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wow.... thanx for all the nice comments. been AWOL

One

It was a normal day, the day I died. In my eyes, there was nothing wrong with the gloom that enveloped the morning. After all it was a September morning and September in Lagos is one unpredictable month. It rains in September: the clouds are at most times morose, dark as the human mind yet the moodiness of the clouds doesn’t always guarantee rain. Sometimes the sky immediately becomes bright, its ill humour forgotten, like a lover in the arms its beloved returning from a journey of many months.

Since it was from a nightmare –one that left me sweating and jittery- that I had woken, I found the unusual familiarity of my home welcoming. There was something strange about that morning, something I couldn’t place my hands on. Everything seemed as it should have been and yet nothing seems to be right.

I was feeling healthier and more alive than I have ever been as I rose from bed. The nightmare that had had me racing from my sleep to the land of the living was by then a distant memory to me. I could not remember a single detail of it but it was there at the back of my mind threatening to thrust out.

The room was eerily silent as I got up from bed. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock down the corridor from my room resonated like it was in my head. I heard it loud and clear and I had never heard it from the room before. It seemed like someone had smoked the room. I could see things clearly though it felt to me like I wasn’t really seeing through my own eyes, that there was a device other than my eyes that was transmitting images to my brain.

I stretched out of habit and then looked outside the window into the yard. I stood in that one spot for many minutes. It was as if I was seeing the universe in a whole new dimension. I took everything in, every detail of the morning. The sun was about coming up and I waited to see the first sunrise of the day. I saw the sun that day like I had never seen it before. Every colour was sharp and more proclaimed than ever in my eyes. I used to see the sun as just a yellow disk in the sky. That morning, it was more than that. It was a burning disk that exploded into a million golden lines. It was magical. I stretched my hand in front of me and felt the warmth of the sun permeate through me.

Once the sun had found a comfortable spot in the sky, I walked out of the room, passing by the standing mirror which I stopped in front of for a second to look at myself.

Until that morning I had held on to the notion, like every sane human, that mirrors don’t lie. I stood in front of it and stared at the improbable image that was in it. It was me, that much I know, but it wasn’t the me that I remember before going to bed. In the mirror, I looked perfect in my own eyes, saintly and beautiful like I had always wanted to be.

I am a little bit on the big side but I looked like a beauty queen that morning, the only thing missing was a tiara. Gone was the huge ring formed around my belly and deleted from the image were my flabby arms and puffy cheeks. I looked like I had always wanted to be.

A scoff escaped from my mouth without me thinking it. It had graduated into a full blown laughter when I decided to move away from the mirror and face reality. I walked out of the room wondering how weirder the morning could get. I had had a lot of wine to drink the night before and thought maybe it was the after effect of it that was fooling me that morning. I was seeing things like I had never seen them before.

As I made my way downstairs, I didn’t know what it was that awaits me. No one in my situation would have thought it, too.

There were voices coming from the living room. Not only was my sight sharper that morning, my hearing was keener too. I hadn’t even gotten halfway to the living room that I began to hear the voices. They weren’t shouting, it seemed like they were whispering and yet it was audible to me from where I was. Weird, I remember thinking.

I recognised the two voices. There were my husband’s and his best friend’s.

“... I just hope she’s safe wherever she is,” my husband was saying and I could sense pain in his voice as he said those words. He spoke like it was a burden, that with every word he uttered, he needed to regain his strength before attempting to speak another.

“She’s safe and she will be back. You just have to put your mind at rest.”

“I hope so,” my husband said, wiping his hand over his face. He had been crying, I could see and I was alarmed. I had only seen him cry once, a long time ago and it was horrifying to see him in tears. Whatever it was that was making him cry, I knew it wouldn’t be a scenario that would leave my own eyes dry.

“I am scared,” he continues to say, “I can’t even think straight. I am praying she’s okay.” He was unshaven, too. That gave me more concern than the pain I heard in his voice. There was no way my husband would step out of the house without shaving his face clean. He hadn’t touched a blade for days, I could see as I approached him. I had seen him just the night before and he wasn’t that hairy. How could he have grown so many stubs in one night?

“Who?” I finally found my voice, “What is wrong, baby?” seeing that none of them turned to look towards me, I convinced myself that I had only thought what I believed I’d spoken and that they were yet to be aware of my presence. I start to make my way towards Tunde, my husband, but there came a knock on the front door and he bolted out of his seat the instance he heard the first knock. He raced to the door and opened it without even demanding to know who it was that had knocked.

There were two officious looking men with sombre faces at the door. When Tunde saw how pale they looked, he slowly began to make a retreat into the room. He said no words to them. His eyes were on them as he made the retreat but I knew he wasn’t looking at them. His mind wasn’t where his eyes were.

The two men allowed themselves into the house and the shorter of them said, “We found her body.”

The squeal that escaped from my husband’s mouth shocked even me. I was by his side in an instant and demanded to know what was going on. No one was answering me. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that they could not even see me at all.

“No, no, no.” my husband repeated amid tears, like a mantra, “this can’t be happening to me.”

“It is well.” His friend, too, was saying. “All will be well.”

To say I was confused would be an understatement. I felt like I was in a dream once more, that what was happening wasn’t real. Whose body had they found and why would it make my husband cry so much? His mother was dead and he was an only child. There was no other woman in his life except me.

“How did it happen?” my husband finally found his voice, interrupting my thoughts. “Where was she found?”

“We found the body somewhere on the highway this morning,” the older of the men said, “and we believe it was dumped there sometime during the night or very early today. She had been dead way longer than that, hours we think. What we believe is that she had been held somewhere this whole time.”

“Who did this?” Tunde, my husband asked, “I want to know who did that to my wife.”

“We are working on it,” the man said, “Your wife isn’t his first victim. She is the sixth we know of in recent times. The perpetrator of the crime is a sexual predator who abducts women, tortures them for some days before he kills them. We have been on his trail for quite some time and I promise you that we’d apprehend him soon.”

Tunde scoffed, “will that bring back my wife.” He was crying again, not audibly but the tears were dropping. “Will everything be kosher after then?”

No one answered him. The man who had spoken seemed to have diverted his attention to the shoe he was wearing. Silence reigned supreme for a couple of seconds until the two men announced that they had to leave. They demanded that he came to identify the body. Segun, my husband’s friend promised to bring him over when he got back to being himself.

I stood there like an idiot wondering what was happening. I was yet to know my fate then. I didn’t know, at the time, that I was nothing but a spirit. That I was an entity in my eyes alone, that no one could see me, that I was nothing to them. I was still thinking that I was in a dream and not that I am dead.

Who thinks about death in such situation?

We all know that it is the only way by which we’d leave this world and that it is certain, but no one expects it. Not many even wish it upon themselves. Few do, but they have to have seen its emissaries; disease, loss, poverty, depression. No one knows the exact time of its arrival for death visits unannounced, like a thief, and sneaks into us to claim our souls.

Whatever happens to those souls it snatches? No one knows. I don’t even know what doom awaits me.

“Why should this be happening to me, why did Toni have to die now?” it shocked me to hear my name and the reference to it in the past tense.

“It is inevitable, bro. We have no choice but to accept it when it is time.”

“Why now?” He said more to himself than to his friend, “Why should it have happened to me? It’s just been a little over a year that we got married, weren’t we meant to be together till old age? We are just starting our lives together. We were going to get old together. I promised her.” His eyes went to the portrait of us that was on the wall just before where he sat. It was our wedding picture and we were both beaming.

“There is no right time to die”, Segun said, “We can’t be the architect of our own fate. There is a greater force that determines that, all we have to do is just deal with it when it comes.”

“A greater force you say, but why? Why us, why me?”

“We might never know why and we cannot question God. To do that is to blaspheme.”

“To hell with blasphemy…” He suddenly looked behind him towards where I was standing but his eyes went through me. Though he could not see me, I realized, he could sense me. He would never see me again.

“I think am going mad,” he said to his friend, “I keep sensing her. I keep thinking she’s around here, that she can hear me. I could have sworn that I felt her just now.”

“Am here, baby.” My voice was only a whisper, it was choked by emotions. I guess I’d be crying if I was still human. I want to cry but it just was not happening. The tears wouldn’t come but I felt it in me, the loss. It was like a hole within me. He had been a part of me and I felt incomplete.

“I am here.”

I walked up to him, stood before him and then lay my hands on him.

He smiled, looked up towards my face and burst into tears. “This whole thing is crazy. I can feel her. I feel she’s still alive.”

“It’s all in your head, brother. She’s all memories now and you don’t have to deliberate on them for too long else you’d never let go. You have to let her go. If not for yourself, think of the little one she left behind.”

As if on cue, there came a cry from upstairs. A child’s. A little child’s.

“I will be right back.” My husband got up from his seat and raced up the stairs, taking them three at a time. I was right behind him and we both entered the room at almost the same time.

He reached for the child that had just woken up and carried her in his arms.

“How are you doing, cutie?” he asked as he lifted her up from the cradle. She was just eighteen months old. I was behind him with the child facing me. She was looking towards me and I was damned sure that she could see me.

“Mama.” She said while pointing towards me.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

“Mama.”

“I miss her too baby, but we are alone now. You and I?”

“I want Mama.”

She tried to get down from his arms, wriggled until he had no choice but to let her go. Hardly had her feet touched the floor that she tottered towards me with her arms stretched wide apart.

I got on my feet and opened my arms too, expecting and longing for the hug. We were however on different planes. She moved right through me and almost hit the wall behind me before she stopped to look back at me. The confusion on her face was indescribable.

She moved slowly towards me, tried to touch me when she got to me. Her hand once again passed through me. It was then that my husband walked up to her and took her hand in his. He pulled her towards the door and she willingly followed him but never took her eyes off me.

“Mama.” She mouthed and then waved at me as she went out of the door.

Anabele lee by Edgar Allan Poe

something else i wrote... https://www.nairaland.com/924056/mothers-burden-short-story#10688126

i will post more chapters but i can't post the story to the end cos it's a full length novel ....

[quote author=O.D.B.]If I wanted to direct your story into a movie, it will be done in black and white, a lot of first person shots from the main antagonist view. Flash backs into rosier times will be in color other than that I can't picture how I will cram all you wrote in 1 minute without having the audience fall asleep.

As I said you know how to write but your story lacks substance.[/quote]a movie you said? when a book is adapted into a movie, a SCRIPTWRITER is usually employed abi? it is the job of the scriptwriter to murder the story as he wishes. yes, there will be flashbacks and you are yet to see the end of the story.

[quote author=O.D.B.]Dull, uninteresting and out right depressing.

You introduced your story fluently but it flat-linned almost immediately.

You story lacks content and substance. You know how to write but you have no creativity.[/quote]thanks all the same

yay! front page

Castos: Source please!

sarcasm?

thanx st.okolie. 113 views and only one comment

bump

One
Maybe I should never have woken up on the first day of October 1995. It was a day I could never forget, even if I tried to. It was my thirty-fifth birthday and the day I died.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t die in the till-we-meet-again sense. I stopped existing; a large part of me stopped being and a new part emerged. Death to me doesn’t necessarily mean the end of everything; it means the end of a phase. October 1995 ended an unfortunate phase in my life and heralded a terrible one.

Before that day I was a walking corpse, an effigy with a soul.

My life as at that time was slowly and precisely being garrotted by a myriad of problems. I had a million and one troubles in my life and a tidal wave of disturbances followed me everywhere I went. You didn’t need to personally know me to deduce that I was troubled. My face announced it. Seemingly carved out of rock with dull rhinestones glued into the eye sockets, my face was a poster for trouble. My eyes, if you looked deeply into them, would seem to you that I’d witness every major disaster the world had seen.

I had lost my job eighteen months before then, and in my world, a man without a job unwittingly becomes the wife in the home.

I was living on my wife. She was feeding me, clothing me and paying the rent.

I was married to Adeola, a nurse and together we had two kids, two beautiful daughters, Tayo and Ebun. They were six and four respectively at the time.

I was roused from sleep on that day by a sudden and continuous throbbing in my head. When I opened my eyes, I was confronted by an ineffable darkness. The room was enfolded in it and my eyes saw nothing but blackness.

I walked blindly towards the window and pried open the curtains. The moon was full. It cast a streak of light through the opening between the curtains and splashed on my wife, its brightness.

The luminous bedside alarm clock told me the time was three am. I had had just three hours of sleep.

Looking back to that day, I wonder which of my troubles had caused the turmoil in my head; the fact that I had been dependent on my wife for one whole year and six months or the fact that I had no prospect of getting a job anytime soon.

My daughter, Tayo, had also been diagnosed of a heart disorder and the doctors gave her just six months to live unless an open heart surgery was performed on her. The surgery could not be done in the country; she had to be flown abroad and the total cost of the whole package, travel, actual surgery and accommodation ran into millions of naira.

Money we would never be able to afford or raise.

We did everything we could, I sold the plot of land I owned, sold my wife’s jewelleries, we went to churches and to mosques and to charities and to media houses and to people we hoped might help. All we got were endless promises and a few actual donations. Nothing near the amount we needed.

And the series of tests being run on her ate the funds up.

We were left in a conundrum.

I could not allow seeing my daughter die, yet I couldn’t stop death from snatching her away from me. Every hope we had of saving her was lost and my wife began to retract into a shell I didn’t know existed.
Our problems had dropped a wedge between us and we grew apart, but I never stopped loving her: even until this day.

I think in her mind, she was blaming me for everything. I think her retraction was a protest against my incompetence. I was the man of the house and I wasn’t living up to my expectations.

And I couldn’t blame her. I never blamed her for arriving at that conclusion.

I’d taken her unspoken blames stoically and nursed my battered ego.

I returned to the bed and sat up straight on it. I looked forlornly into the room. I was looking but not seeing.
Only my mind and ears functioned.

I heard my wife’s light snore and felt the rhythmic up and down motion her breathing made on the bed.

Her back was to me, as it had been for the past six weeks.

We don’t talk anymore and neither do we touch each other. Our marriage was on a hiatus, we only put up a façade when we were around the kids.

But I sensed that they too, knew that we were hiding something from them; me especially.

I was once a ‘father of the year’ material. I was jovial, played with the kids, sang to them and drove them to school. Losing my source of livelihood, sort of took the merriment in me away.

“You are taking it out too much on yourself,” my wife would say in the early days of my misery. “Why don’t you just be happy? You have me and the kids and we love you. It wouldn’t hurt you to smile, at least at us.”

Eddie Murphy, fooling himself in front of me wouldn’t have made me cracked a smile. My face was always in a corrugated state, I had a permanent scowl etched on it because I constantly reminded myself of what I ought to be.

A man.

A breadwinner and not a bread-eater.

That realisation made me the unhappy man that I was.

I let my gaze linger on my wife’s silhouette as she slept peacefully and a sudden thought occurred to me. I had to gain my position in the household back. I had to revert to being the husband, but how? I asked myself.

I had searched futilely in the month’s I had been converted to a stay-at-home dad to get a job, but I couldn’t get one. Not even a low paying job.

I’d wake up in the mornings and go to the news stand, peruse through the papers for vacancies, write down addresses and send out applications. I never got any replies and I became frustrated the more.

I got up from the bed and made sure I didn’t rouse my wife. I walked into the living room which was devoid of furniture – we had sold everything- except the dining table.

I picked a pen, tore a sheet from Tayo’s math exercise book and wrote a letter to my wife. The note was short, precise and straight to the point.

I left it on the table, where she’d see it and went back into the room for a change of cloth. I put on t-shirt and jeans, packed extra clothes in a backpack and walked out of the room.

I made a stop in the children’s room, stared at them for what seemed like eternity before gently placing a peck on each of them.

I had tears in my eyes as I walked out of the room but my mind was made. I was leaving home, never to return until I got my manhood back.

I was leaving. I was leaving my old life behind so I could start a new one.

My decision then, to my wife, would have looked like an art of cowardice but to me, it wasn’t. I wasn’t abandoning them. I was only going away for a while.

I knew fate would bluster concerning Tayo’s health, and I also knew fate had been predestined and that nobody could alter it.
So I walked out of the door, having it mind that whatever the case might be, Tayo’s healing or otherwise, was her kismet and not in any way a result of my absence.

I loved them, God knows I did, but I just didn’t want my kids growing up believing their father was a sluggard.

I wanted them to grow up seeing me as a father: a man.

I wiped the tears out of my eyes as I walked out of the house. The time was four in the morning. I didn’t know what I was going to do in Lagos, I just knew it was where my success awaited.

The letter I left for my wife read thus;

Dear Adeola:
By the time you are reading this letter, I’d be far away from you. Please don’t bother looking for me. I will one day return to you and the kids; that is a promise, but please know that this was a tough decision to make.

I am not leaving you because of anything you did, I am leaving because of the things I am not doing. I feel I am lagging in performing my duties as a husband and as a father, I also know you are not complaining, but the man in me will never be satisfied if a woman continues to feed it.

I am going to work hard while away, and hopefully make it soon. Please do take care of the kids and when they ask of me, tell them I will be back soon.

Always let them know I love them and remember that I love you too.

Take care of yourself while I am away.

Your loving husband.

As I walked away from my home and family, I envisaged how my wife would feel after reading the letter. Would she be disappointed in me?

Would she be relieved that a burden had been lifted off her? Or would she curse me to damnation?

I walked away and never looked back. I walked into that misty October morning, empty-bellied and with just two hundred naira in my pocket.

And I hoped that the next time I saw my house, things would have been better. That I would drive back in my own car and with plenty money in my pocket: only I never saw that house again.

Like I already said, if I knew what fate awaited me that day, I would never have woken up; ever.

I once read somewhere that we humans are nothing but pencils in the hands of the creator. If that is true, then my own creator is a retarded three-year old that is learning how to draw.

He just never got the picture right; my life was doodled.