₦airaland Forum

LarrySun:
THE JOURNEY TO A THOUSAND FLASH

Flash 27: The Full Moon

For Akintayo Akinjide (Divepen)

I lived in a small village in the south-western part of the country. After careful thoughts, I have chosen to keep my name and that of my village to myself. The singular reason for jumping on this wagon of personal discretion is simply because the village is now nonexistent, yet it exists; I am dead, yet I still live.

The absurdity and horror began after the New Yam festival. There were about a thousand of us in the village, but one by one we all fell when it appeared - it was the full moon.

The first set of people who saw it were initially fascinated by its beauty. The full moon had always come out in its time for hundreds of years in the village, but there was something incredibly unique about this particular one. Besides the fact that it seemed about close enough to be touched, it was a ball of horror that, at first, shimmered through cumulus blue clouds scattered like popsicles across the blanketing spectral yonder, then finally luminous against our tormented little village. It is quite remarkable how nature of such magnificence could arouse such terror.

Those who saw it and marvelled at its beauty were deep-sixed into a brief phase of hypnosis before they started to go mad one after the other. Obviously, the moon had something to do with their insanity; its sight messed with their heads - their sense of reason, their rationality.

The first incident of the horror was that of the oldest man in the village who easily lifted a grinding stone too heavy for even young able-bodied men of the village to carry. The source of the old man's incredible power must have been the moon - that was the only credible explanation for the sheer stupefaction. The old man, who had seen four score and ten rainy seasons, lifted the stone high above his own head and then released his grip on it. We watched in horror as the huge rock crashed into the man's skull and shattered it against the hard ground. He died instantly, bits of his manipulated brain could be seen as it popped from the head already knocked horribly askew.

It turned out that only a handful of us felt revulsion at the suicide we just witnessed - only a handful of those with their rationality still intact, those of us who were yet to look up at the sky and admire the beauty of the full moon. Those who had seen the moon showed no emotion whatsoever; instead, they went ahead to end their own lives in their own singular unique manners. A teenage boy produced a knife from the kitchen and drove it through his own throat in one swift motion. The knife was driven so deep that it's pointed end came out the back of his neck.

It seemed like they were all under a trance. They didn't kill themselves simultaneously, they rather did it in turns. One would wait for the other to die before going ahead to take their own life. A hunter had put the barrel of his shotgun between his mouth and pulled the trigger. A palm-wine tapper had seppukued himself with his own dagger. His bowels had flooded out of his stomach into his hands as he cut himself almost in half. Mysteriously, none of them cried out as they took their own lives. One even doused himself in paraffin oil and set himself ablaze - there was no cry of agony. A fisherman trying his luck at late night fishery heard the cawing of a crow and had looked up to the sky by reflex. He jumped from his canoe into the body of dark water, drowning himself.

There was a pattern to this visceral of horror. Besides the fact that these felos-de-se took turns in killing themselves, they posed no danger to other people. None of them attacked any one of us; even when some of us who hadn't gone mad attempted to stop some of them from committing suicide, they didn't attack us, they instead shook us off with unbelievable strength - both old and young alike. We couldn't stop them from carrying out the acts. In the end, we could do nothing but watch the horror. The gods had cursed us, and so they sent the evil moon to damn us one after the other. None of our traditional priests could ascertain the cause of this madness, this terror - we were on our own. If you wanted to stay alive, you must not look at the moon. But even with this realisation, some of us were not so lucky. A pregnant woman saw the reflection of the moon from the water she had fetched in a bowl and she joined the queue of the suicides. When it was her turn, she climbed a high hill and threw herself off of it.

All night long, we watched as people killed themselves in their own unique ways. They were our children, parents, siblings, friends, neighbours, acquaintances - we watched them go and we couldn't do anything to stop them. Even when dawn finally approached, those who had seen the moon continued to kill themselves. We prayed that such evil moon never revealed itself again, but it did. The following night, it appeared again, and, of course, the ignorant fell victim. Some fell by sheer accident. Every night, the moon appeared. It was clear that it wouldn't stop until every living soul of my village was claimed by the evil surrounding the moon.

By the end of the first week, my village became a necropolis. The rest of us, a few dozens of us, couldn't bury enough corpses. We were soon running out of graves to dig, or the will to dig them. Eventually, having lost all hopes of salvation, we let the corpses rot in the streets, in every dark alley, every canal, gutter, swamp - vultures had every day feast, termites rejoiced, earthworms slithered in jubilation.

In the second week, we were less than a dozen. At this point, some of us didn't have to stare at the moon before losing their senses. Trying to escape was fruitless; wherever you went, the moon would follow you; and in some cases, you didn't even have to look in the sky before seeing the moon. One of us had seen it in the dead eyes of a corpse - he ended up becoming a corpse too. There was a no succour anywhere - annihilation was our fate.

A man about my age had had enough. Situation had gone beyond redemption. He took a rope one morning and went to the back of his house. He was later found dangling lifelessly from the branch of the mango tree he hanged himself. The incredible thing about his death was that he wasn't a victim of the moon per se. He just had had enough and chose to take his own life. I had seen him take the rope, I knew that he was going to hang himself, but I didn't stop him - that was because I thought he had seen the moon too. How could I have known that his suicide was a result of frustration? That, indeed, is the absurdity of suicide. People who kill themselves have a personal adjudgement that life is not worth living - it is now therefore a topic of great argument to determine whether to praise them for their courage, or condemn them for their cowardice. I'll leave the judgement to your personal philosophy. Now if I was surmoned to the desk of adjudication, I wouldn't strike my gavel in indignation. It's a conundrum of logic, really, but I believe it is better to go down with all your senses still intact, just like my little friend did with his rope. However, if permitted to advocate for Lucifer, I'd surmise that taking your own life under the evil influence of the moon was easier. At this point, you wouldn't feel any pain - you were basically already dead before killing yourself. So, arguably, it is easier than the terrible agony you would feel as you watched your life slip away from you.

In the fourth week, I was the only living person left. This was a battle I wasn't going to win, I knew it. I had come so far all for nothing. It seemed like I was the only survivor in an apocalyptic world. I couldn't go on this way, I would run mad. I knew that at this point I had only two choices; I must either submit to the power of the evil moon or just take my own life like my friend did. No matter how many times I calculated the odds, no matter the formula I used, no matter the evaluation, the method - the answer was always 0. Either way, I was going to die. No matter how long I tried to stay alive, I wasn't going to win this one. I must make a choice now. Solitude was already messing with my psyche. I might be many things but I know that I'm not a hypocrite. I know who I am - a coward, a cow-freaking-ard! I couldn't take my own life like my friend did, even though that was what I wanted, I just couldn't bear going through that kind of agony. Yet, I didn't want the evil moon to claim my soul. If I gave in to evil, my soul would be forever damned, just like a thousand of the other people from my village. But by taking my own life on my own terms, my soul would be free. This was a philosophy I must allow myself to believe in - that's the only thing left that's giving me a semblance of rationality. My belief, on this note, is symbolically stuck between that of an atheist and a fanatic. With much thoughts and rigmarole of the mind, I settled upon the coward's way. I damned my soul.

When the moon appeared again that night, I stood in the village square, spread my hands and looked into the sky, welcoming the madness.

For the briefest moment, it seemed like I had stopped existing. I could feel it from the depth of my soul. Something in me was gone. I can't say it because I don't know, but I felt it. Perhaps it's a part of my soul. And then again, I felt something new. I can't say it because I don't know, but I felt it. It was as if something had been taken away and had been replaced by another.

Now here is the shock; that not unlike a rookie chess player experiencing en passant for the first time. I still haven't recovered. I had been taken to the moment when the moon first appeared. This time around, nobody was killing themselves. Everyone who had died was here, except my friend who took his own life. It was as if he never existed. When I asked about him, no one confessed to ever seeing him. Life continued as if nothing had happened. I was the only person in possession of the knowledge.

If my friend wasn't here, then where was he? Heaven or hell? And the more pertinent question: Where was I now? Was this the damnation I feared, or was this a sick idea of paradise?

Whatever it is, I know that in a certain place in the south western part of this country, there's a village filled with dead people - a place where I was the last to die. How I died, however, would remain a mystery forever unsolved.

©Larry Sun
January 2021

Ishilove:
Do we now talk about the problem of Problem Children? Our protagonist finally has a child (who came out through his mother's thumb, by the way. No vaginal birth here. LOL ) and guess what the baby does? He starts guzzling palm wine like a hardened drinker. A classic case of parental bad habits passing from one generation to the other, and this case it is amplified because not only does the newly born Junior drink palmwine, he also eats like a whale and is as strong as 100 men to boot. He controls the house and orders when and how things are done, even dictating to his parents how long they must sleep. At least Papa Junior was only addicted to palmwine which he got through legit means, but Junior here, he beats up everyone who stands in his way and even his parents are afraid of him because he is ransacking the whole town, eating people's food, drinking their wine and pummeling any modafugga that complains.

Oh gosh I cackled like a hen throughout this chapter. The Drinkards have a serious family problem.

At a level it is totally relatable because every family has a problem or difficult child who manifest their fuckery in various shades. How we handle them is what makes the difference between Family A and Family B. I also realised while reading that not all bad children are bad as a result of faulty parenting. Some kids are just born bad. No matter how well you train them, they will always end up in the wrong way because there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Junior here was bad right from his mother's 'womb'.