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thanx

other stuffs I've written....

THE FARM https://www.nairaland.com/995456/farm-psychological-thriller



MOTHER'S BURDEN https://www.nairaland.com/924056/mothers-burden-short-story



REJECTS https://www.nairaland.com/1116424/reject-suspence-thriller

just started writing this today and I decided to share. hopefully, I'd update it as I write...


One
I always knew I’d die young. I just don’t know how young I’d be when I die. Ten is a young age to die, I’ve scaled that stage but am not yet twenty. Twenty too isn’t a right age to die but I do not know if I’d reach that age.

I won’t be twenty until six more months. I don’t see myself clocking two decades on earth. It would take a miracle. What you are about to read is my life flashing in my eyes. I am down, not emotionally, I am down lying on the hard ground clutching my stomach and watching as my blood flow into a gutter and mix with the filth in it.

I have two bullets in my gut. I did not eat them. Someone shot me and I do not know who. It is a normal occurrence in my neighbourhood, getting shot and all, but I have never been shot before. I never expected to be shot but here I am on the ground.

If you ask anyone around here about me, they’d tell you that I am the coolest kid they know. Of all the vices that abound here, I only indulge in one. I am the kid who never misses school, the one who helps all the kids with their homework, the one who rarely fights, the one who writes- which is what everyone finds odd about me. They all think I am crazy, even my mothers.

I don’t remember the first time it started, I only became aware of it as I grew older that there was always a pen and paper on me wherever I went to. Like an artist that draws, I paint pictures in words, describe smells and beauty in words that made me feel like a lexicographer on crack. To me, the weather could be Lagos cheery. A lady’s voice could sound lagoonic, as in like the whisper of the lagoon. I once wrote about a certain boy in the neighbourhood who according to me had been slapped by the gods. He was a retard.

Despite my unflattering romance with words, I think am a good writer, a fine one at that; the best around here. I am the proverbial one eyed king in the land of the blind. It is no surprise that my moniker, a sobriquet that has almost knocked out my real name, is Prof. Everyone calls me that except they are family. Only people at my homes call me by my real name. I’d been given that name when I was only twelve.

Two respected men in the community had come across a word, ‘serendipity’ written on a piece of paper that the wind had carried to them where they sat nursing their schnapps. The word had seem like Mandarin to them, they’d found it difficult to pronounce until I walked past them. I was called to come pronounce it, which was tongue-twisting for me. I pronounced what I thought the word sounded like and when asked to provide the meaning simply told them that serendipity was a far land that is nestled between Brazil and France. Those were the two countries that immediately came to mind. I was rushing to watch a match between those two countries, a world cup final, before those men stopped me. It was apt to give them that answer since I did not know what the word meant.

That answer earned me a pat on the back, a new name and my first taste of schnapps. It wouldn’t be until I was fifteen before I knew the meaning of the word which I must say could never describe my life.

Luck, in all its embellishments can never be used to describe my existence in this world.

I wasn’t born. I was found. I am different.

Some years ago, a woman had woken up before every other person in her household and had gone to shit at the local dump. She was there doing her business when another woman arrived at the same dump. The second woman had come to dispose off some refuse. Another woman who was coming from a vigil at her church was also walking past the dump. She was humming a song of praise to her God when she heard the cry. They all heard it at the same time.

Being women, they forgot what they’d come to do and moved towards the sound, all three of them. It was an infant’s cry and what else could pique a woman’s curiosity more than that.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the wailing. There was a new born baby at the top of the dump. Someone had left the child there to die. The child was wrapped in a shawl and laid on the dump. The women cursed and hurled missiles at the pig that had just nipped the infant in the head and quickly saved the child.

That child lived. Yeah, that unfortunate being is me.

I do not want sympathy. I don’t fucking care for one. I hate it when people go all mushy after hearing my story. I sometimes wonder if saving me had been God’s plan after all. Maybe I’d been recalled, you know, like cars with production defects and that had I not been saved, I’d have been pig’s breakfast that day and then God would have reshipped me to a better place.

You’d share the same notion if you ever spent a day in my shoes in this neighbourhood. I had a friend once, his dad was a night watchman and his mum had no job. They were poor in all ramifications. I had been in there home and saw how they lived. He came around here once and referred to our living condition as pitiable.

A poor looking down on the poor. Needless to say, it was the last time he visited the neighbourhood.

Those three women that found me that day didn’t know what to do with me after I’d been treated in the hospital. They’d later decide to take care of me until adulthood. Thus, I had three mothers growing up.

I suckled on three pair of breasts. I have two fathers. I have six brothers and four sisters. I live in three places and yet I am constantly reminded of who I am; an abandoned child.