Short Story: Chain Reactions By Onwuasoanya Obinna

Chain Reactions.

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This story begins with nothing extraordinary except perhaps the overwhelming emptiness that fills you that you link to the scarcity of the double-black-striped-yellow-buses that were gradually being overtaken by tricycles littering the roads along with variety of school buses on this Friday morning: rickety, new, old, converted private vehicles, air-conditioned buses and others. Perhaps this is the first premonition you get that you will die today, but you will not know it.

Bayo is turning half of the white spirits contained in little plastic bottles that guarantees a communion with the Lord or one of his minions into his pit of belly and since you could never drink well you kept smoking like you have done since childhood, anything that burned you had smoked, and at the moment you were puffing smoke like a kettle in Hell’s kitchen. No, scratch that. You were puffing smoke like the top view of hell from somewhere safer like heaven or paradise or limbo or America.

He says something to you but you do not try to make sense of it because he was economical with it; sense that is. He was not a Ronaldo of sense more like a Mikel Obi.

You are about to die again and you don’t know it which adds to the thrill of telling you this story as you get up with Bayo tagging along behind after settling the bills with the woman that uses the same wrapper for 23 days and has yellow fever eyes and sells everything from crazy-named alcoholic drinks to illegal burning sticks to the sour valley between her legs to her teenage daughter ‘repeatable virginity’ and to spare parts from her husband’s mechanic workshop.

It will not happen fast and should not have happened at all except that it will happen; you are serving him, Bayo, a little bit of cement mixed with loads of sand and water used as mortar or something you call ‘plaster’ and you are arguing about why Pasuma is the best thing since King Sunny Ade, while the swamp beneath opens up, a feet deeper than it has any right to be but you both take no notice until you turn to say something in favor of Pasuma and you offset the balance of the scaffolding that was made out of balancing a flat wood on three cement blocks stacked on each other and crossing between the windows of the uncompleted two storey building, that will never be completed

You fall face first into the green waters that are rich in human sh__ and swamp creatures with an interlude of occasional fresh water life and though you are going to die you still struggle to get up while holding your breath and wondering how the hell the water that should have been ankle deep became so deep. Then as you whip your head about trying to raise it above to grab some air, a Cat Fish nips your nose in fury as it feels threatened with your sudden presence and instead of characteristically fleeing it lashes out because you should die today.

Bayo finally makes it down to the water when a quarter of every living thing in the water had found its way into your mouth when you reacted to the shock of being bitten and he grabs hold and starts to pull out with all his strength. You cannot even say a prayer to hope he succeeds in time as watery unconsciousness descends on you but he succeeds in pulling out the stump of a decaying tree he had mistaken for your leg.

You die before you can hear him say:

“Ha! The b-----d’s leg has come off?”

This is your second death and you come back to life almost immediately when some twenty minutes away, Silifat the girl you have been exploring the savannah below her abdomen feels an urge to puke that subsides with the incoming smell of her mother’s burning soup.

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Written By Onwuasoanya Obinna.