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Yas Niger

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Yas Niger

Tag Archives: Short Story

MRS QUEEN, MISS KING ~

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by yasniger in Stories

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England, King, Letters, Nigeria, Post Office, Queen Elizabeth II, Short Story

Northern,
Nigeria
1st February 1992

Dear Mrs Queen,

My mama tells me you will not get to read this letter of mine, but she suggested I made it very brief all the same.

I wish to prove her wrong, so please write back and say you got my letter. I promise to be your pen pal if you do.

Your friend,
Miss King.

THE PALACE,
LONDON,
ENGLAND.
14th February, 1992.

Dear Miss King,

We got your letter and we were quite glad to read from you. We are sure this letter will make your mother eat her words and apologise to you.

We will love to be your pen pal, so do please write us again and tell us about yourself, your family and your friends, your home and your country too.

We have very few real friends ourselves, and only get to meet mostly boring people who do not know how painful it is to keep smiling everyday of the year; especially if we do not really feel like it most of the time.

We are looking forward to your next letter. We hope you will write us very soon. Do please write your name on the top left corner of the face of the envelope your letter will be in. This will help us locate and identify your letter quickly.

Royally yours
Mrs Queen.

Northern,
Nigeria
1st March 1992

Dear Mrs Queen,

My mum is seated beside me as I write you this letter and she is beyond herself with wonder. She gave me thirty naira to buy the stamps for this letter and has promised to correct all the mistakes I make in my letters to you. She sends her regards.

I was born on 15th April, 1980; which I’m told is a Tuesday. I’m twelve years old and I’m too short for my age. I like blue, sweets, cakes, cats, bicycles, comics and I am in class five. My first name is Titi but I love being called Miss King. I have one brother, he doesn’t have many teeth now though. He lost most of them somehow. He is still only six.

Daddy and Mummy are married. Daddy is a lawyer and mummy is everything else. She drives us to school and back, cooks, washes, cleans and even does most of the talking too. My friends are many but I’ll not tell you about them. You see, I’m punishing them for not believing I’m your pen pal.

I live in Northern Nigeria. They are always burning houses here. I live in Tudun wada. They are always shouting out of loud speakers in Tudun wada. My country is very big and we have so many states, but I do not know all of them now. Daddy says I should not bother to learn the names of the new state governors because they will change them again very soon.

I am of the country’s western Yoruba tribe. Last time when there was trouble we went to stay with my grand mum in Ibadan. When you write me, please tell me about London. Is it true that the people in London do not wear wristwatches because there is a big clock in the sky? My paper is finishing and I must stop now. Please write me soon.

Your friend,
Miss King.

THE PALACE,
LONDON,
ENGLAND.
14th March, 1992.

Dear Miss King,

We can understand your mother’s excitement and the disbelief in your friends’ attitude. It is not always that people so different, like you and we become pen pals.

We were very interested in what you had to say about your country, your home, your family and yourself. We assure you that we are not as tall as our age either!

It is easy to notice how you made your country appear rather unpleasant. We wonder, is it really? Do you always have trouble in your country? What kind of trouble do you usually have? Are you always is some sort of danger in these times of trouble? We do love to know more.

We do love to tell you about London. London is our very big capital city. It is very old in a quite modern sort of way. It is noisy in most parts of the larger city and that is true for most times of the days of the week and all year round too. It has lots of people living in it from all parts of the world.

We do not know about people in London not wearing wristwatches because of a ‘big clock in the sky’. We do know that there is an old big clock on a tower called BEN, which can be seen (and heard) from many places in London. The people we are allowed to see always have wristwatches on, but then we suppose they always dress themselves up rather well, to meet us.

We would be delighted if you will keep on writing us. Do not forget to write your name on the top left corner of the face of the envelope that your letter will be in. It makes it much easier for us to locate and identify your letter from the hundreds we receive everyday. Our regards to all you love.

Royally yours,
Mrs Queen.

Northern,
Nigeria
25th March 1992

Dear Mrs Queen,

Daddy bought me a new writing pad today and mum got me some more envelopes and stamps. So as you can see, I will never stop writing you until I die. I was glad to hear about London and BEN. Daddy showed me a picture of BEN. He says it also has some kind of bell. You make London sound interesting. I will love to visit it some day.

I did not wish to make my country sound so unpleasant but it is quite hard to write anything about my country without making it sound so. I know that there is always some kind of trouble everywhere else; it is human. Actually, I borrowed that last bit from my daddy.

My country is one; at least it appears to be. But even the number ‘one’ has its fractions, so my country also has its ‘factions’. These factions know they must agree, yet they do not agree always just like the fractions in the number ‘one’ don’t agree often, most of the time. I hope you understand all that numbers bit; I am not so good in arithmetic. Neither are most of the factions in my country, it would appear.

The trouble is mainly that of superiority. Each faction claims to be more important than all the others. Religion, population, tribe, politics, literacy and commerce are used as a yardstick to measure and establish the superior faction. It is a sort of social mathematics. This affects the weak oneness that we have amongst all of us and always causes lots of trouble.

At times of trouble, it is dangerous to stay on in the opposing faction’s town. They may burn down your property and kill you too, if you don’t run away. Daddy always makes sure we run away in good time when our neighbours are our current opposing faction, or there is a hint of any trouble.

My country is a beautiful place. There are many tribes and people of very different customs and religions. I think we are together because we had no choice. Daddy said YOU gave us no choice, but he didn’t sound sure. It is late and I must go to bed now. Mummy is breathing down my neck; after making me write most of her own stuffs too. Please write me soon.

Your friend,
Miss King.

Northern,
Nigeria.
1st July, 1992.

Your Majesty,

I’m Titi King’s mother. I must apologise on her behalf for her inability to reply your letters. In fact, I just discovered the last two letters and birthday card you sent her. You see, we were away in Ibadan with Titi’s grand parents. There was an ethnical and religious uprising in the town we reside in.

It started on a Sunday evening. Titi’s father and I were away, visiting friends in another part of town. Only Titi, her younger brother and our maid were left in our flat. The maid got out with Titi’s younger brother but Titi was burnt down with the flat by a mob and we lost her so painfully.

I am sure she would want you to know that you had made the last three months of her life so wonderful. Thank you so much for this and God bless you.

Yours sincerely,
Mrs King

LONDON,
ENGLAND.
10th May, 1992.

Dear Mrs King,

We are so sorry.
I am so, so sorry.

Yours
Liz

________________________________________________

“How do I tell how you feel,
Sitting on this height’s will?
Personal love trapped within,
Expectations curbing peace in.”

“I can easily say your state,
As only a child truly taste.
For love within is personal,
Our judges are then eternal.”

BREASTS OF DOOM ~

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by yasniger in Stories

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Novelette, Short Story, Woman

BREASTS OF DOOM
Sorry folks, this is now a published work available online at smashwords

SPORTS FOR PLAYERS ~

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by yasniger in Stories

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Tags

Short Story, Sports

THE COACH

I am a reluctant Coach. The first time I tried coaching was in school. I was the tertiary institution’s Basketball team captain and we had a non-official Coach; a short middle-aged fellow, who was not a staff of the institution and only lived behind the school’s main campus. We were not sure he had played the game competitively himself and tolerated his feeble attempt at guiding us out of respect. I was looked up to by my fellow team mates, and most especially by the female Basketball team.

I liked that. If getting all that attention from pretty girls came with it, why not? It was just a game I played then. Not the Basketball, but the coaching. The presumed remuneration was cosy and quite good! It came in doves of willing babes, hyped up campus status, popularity, travelling and fun. It was unlimited fun my parents paid for with my school fees. It was free fun like campus life always would be and life never ever is.

The second stage of my Coaching-hood dawned on a prolonged holiday. In the pigs ‘invaded’ slump my father housed our entire family in, was a group of young men who played amateur soccer. Out of idleness, not even youthful curiosity and certainly not professional pursuit, I teamed up with them.

I was the least skilful of the whole lot, but was respected mainly because my family had a posh status in the ghetto community, and also because of my higher education and maybe also my relative advanced age. I was allowed to play, even in competitions. Though my knowledge of the game exceeded my physical display of it, I gave a good account of myself with the number of goals I scored and the lots more I ‘almost’ scored.

One day, the oldest and most experienced leader of the team; who we obviously called Coach, suddenly named me his assistant. That was it. My first solo assignment was to handle our junior male team. I made a show of it, encouraged some idle girls to join in on the fun as well and started a female team too. This time though, these girls were a lot younger and I was sincerely interested in only improving myself as a soccer Coach with the work I did with the younger players. This I continued to do pretty well, while I finished school and waited to farther my education or get a job, still much the reluctant Coach.

The third stage was longer. My young female team played in its first competition. We did well and got rewarded with a friendly match against a State sponsored side. Afterwards some of my players were asked to play for the State side and I was asked to join the managerial crew of the team. The State team did well, but it soon got off-loaded by the State and a group of tradesmen took over the players. I willingly stayed with the players on a part-time basis, while I worked and schooled full-time.

We won a National competition and did well in another National contest. This brought me and the team a drop of national recognition and I was offered a regional role in a National programme by a prominent National soccer Coach.

I would work at my job as well as pursued a full time advanced course in the city’s polytechnic on week days, while at weekends I spent hours coaching young children under the National soccer programme. I was able to polish my coaching abilities under the tutelage of an ex-professional player, now an established seasoned soccer Coach. Taking it one day at a time, I managed my time according to my prevailing priorities. It was always work first, school next and coaching last.

I had made it the quest of my reluctant coaching career during this period to improve the general lives of all the young players I handled. My principle was simple: ‘Sports is recreational and recreation is temporal.’ Hence, I ensured that all my wards pursued a more permanent career alongside sports. Mainly it was schooling, but some learnt other trades too. My quest became a means of recreation for me too. And though by my actions I had assisted in ensuring that the aspirations of many families for their young ones were achieved, it was always a past time to me too. Soon it developed into something special as I simply dedicated myself more to it. It became more important to me than actually coaching soccer. I will coach for a lucrative package when I got the chance, but I am still a reluctant Coach.

THE PLAYER

It was a secondary schools’ female soccer competition match and our team was winning with four goals. But though our team was five goals up by half time, we were still worried about a skilful, natural left footed girl in our opponents’ midfield. She had repeatedly dribbled, waltzed and shot through our entire defence line like we were playing against her alone and not another team of eleven girls. We won the match by a whooping seven-nil, but everyone was looking at that talented girl like she had netted all the seven goals we scored against her team.

I wanted her in our team and I tried to get her by every legal means conceivable. Every attempt to get her interested in our school was foiled by her then handlers. I got to know that she had played that match illegally because she had not even been a student of the school she played for and had indeed dropped out of an entirely different junior school two years earlier. It only made me even more interested in her.

I tailed her home from her local training field one evening and met her parents with my very ‘palatable’ offer. Unknown to me, they were prepared for me. The girl’s then handlers had falsified some details about me and warned her, and her parents about me. They had been told that I was a profiteering schemer who wanted to deceive them, and that I had no good intensions for their daughter. I was then disappointed that I had probably seen (maybe) the most talented female soccer player ever identified in my country and she was wasting away, out of school, hawking sugarcane, flirting around and utterly poorly handled.

She could have very easily been schooling on a full scholarship in one of the best schools in the country like I had offered her. She could be polished and managed into becoming an educated success in both sports and in any other career of her choice. It hurt me, but there wasn’t much I could do but wait and hope.

I didn’t have that long to wait though. In sports two years is not a long time. In sports we remember and forget too easily. I had stopped to change a flattened wheel and habitually responded to greetings from behind me, as I changed the punctured tyre. At first I didn’t recognise any of the girls sitting behind full trays of neatly stacked well cut sugarcane sticks, they were selling.

When I finished changing the tyre and had put the flat tyre away in the car’s rear compartment, one of the girls came over with some water for me to wash my dirtied hands with. It was then I recognised the talented left footer. After holding up the water for me to wash my hands, she insisted I took at least a stick of her sugarcane with me. Before I drove off she shyly asked me if she could come to see me sometime. She claimed to know my office and pleaded that I gave her a few minutes when I could. I gave her an appointment, drove off whistling. Patience does pay.

She came early, in time. I gave her something to drink, which she didn’t touch eventually. She wept as she told me how she regretted not joining our school and what a mess her handlers had made of her prospects as a promising talent. She then wanted to join up with us but didn’t have the courage to face me until she met me recently. Though I knew it was too late to get her admitted into the private school where I coached part-time, after the proprietor had given seventeen girls from my team admissions on full scholarship. Since he died in a car crash on his way for an inaugural meeting of a federal sports panel, the school hadn’t taken any more students on sports scholarships.

I was so thankful that his family held up to their end of the arrangement and still allowed all the girls (and some boys) to complete their studies on full scholarship. To request for an additional space, at that time, was asking for too much.

I however asked her to return with photocopies of her most recent academic credentials and lied that I will try to get her accepted into the school. I had however explained to her the difficult situation truthfully. I just wanted her in our team first, so that I could have a shot at handling her properly. I was certain I could make her an outstanding future star.

THE SPORT

A year passed and she was now fully part of our team. I finally had to get her settled into a public school and assisted her ‘struggling’ parents in paying her school fees. She blossomed into a wonderful team player and she travelled with our team everywhere, playing in both local and national competitions for the private school’s team too. She was the toast of every match she played in and I started getting doves of hugely promising requests for her from big professional club sides.

My refusal to accept any of these offers started a feud with her parents. They had been told that their girl will earn a lot if she joined a professional side. Though this is partially true, I had my reasons for refusing. This I explained to her parents. But against my best advice her parents soon insisted she joins a professional club. I had two reasons for not wanting her to go just yet. Firstly, I thought she was still rather young and inexperienced in the dirty ‘game’ behind the sports scene.

Secondly, she had to finish secondary school to enable her continue her education any farther. If she is to have a decent life after her very limited sporting career, then furthering her education was paramount. This I considered was appropriate then and not at any other non-feasible time in the future.

I lost her, but happily not her trust. Her parents made her join a big club in the south of the country for their own selfish reason. I was given some money to sign her mandatory release papers, which I took and did. She was gone for only one calendar year and though she is an incredibly talented player, she never got to play in even one competitive game for the club. She was not even registered for the national league in two abridged seasons.

It was soon revealed that one of her Coaches there wanted sexual favours from her and the other considered her a threat to his most favoured player. Then she broke her leg in training and had to return home untreated and without any savings to fall back on. Her folks had used up every dime she had sent home. I got a specialist to treat and manage her leg. And in those eight months, while she healed and rehabilitated, I got her re-admitted to finish her secondary education in her last school. I paid for her extra lessons and her examination fees too. She was able to resume training exactly nine months after she returned home.

Three months later, her results were out. She had passed averagely and it coincided with her regaining her previous playing form. By the time we started processing her admission into a tertiary institution on a sports ticket; she had healed completely and was thrilled to have attained the ‘form of her life’. Then she did the unexpected. You just never know with young girls and lying cute good looking boys. She called to tell me that she had ‘run-off’ with her mechanic boyfriend, who just got employed into an engineering firm somewhere in the biggest city in the west of the country. It was a huge blow.

The necessity of sports in teenagers’ lives can not be over emphasised. It makes them burn up their excess energy, tow the line of good behaviour, stay healthy, imbibe important values in their characters and provide an immediate alternate means of livelihood, and if they are among the lucky talented few. Sports could also ensure a comfortable life subsequently.

I had always insisted that my players get a proper education, the highest possible when obtainable. The risk and luck involved in making it in sports hugely out-weights that involved in making it straight from a proper education. I pursued the same course myself; thus I subjected all my players to the same pursuit. Most turned out well, but a few derailed. She was no exception, though hers hurt me a lot because of the promise she personified.

Five months later she returned, visibly pregnant and sent away by her boyfriend, who she told us had moved in with another girl. Her father came to me and I followed him. Amidst her entire family’s continuous onslaught of curses, I insisted she is allowed to pick up her life and not discouraged by our disappointment or indeed hers; not even considered. I was secretly certain that this experience will serve a good purpose in the future; for others too, through her.

THE GAME

To keep her mind off things and in an attempt to give her some confidence, I got her enrolled into a Computer school. She finished the brief course just in time for the birth of her baby. Three months after her son’s birth, she started a two years course it a tertiary institution in our town. Eight months later she was back in training, her son weaned and in her mother’s care, most of the time. She made the institution’s team to its biannual national competition, which they won. She was a member of the State’s team to the national sports festival, a team I was given the privilege of handling.

She was simply so brilliant at the tournament that she couldn’t be ignored by our country’s junior national team selectors. The two years of her course ended swiftly and she was invited to join the junior national team in preparing for the world cup. Everyone was excited but I advised that she took her final exams first and wait for another chance in the future. She was still young and officially eligible, even if she should be younger. I expected some resistance but I got none as she readily agreed.

I however made her understand that it had to be her choice, not minding that I was assisting her with her education. She replied me with what is the most touching response I have ever received from any of my players. She said I was her guiding angel, sent by God to steer her through life. She added that she was not the only person I handled, but I had dedicated most of my time, effort and money to her and her troubles.

She did not go to that juniors’ world cup. Instead she finished her academic course and proudly got a National Diploma. It was afterwards easy for her to get into a National females’ League club side. The next two years were quite great. She actually won every competition she was featured in.

The National female soccer league and The National Football Association female clubs’ tourney, The National Sports Festival soccer and a women soccer tournament in Europe were all won by her teams that year, with her playing a very prominent part. She was to later play in the very next edition of the junior world cup she had missed previously, and later won a female soccer continental championship. She became an instant big star and was well off with her financial earnings now.

I sort of managed her affairs for her back home and supervised the construction of the two residential flats she built. Her parents moved into part of the building, leaving the rented abode they had been living in all this long while. She had the other flat fitted and furnished for her own private use.

She agreed with my suggestion to buy a small commercial bus for her first vehicle, instead of the family utility van her father preferred. This was a sore point between her father and I, but she saw the sense in generating money with the vehicle to maintain itself, while it still served the family’s needs. When she returned for her annual holiday, I suggested that she changed her club so that she could farther her education while she still played actively. She did. She was now a big star and it was easy to get into just any other club she so desired.

So she moved to another club, secured an admission into an institution in her new club’s home city and in another two and a half years, she graduated with a university degree. I went for her graduation alongside her brother and father, in the same vehicle she bought. Then she changed clubs again, this time to the city she was posted to for her mandatory National Youth Service. In those two years she made the senior national team, won the continental nations’ cup, and featured in the Olympic Games and in the senior female world cup.

She was soon engaged by a small club in Europe for a two years contract. One year into the contract, her contract was sold by the club to a much bigger club in a different European country for a heart warming sum that was assessed a world record for a female player then. Her new personal package was quite huge. I asked her to take an insurance policy for disability and retirement, and with the assistance of her new foreign club’s secretary, she did. It was such a great idea as the unfolding events that soon followed was to show.

Returning home for an off-season holiday, her plane had to make an emergency landing. As a result of the ensuing crash, she was among the few that got injured when her right femur was fractured in two places. She had stayed behind at home since then. The insurance company paid up and with the statutory settlements she got from her big European club and the Airline’s insurers, she had enough to retire many times over.

She healed well in four months and wanted to play again, but I made her realize that her whole soccer career will end eventually and she would then want to start off in another field. She might never make more money than she had already made and it was a perfect time to start off in a life long career that will define her future status as someone other than just an entertainer.

We looked at all the options opened to her and concluded that she invests most of her considerable fortune in landed structures and pursue a career in the field she already studied. So because she had read Banking and Finance and had a favourable public image, we had; with a little persuasion, got her employed as a junior manager in a bank she had also invested heavily in. She bought a small store and built a small office structure, which she rented out. Now her son is doing very well in the private school she couldn’t get into and I am as proud as a stuffed bear.

The Coach isn’t selfless but human too,
He is the person with a plan for everyone.
With abilities as experience all learnt anew;
He is an optimist, patient as sure as the sun.

The Player obeys the norms and urge,
Enjoying the dreamt up living, yet real.
Dancing to all songs with a new surge,
Blinding days are lit with a light to feel.

The Sport is heartless and demanding,
All companies it keeps are envious of it.
Consuming lust filled, never satisfying;
On its sure ride it will keep every bit.

The Game is simple and easy to chase,
Embraced in choices to choose and make.
Stages of gains at every level of the race
Made the whole thing Sports for players’.

GONE ~

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by yasniger in Stories

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Dogs, Life, Short Story

GONE~
Father had been very angry all day. It is so clear that mother must have said something to upset him again, like she does again and again. You could see his effort to stay in control of his emotions, not to do anything rash, to be polite and keep a smile on his face. It always gave him away, every time.

We had a flat tyre and stopped behind a parked lorry on the highway. I saw the little monkey too, as it swung and played beside the huge lorry’s doubled rear tyres. It was swinging from a rope which was keeping it fastened to the lorry’s roofless wooden cargo-hold caging. The monkey made a grotesque picture against the amateurish painting of a fighter jet spread across the lorry’s big rear door. That notwithstanding, it was a sight to savour; and if father hadn’t need of my help with the flat tyre, I would have gladly enjoyed the sight more than I had.

The large nuts tightly holding our vehicle’s flattened wheel were rusty. Father had to ‘tap’ some oil from the car’s engine to lubricate them before he could finally loosen them. In between the wait, I had to help Sani ease his six years old bladder beside the highway and back inside his wide lonely back seat again. Sani and I had made silly noises at the playing monkey before I hurriedly returned round, to help father with the flat tyre.

I remembered seeing Sani toss pieces of his lunch-bread at the monkey, through the open rear window he was seated beside; his window was on the other side of car, away from the sparingly moderate traffic that sped past our car in seemingly endless hurry. Their speed gave such force to the gust of hurled air that blew at us in short busts, as it literally shook our stationary car, while we worked at changing the flat tyre.

Father had dirty hands after the flat tyre had been changed and I held up a bottle of water for him to wash his soiled hands. We both eased ourselves beside the highway too, in front of the car, in the small space between the parked lorry and our car, by the edge of the graveled highway side-walk. Then we hurried back into our front seats and father drove us off home. It was my first holiday back from my new boarding school. Father had come along with my younger brother Sani, to pick me up.

Twenty quiet miles later and we were home. I got out of the car first and was opening the huge metal gate to our house when I heard father’s shout. Sani wasn’t in the back seat! We lost Sani that day and twenty long years later, the pain and regret of that single incident killed father. It is still a mystery to this day and every single possible theory had been discussed and pursued to its logical human and orthodox end, all to no avail.

Mother blamed father and he agreed. He had accepted that his absentminded state had made him less vigilant. The anger in him had made him lose his little boy so strangely. Nothing we did brought Sani back to us. Mother changed her thoughts much later, rather belatedly. It always feels good to recollect that she made father’s last few years less painful with her support and love. But for father, all through those twenty miserable years, there was no worse crime in the world than to be angry:

Yearning not out loud,
Judgment does complain.
The verdict is yet proud,
Its picture coloured in pain.

Wisdom suddenly goes up,
Patience flew its balloon.
Decision flirts with hope,
But it’s still so much alone.

Restrain the wild stallion,
With a branding hand about.
Hurts enough to melt iron;
As penned up heat cries out.

Tomorrow returns somehow,
Mindful of its joyous winning.
And consequences whistle now,
So it all sits to wait for morning.

On my wall now, as just before I got married, is a picture of Sani. It was taken earlier that same year he got lost. The family had mourned him for so long; for too long. As the only child ever again, I knew just how much he was missed. In those long twenty, laughter-less years of an endless stretch of mournful sore existence, the three of us mentioned Sani like he was still there with us, through the nearest open door, in the next room.

I have since grown up to fully comprehend all sorts of feelings like pain, joy, disappointment etc. Most of my experiences had been of the kind that renders the mind skeptical of happy possibilities. Those that question every sad event with a resignation that says it is just fate. Life became a vast open field under an ever mobile parade of tears filled clouds and living is a ceaseless downpour of pain and timeless rain.

I have lacked so much, that I have come to miss my family so much more now. They had all left me alone on my own. First it was Sani then father, and mother is most recent. It isn’t strange that I should remember her least of all, she being the last one with me. Her death was weird in a sense. Though I did cast soil into her stuffed grave like I did father’s too, I was completely unprepared in her case. One moment she was nagging about my childless marriage and the next moment I was fully parentless.

But then she was always just my mother. Unlike my dear wife, who is more of the finest breed and is so inappropriate for me or her family; which I never got along with. She is as different from me as an Ant is to a Spider. She is the ever searching, busy and industrious type but I am not. I scheme and wait. Most times I wonder why she had a thought for me. On this one point I agree with her folks wholly, for I had been brought up spoilt and calmly bred to take things as they come and wait forever for fate and destiny. She faces her fate and makes her destiny.

Mild as milk yet sharp as acid, my life and mind respectively contrast the existence I grew in. I had naively conspired to be wrongly trained in a neglected field that it seems my inherited intelligence was being wasted. In my wife I found purpose and direction; most of all, patience. These were both comforting and conforming as I trove mentally and to a great extend, spiritually.

Her simple smiles spoke in invisible words that showed and said her daily looks of profound angelic niceness wakes up mean vengeful gods in fair moods. Her face steers nature’s soul with its uncomplicated beauty in a mythological sense. Her eyes lit sceneries that warm every heart that meets them, know them and experience the internal simplicity they mirror.

It was like a joke of some sort when my Best man gave my wife and me a puppy as a wedding gift, right there at our wedding guests’ reception. He had the puppy brought in just before he made the customary toast, which he choose to conclude with the cheeky lines; “The little pup is now about; May the little Bob soon pop out.” So when my wife named the puppy ‘Nisa’, meaning ‘Far’, I guessed she saw the dog as a symbol of our union and made a statement with its name to all and sundry, that our marriage will go all the distance. I guessed wrongly.

Nisa became the little ‘Bob’ that hasn’t popped out yet. But it filled our early years of coupled existence with fun, love and joy. The dog turned out to be a witty, disciplined, smart and dedicated animal. He was just a dog to everyone else but to me and especially, to my wife. She and Nisa were practically together all day long and if I didn’t love the animal too, I would have really had enough reasons to dislike him.

Some of our regular guests had sworn the dog was more human than canine. He has been known to sit in his four legged way beside our two rooms’ front door for hours without moving an inch because he noticed we were both out of our modest abode and had forgotten to lock up. He once incredibly guided a desperate visitor to a nearby house where my wife and I had both gone for a neighbourly chit-chat.

Not a trained dog by any means conceivable, it incredibly had an almost human like intelligence. He ate everything he was fed, never stole or sat close to anyone eating, like local dogs are fond of doing. He would dutifully guard a tray of meat or fish laid outside to dry or cool off, barking away interested lizards, chickens and other dogs with as much dedication as any of us would. Built like a prized sheep, he had a beach-sand coloured thin hide that looked almost faded yellow in visibly poor light.

When very lean months soon engulfed us, as it is usually the case for most people of average means, I became so ill from malaria that my wife feared the worse. We had no money for food or drugs and she was at a complete loss of what to do. She called Nisa into our inner most room and he came in reluctantly. It was the first time he had entered any of our rooms, ever. I was barely awake but I could hear her whisper to him that she was going out to borrow some money for drugs.

As silly as I thought it must have sounded, even to her obviously confused mind, she still went ahead to converse with him. I knew they were quite close but as a matter of fact, I doubted her sanity at that instant. I watched them in a bemused pain induced stupor, as she further instructed him to come and look for her if I got any worse. I called her back, as she was about to leave and a very brief one-sided argument ensued.

As we spoke I would have sworn Nisa was following our exchanges with much more than his eyes and head. She retuned a couple of hours later; I was barely conscious and moaning in pain when she entered the room. She had been unsuccessful and broke down in tears as soon as she saw me twisting in pain beside a tensely still Nisa. I tried consoling her but it was such a pathetic attempt. She ran out again and sped into our empty compound in the huge cosmopolitan low-rent, many tenants building we resided in. She was in one big panic as she dashed about, hoping for assistance from any of our many neighbours.

Everyone of our fellow tenants was home that early evening hour, yet the best they could all do was give her a small cup full of raw rice and lots of kind words of encouragement. She somehow cooked up a miracle dish with the cup of rice, throwing in some left over fungus infested spices and some old forgotten dried fish. It smelt nice and it must have tasted good too, but I couldn’t swallow anything but warm water.

Her tears spoke to me words that hurt and I feared for her like I never thought possible. As death wooed me for that brief point in time, I momentarily was selfishly glad that I wasn’t going to see her leave me, like I have always dreaded. In the quiet mazy-whirls of my mind I saw my father dieing again and my old questions all came up for answers again;

Baba, mutuwa na da wuya?
Mun amince duniyar ka da wuya.

Father, is it hard to die?
We acknowledge the hassles of your world.
With life’s wards always roams a lie,
We all are reproductions of its mould.

Choking in the presence of its grip,
The inscrutable crux not familiarized.
Do we sit out the stages of its trip
Like your peaceful love that wasn’t recognized?

From the weep the baby wails
To the whip’s lashes life hails,
These tastes we own and inherit.
Say oh father, is there better to merit?

The strangest thing happened. My wife sang a prayer as I took in long deep breaths. Nisa stood up on all his four limbs from where he was half sitting. He gave a curt bark and licked her arm before running out. He kept barking inside the compound and no one could shut him up. My wife hurried out impatiently, cursing him for not knowing better. Nisa came at her swiftly and tugged at her wrapper with his teeth.

She didn’t call him her son for nothing, she recounted was her very thought when the urge to let him lead her on overwhelmed her. She followed him; filled with curiousity, as he walked on determined and unhesitant, head down in a solemn meditation like posture. He led her to the local dog-meat butcher’s stall, where he folded his limbs and laid still on the soft ground.

She came over to his head with her eyes instantly tears filled. He closed his eyes firmly and licked at her hand as she patted his motionless cone-shaped face. It was such a very pathetic and uncommon sight that it lost the dog-butcher lots of dedicated patrons later. She was paid handsomely by the unrepentant meat merchants because he was a fairly big dog. Though she didn’t see Nisa slaughtered, but we were told later that he ‘cooperated’ fully. That word had never sounded so inappropriate.

The next morning I woke up feeling much better. The drugs she had bought and given me the night before had worked well for me. She cleaned me up and fed me a hot, sweet smelling and good tasting breakfast as she sang a popular funeral hymn. Still in the dark about Nisa’s strange demise, I was quiet all the while until I saw the single tear drop float out of her eye and run down her cheek. Then I tried to ‘break the ice’ with a joke. I asked her if she was rehearsing for my funeral. She replied, with so much feeling, that she was not rehearsing, but was singing for real. I guessed she meant I had died and was ‘reborn’ again, after our ordeal the day before. I guessed wrongly again.

This time she didn’t keep me in the dark for long. She couldn’t hold back her tears as she told me everything. It was then I learnt that she had named him Nisa in memory of Sani, my late and only brother. She knew from the stories we told that a big chunk of our lives disappeared with Sani and in her own way she preempted the family’s preference for a name for my future male child and named the dog after Sani, without desecrating our memories. There it is, as it always is and will always be. Life congregates us in one loving hub of family and friends, wooing us to have and share love for one another, as it educates us with the knowledge of our inevitable end and final separation. But it never empowers us with the secret of bearing its insipid emptiness and harsh betrayal. It is cruel and just not fair.

This we can only experience; life comes and then it is gone also. Like all those I have come to accept as mine, life will all too soon be eventually gone. It is discomforting to know the endless list of those gone is never ever complete, one way or the other.

They had all gone,
I only heard how.
They made the home
That I have now.

They met my sun
At its very dawn.
Made day my own,
As their night’s done.

They are all gone,
I saw them all go.
Where they’re borne
I will come to know

THE SENSES OF THE SEASONS ~

11 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by yasniger in Stories

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Short Story

THE SENSES OF THE SEASONS ~

Seasons come and seasons go. None is first and none is last, for they come and go in their mild and in their harsh, as a loose fitting circle, which is reflective of the daily striving continuous spiral spin that rotates round and round. The timeless survey of natural logic doesn’t give it stature, even if it identifies a form for it, because no single one day could start a season or indeed end one, no matter how melodramatic it is.

On different occasions, with one glorious dawn or a hideous evening; with a frighteningly mean spectacle, one season melt into a void that cocoons into a state of anticipation and sense. One season will caterpillar about in an endless walk of leggy lethargic days, then it timely folds up in the secrecy of a covert day and suddenly it flies out in one beautiful open splendor, with its refreshing breath of colour and life. In between them is a mingled confusion of silent insolent void that is none of both.

How elegant she looked in her loose fitting grand wedding gown. The calmness she represents made the setting mild, totally misrepresenting the harsh life-long build-up to their marriage. It is so much like all the seasons in their mild and in their harsh personalities, together. Her loose fitting elegant cloth was a miscreant, she looked graceful in it. How easily she could stumble and fall because of its flowing beauty. Most ironic!

If to compare the seasons with the butterfly’s all too famous serendipitous life stages is clever, then certainly to liken it to her life’s memorial moments is most appropriate. From such a long past comparatively young age, she had been the type to identify her blessings as they come and not scale them with measurements and glut at how better off she is or not or such.

If she would have bothered, like most others around her did too sickeningly often, she would have seen her scale floored on the plate of blessings gone. But then, not perched on the safeness of height to prey on time with such an impossible patience so endlessly real to be innocent, she detached herself from all the remarks and simply lived on. She didn’t copy those who only humbled themselves because they were powerless.

With the increase in her age, she had proven that what matters most is the destination of the frail soul, surely and certainly burning itself out. The stakes were always too high to falter. Yes, she had ‘stuttered’ throughout on the way, but was never astray. If she cannot, by herself, justly and fairly satisfy man, then she most certainly cannot satisfy God, who is poised everywhere as time and patience; all in one sameness and form.

She was endlessly embracing humanity in a loving embrace like any mother would do while saving her drowning only child. Struggling along, she had identified God’s invincible arms from the deceptively entangling long ropy sea weeds’ leaves of the wrongly labeled evil and their manly harbingers, the Waters;

Look at the waters, compare and see
How like man it turns out to be.
With substances or matters joint,
It changes form and focus point.

Piffling people see evil before it reveals,
And all good only after it has surfaced.
From unlikely substances pain heals
And old valuable matter, are defaced.

No action without its consequence,
Then this love is basically insanity.
Take a dip and the source is essence;
Faith’s indulgence keeps humanity.

She has six children; three boys and three girls. All from the same marriage she gave her all. The marriage became the predicament it wasn’t meant to be. It demanded and got her best. At the end it was all worth it because she entrusted what little faith she had on the limitless hope she covered herself in.

Her late husband was a good man, if there ever was one. It had nothing to do with him but with what he had to done. He ran away into the lifeless embrace of another entity, when it was obvious that he was financially ruined and socially discredited. Widowed young, with six children after ten years of marriage, she struggled on. That cold season was harsh as hard winter. Her senses repelled its tough monster. She pegged faith, hope and future in God, her children and the roving power of change;

Only those friends
Because they know you
Would dare tickle you.

Though friendship ends
As time will all change;
For time is itself change.

This very air that fends
Will one sure solemn day
End each and every single day.

With God she won yesterday and was poised for a successful today. Change made sure her case wasn’t unique. Her children’s actions and in-actions claimed they weren’t indebted to her or the memory of their father. If she knew their minds as infants she conceived, if only they knew where they were then or will be, eventually? She couldn’t tell if they wanted to be living and wanting and wishing and needing. She only knew what she and her husband wanted as they ‘conceived’ to have them.

Like every parent, they said their want, planned it in a broad sense, if not in every detail. They did their wish, satisfying their need by consuming their wants in the birth of child after child, six times over. They unconsciously kept making one relationship after another like small steps on a staircase of a lifelong ascension that will certainly end with one fatal drop.

Unconsciously still they had stepped on their individual off springs to get to yet another next level. They fed an old idea and refused to nourish a healthier new one instead. They fear that when too many new ideas are being mooted out to replace old ones still in use, they are being changed merely for being old and not for being obsolete and utterly harmful and unhelpful.

As the children grew, each child revealed their person. Their wants; all their wishes as well as their needs, were all made clear with time and its slowly piling age. These same things that the couple didn’t know about each of their six offspring, before the children became their true selves, were clearly revealed. No one could tell their hopeful aspiration before they took form in them and were stated in their words and deeds. They are lost now as then and ever, as is the vagueness of their knowledge.

The knowledge of where they were or had been are lost, lost as their hopes then, as well as those they still have at present; those their parents, peers and society groomed for them and they innocently nurtured as theirs. Naturally, she cannot justify all this ‘favour’ she came to do for them, if she knew they didn’t know before they were themselves. It was always hers then; the wants, the wishes and the needs. Their lives were always hers to want, to wish and to need; hers to make as she craves. She thus owes them a good life and not only explanations. So when these two collided, one must give and did. What is then as selfish as to owe who you own? And it is so human too.

Her late husband had been incensed by the traditional logic behind being successful in the amassed might of being remembered long after he was gone. Still when he queried her endless pride in these living assets and she averted her eyes respectfully in the same traditional fashion, he thought it was rude by his enlightened European standings. His mental gaze followed the living crowd but he walked alone, like a violently funny madman in a crowded market at dusk. The late market people looked on amused, but stayed a safe distance away and still stayed for the entertainment and didn’t hurry home.

All her children went to very good schools at her expense, her slaving humiliation and her selfless sacrifices. Now they are all established, with self chosen spouses and in the most reasonable comfort, each child had turned away from her over powering love with a diplomatic apathy that always seems to speak for the younger ones when it involves their much older kin. She continues to live alone with none of her children offering to take in her ever present love for keeps. The big house they bought for her and maids they hired for her couldn’t share the love she craves to off-load; until she met him, long after.

He had lost both his legs in the Civil war and his entire family too, that was thirty-five years ago. She met him beside the big shopping mall in town, as he sat in his wheel chair, playing a small acoustic guitar. She habitually dropped a crisp money note on the small neat mat conspicuously placed in front of him as she went by. He smiled and nodded his familiar appreciation at her and sang on. She had barely looked at his face and had merely responded to a sense of duty to the disabled, like she is sympathetically accustomed to. Then with an unusual swift backwards glance her eye caught the sight of a fair-skinned, beggar child suddenly snatch up the money note and sprint off.

She was stupefied by the quickness of the sharp incident and the apparent audacity of the escaping boy as he called out excited words, still racing away in the radiantly bright early sun of the late morning. She suddenly stopped, called out and demanded for help on top of her voice, concluding that the beggar-boy was stealing the guitar playing man’s money. Then she hesitated as she recollected her glimpse of the angelic happy young face of boy that picked up the money note. She knew she couldn’t wish any harm to come to him, but the guards from the mall heard her and had quickly responded to her call. They had followed her pointed finger and chased after the running beggar-boy.

She didn’t stay to wait for the outcome of the hasty chase but walked into the mall, so full of admiration for what she thought was the guitar playing man’s indifference to the theft of his money as he played and sang on. The calmness in his face had remained motionless in its honesty. It was obviously real.

An hour later, when she came out of the mall, she learnt she had been mistaken about the incident. She was amazed but relieved that she was wrong about the incident and then she wanted to know what actually occurred. The story she was told touched her so deeply that it had made her be-friend the guard who told her the story and is today marrying the crippled guitarist.

She came out of the cocoon of her loneliness and embraced the morale in the crippled guitarist’s story of love and selflessness, devoid of expectations. Like her cagy children she chose to live her life, even if they desperately disapprove of her demeaning choices. She had sought to enjoy the company and intelligence of the crippled guitarist who had embraced her gentleness in return. She gleefully sank herself into loving; selflessly, without expecting anything back in return. She flicked her beauty and flew her peace, like a freshly emerged butterfly.

Like the seasonal butterfly that keeps a circle going with no demands on it. It was her spring of happiness after a long barren spell of murky confusion. She had meddled in and out of the many complicated seasons. She had been confronted often enough and severally had to jump into the shallow calm waters.

Reason stir things up, muddles up the calm pond and made things worse without ever meaning to. I told her the crippled guitarist’s story. I told her why the leg-less retired Army captain and pensioner plays his guitar for alms, so that he could give the money to the street orphans. They both chose to make me their best-man today and I will toast, ‘Their true selfless happiness’.

Cold, harsh and hard winter.
As skins feel and muster,
The senses repel this monster.

Water, green and breed spring.
As tongues taste and sing,
The senses eat everything.

Warm, lazy but busy summer.
As eyes see and shimmer,
The senses ponder in wonder.

Windy, dry and dead autumn.
As ears hear and minds fathom,
The senses prepare the burial drum.

The strenght of a woman – Subtle but forceful

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by yasniger in Stories

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THE STRENGHT OF A WOMAN ~

They stood there with their hands akimbo, resembling quite a hilarious picture from an African comic book, with a well drawn, colourful scene. They are a trio of early teenage girls, only out for a busy afternoon of fun. Monday is the fat, slow and lazy one amongst them. In her bright orange dress, she looked very much a discarded piece from the olden days, like the badly styled old dress she had on, which had been handed down to her from a much older sister of hers, two persons up.
The dress was still out of fashion, just like it was when her older sister had first put it on as a much thinner flower girl, at a relative’s wedding many years ago. Monday had squeezed her plumb fleshy body into the slim dress with the considerable pressured ease of a thumb forcibly thrust into an unpeeled, half-ripe orange. Monday is stupid now as everyday she had lived and tags along any where her two other friends went, though it didn’t please her so much. Like her, her two friends were also named after the day of the week they came into the world.

Friday is the tall, thin one with a loud voice she just loves using so much. She stood humming a popular tune under her breath as usual, wearing one of the so many short checkered faded dresses her mother still makes for her from the tiny pieces she collects from a nearby tailor. She is a shade smarter than Monday and tags along always too, when Wednesday says so.
Then there is Wednesday, the gorgeously shaped girl, with highly developed bodily curves beyond her tender age and an ever present beautiful smile on an ugly face. Her nose is an extension of her forehead and her large ears are too visible from the front that they appear to be on her cheeks. With her favorite bright purple cap pulled down over her eyes and in a tight fitting black T-shirt, over white knee-low straight-cut shorts, she appears very much the dish any male eye would fish gladly.
Sharp as new razor and wise as a well handled crackling horse whip, Wednesday always called the shots for the trio and all her shots spelled out only one thing over and over again; trouble. All the little bits of trouble she gets her group into from time to time, were costly ones; more so to her sheepish disciples than to her. To her, the costs were estimated as calculable.
In her selfishly styled smarter bravado, she rode on the more immature silliness of her companions as they fumbled along in their naïve good natured mannerisms, more sisterly than neighbourly. Wednesday is edged at the top notched hierarchy of bullies, if truly there is such definite bureaucratic manner for classing this psychological specie of human beings.
The girls all stood on their dirty bare feet; under the shade darken mango trees, pointing out the ripe mangoes with eager fingers after their sharp teenage eyes had picked them out. The trio didn’t say much as they all meaningfully waited for Wednesday to confirm anything final first, as it is customary.
Friday hummed a tune, Monday suddenly farted and almost simultaneously coughed loudly too, with the cunning hope she could disguised the fart’s soft explosive sound with a loud cough. The strong breeze blew into their faces and she wasn’t bothered her friends would sniff the foul smell her fart emitted, for she was sure she had successfully disguised the initial sound made when it exited her rectum with its habitual stealth.
Behind Wednesday’s back everyone joked about her rather large nose. People humorously said it took in more air than normal and could easily smell out a pebble in a hot plate of well cooked beans mash. Friday hoped still.
Then Wednesday spoke, ordering Friday under a tree, to call out the directions to the ripe mangoes as well as to catch those thrown down from the trees above. Monday would pick and collect all the mangoes from beneath the tree and they were both to keep a look out for the orchard’s owner and his famously timid dogs.
As they boldly matched out towards their assigned roles and positions, Wednesday sarcastically told Monday she could freely fart out loud all the foul smelling gases in her fat rotten smelly gut while at it. She gave Monday a stern meaningfully slow glary stare in emphasis. The joke about the nose must be true then, Monday concurred as she looked away, ashamed. Wednesday had definitely smelt the fart, despite her best effort.
It isn’t difficult for Monday to take the daily decision to join the group on any of their many escapades, at any one time. But she remains afraid she would fail at deciding when to take the tougher choice of not staying on, a decision which she knew she must make soon, maybe at some point she couldn’t control.

The minutes ticked away quickly as the tree riding Wednesday ‘monkeyed’ from branch to branch in the first dark mango tree she chose to climb. Beneath her, Friday called out the directions to the ripe fruits with her well practiced voice as she pointed them out for Wednesday, quite high in the thick tree.
Wednesday plucked the mangoes and threw most of them down at Monday, while she paused from time to time to eat a juicy ripe one, in full view of her assistants below. At such times, they all stopped and waited quietly, pretending not to look up at her. Wednesday had always forcibly displayed her self imposed tremendous responsibility for their all girls’ group, calling it hers, for it was indeed hers in every sense of the word.
When they had joked and laughed, jostling each other as they walked along the quiet deserted dusty road, headed for the orchard earlier, Wednesday had made it clear that no one could eat any mango until all the collection had been fully shared.
Obviously in their trio, Wednesday isn’t just anyone. All knew it pretty well. No one dared argue or complain with or to her, respectively. The two girls beneath the tree couldn’t muster the courage to look up when she paused to eat a ripe mango. It was early in the raining season and ripe mangoes were still few.
Monday sat quietly on the moist ground, day dreaming of a wedding reception and all the things she could eat there. She looked at the small pile of ripe mangoes beside her and wondered why Wednesday could eat some mangoes up in the tree, and not let she and Friday do the same on the ground.
She wanted to call out that she will eat one mango out of her final share but did not have the stomach for Wednesday’s curses. So instead she went back to her dreamt up wedding. None of them saw the two dogs quietly go by for the second or third time. The first any of them knew of not being on their own anymore, was when Monday gave a nerve chilling strangled frightened shout, after the orchard’s owner sneaked from behind, grabbed her bare thick fat neck, literally choking her.

Friday’s legs had involuntarily folded underneath her in response to fear. She abruptly knelt down in sudden breathless panic as she was so terrified and stunned speechless. With her widen scared eyes she started to plead with the old man, who was now busy dragging a tamely resisting Monday towards the transfixed Friday. Monday struggled feebly as her sliding body made an unevenly cleared path on the thick carpet of dried up decaying leaves and weathered prunes from the trees above.
Then in a quick flash, Monday broke free and ran off. Friday took off in another direction as the old man’s timid dogs separately chased both girls, with as much aggression as they would have a strolling Hyena.
The painfully thin dogs tucked in their tails in between their hind legs, as they chased no further than a shouting distance and soon returned to their waiting frail master, so much faster than they had chased after the girls.
The old man didn’t appear too bothered as he observed his singular sizable living trophy, still above him as he stood beneath his mango trees, his walking stick in hand, looking up at the visible and apprehensively motionless expressionless Wednesday, still high up in the tree, trapped like a webbed fly.
The old man cursed the grey mystical heavens and the brownish earth beneath. He cursed all children and their parents, then all time and the present age. Then he cursed all men and all women, their many silly sons and their wrongly conceived, badly raised and horribly brought up naughty, unruly, rowdy, mischievous erring daughters. Finally he cursed these three girls, starting with Monday, then Friday and ending with Wednesday.
He detailed their very contrasting looks in such appropriately expressive vocabulary, as only the elderly can. He used words well known to only his peers but rarely used anymore by others.
Though he shook in his rage, Wednesday still didn’t budge or come down the tree. She remained motionlessly mute, as if all the cursing had indeed stricken her, wrung her tongue and severed her witty answering chord. Still he threatened and cursed some more, but even as he summed up his vast insults, she still didn’t move.
She spied at her pals, finally congregated at one common place some distance away from her, still in full view of the agitated old man as they silently, as quietly laid their support to her predicament at that safe distance, like most true parishioners would do for their ill fated faithful peers.
At last the old man called his dogs over and tied them to the mango tree’s trunk, under her. He verbally threatened her some more before hastily walking away, swinging his walking stick and promising to shoot down Wednesday and cut up her corpse into tiny pieces for his dogs to feast on, if she didn’t climb down and surrender with her pals.
He walked away too quickly for his much advanced age, leaving the silly scene. His scared dogs’ loud barking started to change into eerie canine squeals. The dogs’ courage diminished with the little confidence their master’s presence gave them, as they steadily lost sight of him walking away from the tree Wednesday was trapped on and the dogs were now tied to. Soon after he left, a descending Wednesday threw unripe mangoes at the dogs from above.

The other girls quickly ran over, brandishing sticks, and the terrified dogs pulled at the ropes with such force, till they manage to cut loose and run away from the now cheering girls. Monday went over to their small pile of ripe mangoes, still on the ground where she had left them. She pulled up the low frontal edge of her tight fitting dress and put them all in its curve, with the hurried help of Friday. Wednesday ordered them to wait as she bravely climbed up yet another tree and resumed her foray, vowing to get some more mangoes before they leave.
An even more frightened Friday and Monday stopped transfixed, frantically keeping a re-freshened look out for the old man and his dogs, this time relying more on a strenuous visual regime than merely their sense of listening, which had failed them earlier, but their newer rapt attention soon passed as well. Their momentary dogged stance proved to be more of a whim rather than the sheer will power required.
Wednesday took her time, not showing any concern in the slightest. From above she encouraged her friends and even permitted them to eat one mango each. Soon they also became more comfortable and relaxed. It looked like the old man wasn’t returning, but that is always the case with children at that age, they soon forget they should be vigilant.
Severally in the girls’ many obnoxious attempts at being helpful to their popularity; over their few years of friendship, they had frequently rubbed shoulders with their community’s ordered self indulgence and had never come off the better for it. It happens so often to worry.
Thirty years out of the old man’s now eighty-something years of life were spent in the Army. One long world war and a short civil war would teach any old man a thing or two about camouflage and concealment. So without crawling or making the slightest audible sound and hiding behind the many trees’ trunks and in the shadows, the old man edged closer to the girls without being seen by them. In minutes he was upon them again.
This time he was calmer, composed and dangerously armed with a long loaded local rifle, which he stood pointing at a startled Monday and Friday, yet again. The two girls were too stunned to think and the idea of dodging splashing bullets while making a quick dash for it was easily repudiated. Their itinerant spade of ill luck hadn’t prepared their childish minds for this.
They simply never seem to apply the right logic for the right task, since the right logic is wisdom, which they lacked. Though necessary knowledge breeds wisdom, it is its logical interpretation that is wise. Either ways they failed repeatedly.

The old man also had a glittering, sharp machete tucked into a strapped leather belt around his thin waist. He ordered the two girls to kneel down and place their hands on their heads. As they complied, Friday; true to character, broke down into a silly tearless mournful wail that sounds so much like a wordless tuneless song, which she usually passes off for crying.
Monday jellied down to her fleshy knees, into a puddle she absentmindedly let trickle down the inside of her chubby legs, as her full bladder betrayed her fright. Her senses had numbed up, like they so often do when she wets her bed at night.
Wednesday this time calmly climbed down the tree in response to the old ex-soldier’s threatened beckoning. She joined her kneeling cronies. They appeared totally subdued as there was the evident note of lingering pessimism in their earlier professed optimism. The victor planned to match his ‘prisoners of war’ to the Village head and demand compensation from their parents. He whistled for his dogs and they raced back to him, barking with wagging uncertain tails. They came closer to him, keeping their distance away from the quietly kneeling girls.
The old man ordered Monday to pick up the pile of mangoes again and this time without the help of any of the other girls, the chubby girl simply knelt beside the pile of mangoes and collected them all in the front of her tight fitting dress again.
This done, she stood up with some effort and returned to her kneeling spot, turned around to face the old man once more, before kneeling down again. With the lower front of her gown curved upwards, her once white but now dirtied brown panties showed, visibly flashing into view, all tucked up in very tight captivity amidst the meaty fleshy folds of her upper thighs, as she absentmindedly revealed her lowest pelvic region. The old man looked away sharply, but Wednesday had caught his eyes and had one of her now renowned mischievous brain waves.
Suddenly, Wednesday more jumped than stood up and started to strip. It took the old man by complete surprise and he was speechless momentarily. Before he could find his voice, Wednesday’s T-shirt and cap were on the ground beside her and she was pulling down her shorts and panties in a much hurried dance like movement.

The instruction to stop undressing barked out loud by the old man went unheralded by Wednesday. The confused war veteran lowered his weapon and extended his free hand, pleadingly at the undressing girl with no effect. Wednesday winked at her friends and her message was instantly understood by her still obediently kneeling friends.
Though reluctantly, the message was accepted and with a similar dose of hesitation, was also executed. The bewildered old man watched helplessly as the other two girls still kneeling, joined in and all three girls undressed right in front of him.
Friday undressed as she remained on her knees, still too scared to be seen to be disobedient. While Monday, very much still jellied by fear, sat down in her small puddle of urine and symbolically started with her wet panties first, after discarding the pile of mangoes at her side.
The old man dropped his gun and pleaded at the top of his voice for them to stop undressing. But the stripping trio continued unperturbed, even appearing to be encouraged by the old man’s attempt to dissuade them. Soon the girls were completely undressed right in front of the old man.
They stood defiantly upright in front of him, nude like dark brown eggs, naked like the day they had each come into the world, only obviously bigger, darker and with slightly visible hairy spots in areas the helpless old fellow was embarrassingly keeping his gaze away from. Still he made offers, begged and coaxed to no avail. They just stopped listening and got bolder.
Then his silent dogs appeared to help him out when they quietly started to walk away from the embarrassing scene. Soon he copied the retreating dogs and stopped talking. He painfully stooped low in a submissive prostrate in front the girls, picked up his grounded weapon and quietly turned away to leave when Wednesday suddenly spoke and stopped him dead in his tracks.
Deliberately slurring her speech, she threatened him with an exposure he will find quite hard to explain to his peers. She spoke of three naked girls held in his fruit trees shaded dark confines, within his orchard, facing the old pervert holding a loaded gun, with a sharp machete tucked in his belt, complying with all his sick biddings in an obviously frightened state.
Another thirty years stint in the all the world’s armies or another decade long world war or ten more brutal civil wars, wouldn’t prepare anyone enough for this kind of mind torturing harassed embarrassment. The old man had just one slim chance to decide his all time reputation, not just his immediate response. It has to be his honourable word against theirs. But strangely though, judgment publicly continues long after it formally ends.
So a deal was inevitably struck. The girls will leave with the mangoes they had plucked, using a bag the old man will give them. He will not make a complaint and allow them to return for free mangoes anytime they wished to. The girls get all these for their continuous silence about the incident. So they allowed him to leave with his silent dogs, who like him, had their single limp tails tucked between their hind-legs, their egos sapped and drained by this miniature act of a woman’s strength.

Where is the bird that hatched this egg?
Flying above the world, up so very high.
And the monkey the farmer wouldn’t beg?
Laughing up a branch, he threatens not near.
Will they ever marry their ideas, so very big?
As always they steal, flock, eat and do share.

Flying above the world, up so very high,
The bird still returns down to hatch its egg.
Laughing away harmless threats if not near,
The monkey’s hunger for the farm will beg.
Their ideas created their world and it is clear,
That strength of the woman gave marriage a leg.

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