Insight – Forgiveness

Through the hole in piles of old blocks, Chima peeped at his friend who searched frantically for him.

He stifled a chuckle as he saw his frustration.

Chima’s pebbles had hit him twice and his had hit him only once. If he could hit him one more time, he would win the game. His friend needed to hit him twice to win and he wasn’t going to let him.

A couple of minutes later, he didn’t see nor hear him anymore. He needed to see what he was up to. So, he raised his head above the blocks with caution to see. But what he saw was a pebble flying towards him at a close range . Before he could duck,  it had caught his right eye.

He felt the pang and at the same time saw seven stars!

“Ahaah! Got you, ” his friend laughed.

Chima moaned as another pebble caught his neck with a milder impact.

The sound of his scream forced his friend to drop the handful of pebbles he planed to throw at him and froze by his side.

“What happened? Are you alright? Did I hurt you?”

“My eye, my eye, ” Chima cried.

His friend stooped and raised his face. What he saw terrified him. Chima’s right eye discharged bloody tears. He let out a scream and ran home to get help.

Chima’s mother rushed to the scene with her heart in her hands. Chima was rushed to the emergency section. When she saw the state of her son, she went limp.

What she had feared had happened. She had always disliked her son’s friendship with her neighbour’s son.

Chima was his exact opposite – gentle, soft-hearted and two years younger than the fifteen year old rough cob of a friend.

She had always tried to protect her son from him but couldn’t. How could she with her son making it difficult. He would always hang out with him.

“The only thing you can do is tell your son to be careful with him. You can’t stop the river from flowing in certain direction.” Her friend had told her when she complained to her.

“I could. It’s simple for me to do!”

“Tell me how.”

“I could build a strong wall between them, “

“That’s absurd.”

Chima’s mother was sure that if she took a drastic measure, she could end their friendship.

Moving out was one of her best options but she couldn’t possibly move out just to keep a neighbours son away from her son. That sounded ridiculous. Finally, she decided to let them be.

Ever since, she had lived in constant fear that one day, he would hurt her son.

Now that it had happened, she knew she would never to her son and would never come to terms with the cause of her son’s blindness.

When Chima’s friend and his parents visited him in the hospital, his mother refused them access to him. She had been embittered by the incident and was determined to keep the boy and his family as far away from her son as she could. That was what she had always wanted to do.

Two months later, Chima’s friend and his parents visited him at school. They apologised to him for the first time since the incident.

“We are so sorry for what happened to you, Chima. I have punished your friend repeatedly for being so careless and insensitive. It pains us his parents to think that our son has made someone’s son blind. ”

Chima’s eyes moistened. He wasn’t happy he got punished. His extended a hand to his friend and a hug followed.

Looking at his eyes which was now deep-set and half-closed with the iris seemingly lost, he wept silently. Chima consoled him.

“You know I didn’t mean to hurt you right?” Chima nodded.

“I can’t believe I did this to you,” his tears dropped, Chima dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief.

“You didn’t do this on purpose. Don’t worry about it?”

“Ever since this happened, I’ve wished we didn’t play with pebbles.”

“It’s my ill luck. It could have been you instead of me.”

That visit renewed their friendship. Until one day, his mother saw them playing together. She picked a stick and drove them apart. A few days later, Chima saw a big truck in front of his friend’s house. Soon, movers moved furnitures into the truck.

They were moving out! He ran towards their house, to say goodbye to his friend who

“Chima! Chima! Come back here!”

Chima paused, hesitated and walked back home. His mother took him inside the house.

Insight – Anger

She walked along, bare-footed and the angry women that escorted her chanted a melancholic song.

She was not crying but tears that rolled down her cheeks dripped on her upper chest and were absorbed into the white wrapper tied around her body from chest to knee.

She admitted silently and blamed herself non-stop. But she knew it was all a mistake. She didn’t mean to send him to eternal life.

He was a very good husband and she loved him so much. She didn’t know what came over her. They were living happily before the terrible day.

It was a relatively dark day.

He had prepared for work as usual and was about leaving without giving her the normal allowance for the day’s meals.

She had a tender baby and was not prepared to starve until the evening when he would be back.

How was she going to feed herself and the baby the whole day?

He said he didn’t have any money on him but promised to come back to give her some money but she failed to understand.

They had a misunderstanding and she lost it when he shouted at her to behave herself that moment.

She hated it when he raised his voice at her especially when she was supposed to be apologised to.

She held him by his pant’s waist and they waited.

He warned her to leave him but she was adamant.

Then he did something he never ever wanted to do in his entire life. He laid a hand on her cheek and afterwards went on his knees to apologise. But the demon had already entered her and she turned into a ‘crazy’ lunatic.

She ran into the kitchen and he waited not knowing what she planned to do.

He saw her approaching very fast with a pestle and began to grin not knowing what she meant to do with it.

Then he realized it and ran.

But he couldn’t make it out before collapsing on the floor.

That was when the demon left and she laid herself on him and cried hell on earth.

Her scream alerted the neighbours and they all gathered to help him.

But nothing could be done to save him.

He was gone.

People asked questions they already knew answers to, what she did to him was there before them and the stained evidence lay by his side. She could not speak again. She went numb and distant, looked on but didn’t speak.

Her normal psychological state had been tampered with by her deed and when kinsmen summoned her for an answer to the question they already knew answers to, she couldn’t talk and throughout the funeral, she didn’t open her mouth to talk to anyone. No smiles, no cries, no expression, just there. Like someone very far away.

In those days culture demanded that if someone died by another’s hand, the culprit must be sent away to a faraway place never to return and that’s exactly her fate.

After the funeral, they led her out of her husbands compound, into the community for the pre-exile parade.

Sympathisers pleaded on her behalf and said the deed was out of mistake but the tradition could not be held back.

They paraded her along the community major roads with tender palm frond secured around her waist as a sign she had been exiled. She would never be allowed by anyone even family members to set foot upon the land again.

She didn’t care about what they were doing to her because she ceased to exist the moment she realized her love passed away by her hand.

All she wanted was to go back in time and undo her evil deed.

Insight – Fear

“Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.”
— Shirley Maclaine

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The toddler, Deme, shuddered at the sight of Pa Oki, a man whose hair was wool white and face an artwork of wrinkles.

He was bent over a stick and walked at the pace of a step a minute.

As he approached, the child galloped away from him, and pa Oki was amused as usual as he looked at Deme who was torn between running to his mother and running to his father.

He knew he would not choose his father – he had once forced him into the shaky arms of Pa Oki after gently leading him to his usual seat. Deme had cried all the while he lingered in his arms and kicked and struggle to freedom, they had laughed as he was running to ‘safety’.

So, this time Deme ran to his mother who was feeding the pigeons. He scared the birds away as he galloped through their brood and secured himself between her legs wearing a horrific facial expression. His pair of bulging eyes gawked through the end of his mother”s wrapper which he raised with his little shaky fingers over his face.

The wait for the usual terrific sight to leave began. In a little while, the scary man would leave.

But Pa Oki walked to him and his mother took a wooden short stool and lowered himself slowly beside her, his voice shook as his fingers as he spoke.

“We can be best of friends son. Take my hand, walk with me. Be my friend.”

But Deme had already hidden in the shrub behind the wooden fence of their compound before Pa Oki could make it to the last of his words to him.

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