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The Cranium
(@the-cranium)
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Joined: 5 years ago
Posts: 36
Topic starter  

 

An empty bottle laid nonchalantly on the roadside, half crushed. It laid near the open drain after being kicked aggressively by some random kid. Someone else walked over to crush it while sprinkling heavy gush of cold salty urine.

A walk away from the empty bottle, at the dead end of the street, was blood on the walls made of corrugated sheets. Someone was shot. Exactly fifty-fifty steps away from the blood-stained walls was a group of men in green camouflage wearing jungle hats, with guns and a roll of ammo.

On the far left, is a house with half plywood, half corrugated sheet walls. There were people outside, sandwiched between small, crudely built shacks; in the house was a woman wailing uncontrollably.

In the middle of the room was a boy, five years old, wrapped in a shroud. Silent and still, his eyes half-shut and mouth agape, his short hair brown from dust.

So, what should this story be about? How he was killed or the moments before his death?

***

It was a sunny day in the shantytown. Clouds crawled homelessly across the skies. An oily river with dead fishes somewhere in the distance. This is 2007 and this is Niger Delta. Pigeons cooed and moved restlessly. It was a normal day.

That day, Tamunotonye went with his friend to buy something. They conversed about homework and hopscotch—even if it was a game for girls, their age still allowed them to jump over lines drawn on sand. Since the first invasion and the clash with the militants, people moved on a straight path. Tamuno bought a bottle of Fanta and shared it with his friend. The shopkeeper said. “Dey go house straight. Plenty mad people wey dey vex dey for the next street”

Tamuno smiled, “Marle sef talk am”

But he took a detour after exchanging Fanta sips with his friend. How dare he take a detour in a land of oil—I mean turmoil. You keep going on the straight path, you don’t take detours. But he did

The chaos on the other side of the road soon spread to this side as well. Some angry young men with handkerchiefs wrapped around their faces ran across, the men in camo behind them. Hunting them down like hounds.

Had Tamuno taken the path straight home he would be alive. Instead, he’d taken another route, the one behind his friend Afini's house. That was where Tamuno was kicking his Fanta bottle and looking at the running men. That was where the men in camo killed him. What was going on in their minds? Well, nothing! How can they think? In rage, you get impotent to think. They may have seen a future stone-pelter or militant.

There was a time when children in school wrote: ‘what will I become when I grow up’. In a war-zone it turns into ‘what will I become if I grow up’.

— Abdulhameed Ridwan O


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Dr. Kennedy O. Obohwemu
(@penkup)
Prominent Member Admin
Joined: 5 years ago
Posts: 862
 

You missed some punctuation here and there, but your descriptions were apt. ? 


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