Suicide Riders By: Jude Ifeme
The youngster slouched in a battered old wheelbarrow at the corner would instantly clinch your attention. Head tilted forward, he snored noisily, and flies buzzed in and out of his wide open mouth, like air planes refilling for a hectic war. There was a frothy spittle line drawn from the corner of his lips to a repulsive whitish pool on his dirty, soaked collar. His eyeballs twitched nervously underneath the lids, and occasionally he would mutter unintelligibly, lapping out with his tongue, but too limp to move a limb – he was in paradise. The rest drank on, oblivious of their stupefied friend. A few yards away, their row of motor bikes queued up waiting for passengers. Meanwhile, the bikers fended off the sun under a zinc shack and drugged their brains to seizure. “I feel like flying,” a skinny slob, not more than seventeen, slurred as he puffed a purl of marijuana smoke into the hot afternoon air. “I too,” returned another in a hushed guttural snarl, “I can touch that rope.