a pee.

Morayo peed on her self instead, in utter panick and at the enormity of her situation.

She continued praying as she has been with all her heart the moment she realised the weight of the evil she was surrounded with.

She looked inside the baby bag of the dead woman, she found the baby's food, diapers and an ankara wrapper with the strong slimmer native wrapper, the one to hold the softer one it in place if there is need to back the baby.

In an urgent protective instinct, she had quickly put the baby on her back and secured her in place.

Then she placed her palm on the eyes of the dead woman to shut the lids.

And so it went on and on, that the hefty guards came and took each person cladded in red, one after the other to the main man under the Iroko tree.

He will recite an incantation and then behead them in one slice of his dagger.

The heads were kept to one side and the bodies were heaped on each other on the other side.

When she saw what was happening.
She looked around some more, and she told her self a saying she had seen in one of her horror novels.

"What do you say to the God of death?
Not today", she whispered.

She resolved strongly to live.

And it came to pass that when it came to her turn.

Knelt in front of the man

The man under the Iroko tree did a double take.

Then again and again because now she backed a baby.

Suddenly he got up and took Morayo by her hand and had dragged her to the back of the tree so as to make some enquiries from her.

He was smiling as he noticed that she had seen and realised that he was the police man that had collected her car papers earlier at the fake police check point.

She did not waste time at all in her reflex.

She did not think too.

She didn't have the luxury of time to.

She also didn't let the ritualist say anything.

All the man felt was some warm liquid gushing out of his gashed neck.

The several fleeting looks that played across the man's face,

Shock,

Realisation,

and then pure pain before he fell to the ground stone dead.

Morayo had carefully removed the medium knife thrown at the baby's mother's chest and kept same inside the folded parts of the front of her wrapper.

**
Earlier that week, to make sure his co ritualists do not turn on him, he had made an oath with all of them including the hefty guards working with them.

It was such that if anything happens to him, and he dies, everyone one of them will drop dead along with him.

Such was the jazzed up bond they weaved.

This was how Morayo saved over half of the masses scheduled for brutal rituals on this faithful day.

Only a few of them knew for sure what had liberated them.

Most didn't.

It didn't matter.

Everyone had ran out of the woods in different directions.

With her chubby blessing tied behind her back, Morayo ran as fast as her tired feet could carry her.

Her heart was beating heavily on her chest, she was scared stiff.

**

Back to present day.

She sent Bejide out of her house, she didn't care where she goes.

She was tired of a sister that likes to inflict only pains and misery on others.

She then told Enitan the actual story as much as she could tell it to her thirteen years old daughter.

Enitan held her mother tightly and she cried bitterly.

They both did.

She cried for her dead mother and then for the lives of the multitudes that were beheaded in the bush on the said day.

She was mostly grateful for the courage of her mother now, as her faith in the woods that day could have been worse off.

Morayo cried mainly becuase a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

She did marry again;

Yeah, she did.

When she met a man that didn't care if she could have children or not.

He was sterile himself and it had equally broken his own previous marriage.

So they have both known real life marital pains and heart breaks.

Their courtship and subsequent marriage was built on solid foundation of love with no expectations whatsoever.

They had resolved that If they want more children, they will adopt same.

As an only child, opportune too.
She knows the real meaning of faith, grace and luck.

'I have a mum and dad that loves me like life it self', Enitan feels life couldn't be better to her than it already is.

All I have to be is good.

When she prays at night;
She prays for God to ease all the pains in the hearts of people.

She prays that God helps the poor to find helpers.

Then she prays that God should please get rid of all the bad people in the world, but most especially ritualists.

THE END.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction and any resemblance with any persons, living or dead, or events, real or imagined, are purely coincidental.