LINES AND VERSES

STAY DEAD                                               By: Jude Ifeme Body becomes lead Blood runs chill The dead stays dead… He looks closely at the corpse. The face though thoroughly battered and swollen is entirely alien to him. Hey fool, he thinks; how did you get my number? How did you know my name? How did you… oh, you won’t even know anymore; you are dead! That’s it. You-are-dead… Six months ago someone started dropping an unusually large stack of cash into the collection box for the poor, every Sunday. It all started with ten thousand, then twenty, and then a hundred. At first the church was impressed. One Thursday morning, they discovered the key to the collection box had been broken, and a briefcase lined with twenty million lay inside. Now...

A sudden pang of pain hit my left arm, then my left lap, and swiftly some sort of paralysis grazed all the energy in the muscles. Slowly it got darker, and darker, I knew I was sinking from the sun, from everything I knew; my family hundreds of miles awaiting my return, my friends who sensibly played it safe at the shoreline. An hour or so earlier, we had arrived the beach, a team of new colleagues. That was to be our final picnic before we were scattered across the country, after a rigorous six month training course in telecommunication. It was my first time on a real beach. Maybe I wasn’t aware of the danger yet, but I was sinking, sinking on my first day in an ocean. The pain in my muscles was racking my brain and I couldn’t move the arm and leg, and the other two good ones were perhaps still waiting for an impulse. Maybe my body was stupefied or something, but my mind still was unperturbed. There was a flash of my childhood. Back then when nakedness meant nothing, I had...

“Tinin! Tinin, my boy!” Paja called in Qonga. Tinin, a skinny boy with bulging eyes and ears unfairly large for his narrow head shot out of the hut like a routed hare. “Aya, Papa.” Welcome, papa; he shouted as he rushed to Paja. First he took Paja’s old hunting gun, rested it on the mud wall of the hut, while Paja waited with the carcass of a gazelle which slouched around his neck. It gave him pleasure to watch the little boy unbundle him whenever he returned from hunting. He stood waiting. “Let me help you, Papa,” Tinin offered excitedly, even though he knew Paja could do it all by himself. They both enjoyed this moment. Paja stooped and allowed him ease the dead gazelle from his shoulders and together they dragged it to the fire place. It was at such moments that Paja secretly mourned his long dead wife. “Is it male or female, Papa?” Paja laughed crookedly, “my boy, it is a full grown male and you will have his ropopo.” Tinin laughed mischievously. That was one of the epit...

Fate By: J.Ifeme Elo “Mister, this is the last stop.” The conductor’s growls in Pidgin English and taps his shoulder rather unkindly. He shudders awake. He saw her again, Farida; so young, and so beautiful. It was ten years ago but he still gets these flashes of the last intimate moment they shared; the naïve promise of commitment; the caress of eager hands; their first and final kiss before she disappeared. It took weeks for him to gather they fled to England because her father became a target for the then military regime for sympathizing with dissident democrats, and exile was the safest choice. Over the years, he had wondered why it had to be her, why it had to be then, and above all, why he had to love her so much that her departure shut down a complete half of him. Today’s flashes ended with the conversation he had with his mother just days after Farida’s disappearance. “It is fate, my son,” she had assured him, “you have to accept it and move on. Concentrate on going to the u...

Mischief By: J.Ifeme Elo “Hello good people, this is your girl on radio, P-E -A-CH. You are right on 107.2 Megahertz, FUN FM – your number one radio location. Hey, don’t touch that radio, because you are hooked to the very best, and we assure you nothing less. Good deal, huh? That is what I am talking about, fun all day,” her satin smooth voice could make even a hard core gay start reconsidering. “It is a beautiful Friday morning. Beautiful, beautiful sun- filled day, blue skies all the way.” She lets in a little of the latest soul music. That is her style, and they love it like craze. She is the one and only PEACH; the smoothest and juiciest of them all on radio, and this is how she flies. She likes the early morning show the most. Though she worked the night shift, she is in the least exhausted or bored. Radio is where she has found, not only her passion, but her sanctuary. The fact that her fans are out there and listening, thrills her. They adore her voice. That is very importa...