LINES AND VERSES

It is 12:45 pm in March, the morning in-flow traffic is just handing over to city runs. The blazing sun deters even the most defiant trekker from avoiding cabs. Abuja is such a city where one tenth of its population reside in the suburbs; in the morning everyone is in a mad rush to get in, and at noon everyone searches for the fastest exit from its sun. Just like the lions of the Serengeti, cab drivers like Ola don’t have to stay long in the business to know this is the kill period. But rather than the usual first-day-of-week excitement, Ola feels something inside that leaves him between a rage and a need to cry, really cry out. No, it’s not his resentment at the job, which is like a cancer you already is there, and some day it will either kill you, live with you or magically go away. It’s about a call he just received, a soul crucifying call. For the past year his job has been to pick people up and drop them off wherever they wished and get paid for it: just pick, drop, and get paid.

Love is so important that we spend most of our adult lives searching for it. We date, we lie, we compromise, we… We preach, look, serenade, and fantasize. And sometimes we find love and don’t even recognize it. Some believe that love will come when you least expect it, while others think you should go out there and get it. Some say you should work it out; a lot still expect you to go ahead with it and grow to love with time. The obvious is that love remains the most inexplicable mystery of all human emotions. There are times when all the indicators are right, and you are like “yeah, this must be love!” That excitement can be like no other, but the moment you settle down to savor it, everything simply dissipates and you left in distraught. But could that not have been love? Apparently, love could sometime be a one sided craze, one person has all the right feeling but the other isn’t just stepping up, and no matter how much of it flows from on direction, it can never compensate for lack

Not that Chisom had a thing to do with that tasty honey in the bottle, not that she didn’t desire it. She was just a child. But she’d hoarded the sugar for her pap and cooked the solution in an old kettle till it was brown and greasy and tasted like the honey in the bottle, and she buried it in her safe haven. When the honey bottle went missing, someone said they found a portion in the old metal box where Chisom kept rags of possession. She must have hidden it, lamented the woman, so she could sweeten her retched tongue. She made it known to all the neighbors so no one would mind the noise when it came. A dog needed a bad name if it was to be hanged. Just that the honey for her kids’ breakfast was missing and something that looked like it was found in Chisom’s box, she had to be kicked down the stairs like the worthless sack of bones she was called, and whipped till her skin felt like beef on a grill. And because her kids had to have sugar instead of honey for breakfast, Chisom had to