Thursday 12 March 2015

Posterity Note Pt.2



It was the right thing to do! MORTIFICATION....
After all, the holy book talked about cutting out any part of your body that commits sin. Her being was not just SINFUL, it was an abomination and what she was about to do was good riddance to her bad rubbish. She knew she would have to do it even though the jagged rope around her neck brought insurmountable fear, nudging her towards a recant.
Don't get her wrong, she does not need pity, for she had died long before she decided to become her executioner. She remembers the day the last shred of her humanity was wrenched from her- THE DAY SHE Died!!!
It was 5years after her 11th birthday, she was a smart young girl, giving sex in exchange for school fees and textbooks from her stepdad and fulfilling her step brothers sexual needs in exchange for lessons and tutoring on her homework and assignment. She had thought education was the way out. She had dreamt big! Very big, to a time when the money she saved from her sexual encounters would be enough for her to go to university, study nursing and never come back home. Never look back on her old life and entirely erase every past memory! Go far away, find LOVE, know love, fall in LOVE, get married, have children... Have a lot of children and shower them with suffocating love. She would weep her heart out with a prayer every night as she told ANANSA-'mother of children', to preserve her womb and not punish her in the future for all the numerous abortions she has had.
A "FRESH START" was the mantra that kept her going, kept her from eyeing the rat poison next to the kitchen shelf, kept her lying on her back for her uncles, landlord, landlord's sons and anybody that cared to venture, just so she could add more notes to the ones she had saved. Necessary evil she called it-   ooh! She was so wrong! For ANANSA never forgave murderers of her innocent unborn children.
One evening she was called by her father and told that she would be travelling outside the country with a very strange woman called madam P. She knew what was going on! Her father was creating a career for her in prostitution. She could not let that happen, she was too close to her "future freedom plan" to have it foiled by sheer greed on the path of her father.
SHE HAD A PLAN!!!
At night, clad in nothing but a towel she seduced her father and tried to get him to change his mind, but he would not bulge. Madam P had given him 20k already with promises of more, if only he could persuade her to travel with Madam P. The days that followed were tugs-of-war as all her pleas and entice where no match for an adamant greed ridden mind.
WHERE IS THAT DAUGHTER of JEZEBEL!!!
Those where the exact words her father called her when he was highly angry and under the influence. This time around, he had a bloody nose from an encounter with UDEME- the most ruthless thug in the whole of Akampa. The thing is her father is an unrepentant gambler and this has put him in serious debt with Udeme.
'I WILL KILL YOU BEFORE YOU ALLOW HIM KILL ME!!!
It was then she understood why her father needed her to travel so bad. Her journey with madam P would ensure steady flow of money to pay his debt and still continue gambling.
SHE HAD ANOTHER PLAN!!!
With bitter tears streaming down her eyes and her body shaking uncontrollably at the thought of a prolonged 'fresh start', she reached for her little 'future freedom' savings and gave it to her father just so she is not sent abroad. She knew she could make the money all over again. All she needed was to double the number of people she gave satisfaction. But  her 'future freedom' savings was still not enough to pay her father's enormous debt, so she offered her body in order to complete the debt.
THAT WAS NOT THE DAY SHE DIED!!
She died in that hospital bed, two months after the angry 'debt collecting' sexual experience. On the hospital bed, lying in a pool of her blood from an abortion gone wrong, a damaged womb and an irreparable soul.
THAT WAS THE DAY SHE DIED!!!
She got out from that hospital without a heart, a soul or a future to look forward to. That was the day "MARY AKPAN" died and "SHE" was reborn.

............ I raised my head to see the lecture room filled with glistening eyes. I knew I had struck a nerve. There was no way I was not getting an A+ in this creative fiction course. Looking to my side, I could see utter amazement hidden behind the stern face of my lecturer. My creative fiction story had moved people to tears, even me the narrator had my paper soaked with large 'tear balls'.
It was too real to just be an imagination! In fact the pity on the faces of my course mates showed they thought it was indeed my real life story.
Was I the girl in the story or was I just a genius with my imagination? I would never tell!

MY NAME IS MARY SHEILA AKPAN, I AM A STORYTELLER AND MY STORY HAS ONLY BEGUN!!!

@Calabar_gist

No comments:

Post a Comment