Exactly thirty three steps away from the white washed shops selling auto spare parts, there is an open space wide enough to play “one-touch” with a mocking post. That is what you expect—pant wearing children kicking a ball around. You remember today is Thursday and children would probably be stuck in a class doing arithmetics. You laugh at that word. When last did you hear Arithmetics? You mutter a silent prayer for the endangered specie because that word is going obsolete soon.
The noise from the open space drives you out of your reverie. Reverie—the first time you heard that word, you were just nine. You could have sworn that the writer misspelt river. Lazily, you went to your battered Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary—the most prized possession you inherited from your father. You cannot remember the edition. You remember things a lot. How come you cannot remember what edition that dictionary was? Its not your fault, the dictionary had no cover and all of the pages are dog-eared. The first page starts with A is the first letter of the English Alphabet.
Where were we? Akilo Road. The noise from the open space drives you out of multiple reveries. You look sideways and saw about twenty males dancing with reckless abandon. You carefully observe. Five plastic chairs arranged in a row of four columns. There is wooden pulpit housing a megaphone. A man in short clings to the microphone like a baby monkey learning to grasp branches. The microphone has a red filter. You know filters eliminate popping sounds caused by the mechanical impact of fast-moving air on the microphone. You know this simple physics but this short man on shorts makes you revert your stance. Apart from eliminating unwanted sound, this filter has absorbed a river full of spit. Like chicken, it died for the mic, protecting it from dangerous enzymes from the buccal cavity.
Dancing men. Arranged chairs. Microphone man. You start to fix each piece of the puzzle. Except that it's not really a puzzle. It is what it is, men of “God” creates a makeshift church to worship God with reckless abandon at a time when they should be working. You look up, expecting white roll of manna
with bank cheques or naira notes. With a dry eye, you realise that instead of manna to fall, man-a-gonna fall because heaven helps only those who help themselves. These Buhari times, food is too expensive to fall from the sky. The only type of money that can fall is the naira—against the dollar of course.
— Abdulhameed Ridwan O
The last sentences in the 2nd paragraph should be edited:
"Its not your fault, the dictionary had no cover and all of the pages are dog-eared. The first page starts with A is the first letter of the English Alphabet."