FICTION — SHORT STORY
Photo Prompt 3 — His Wish
A past, present, and a wish for Christmas
The abandoned buildings around Bar Beach had always been Ayo’s home, from when he could remember. Although he barely remembers anything of his past, or maybe he chose to forget. There were too many stories about it. Of a dead mother and a runaway father. So he had stopped trying to keep up, stopped bothering himself with his nebulous past.
The green walls of the buildings are caked with algae, decayed with age, and broken down by human and nature’s assault. It used to be an event center, but now the large hall is divided unequally into private quarters by swollen and bug-infested boards.
This is the place he shared (and still shares) with his friends and their families.
His friends are scrawny bags of bones with ringworm and lice-infested heads. Twelve-year-old boys like him who by day hawk an odd assortment of items that range from packaged sausage rolls and sweets to Indian hemp. And when night falls, when the city that doesn’t sleep slips into another phase of boisterousness, they snatch bags and phones from the naive and unsuspecting.
They become one of the little opportunistic vampires that throng the beach.
Such was life on the Bar Beach; a microcosm of life in the carnivorous city that feeds on all.
Unlike the other boys whose mothers were dealers in herbal concoctions; cloudy substances diluted with water or alcohol with claims to cure anything from body pain to sterility. And fathers (for those that were available). Perpetually angry and horny men who left for the city before dawn to ferry her denizens in rickety buses. Weary men who staggered back by midnight teetering under the weight of disappointment and alcohol.
Ayo lived alone. He had not even a property to call his own except an inch-thick carton which doubled as a bed, and piggy bank for the proceeds from his trade and his share of loot. And a bundle of rags that serves as a pillow and seat.
“Get your hands off me, you accursed one-minute man.”
“Behave yourself, you prostitute that is peddling my property around Lagos.”
The voices shattered the quasi-quiet of the night; the sounds of the busy city which were slightly muffled by the crumbling walls. Like everyone in the building, Ayo knew the culprits, David’s mother and the pot-bellied man who wasn’t David’s father, the fourth or fifth man Ayo had seen with her in four years. He also knew that it was their pre-mating ritual.
He pressed his hands to his ears and turned. But the insults continued. Verbal missiles aimed at each other, which included a wish for each other to be drowned in the lagoon or knocked down by the city’s new trains; ugly bullet-like things the government said cost billions.
Trains that made him wonder why expensive things could be that ugly. He knew it was better he left before their words switched. Before their cursing became moaning.
If he didn’t, he knew that there would be no sleep for him that night. And despite his decision to stay away from snatching purses and phones, he found himself standing from the carton.
At the moment he snapped a finger above his head, mouthed god forbid as he forced the rolled naira notes into the tiny front pocket of his tattered denim pants.
A few voices intervened, many asking that the curses be stopped. Someone turned on KWAM 1’s Omo Najia, and the sonorous sounds filled the air. Others urged them to get on with it already.
Ayo exhaled and shook his head. As he stumbled out of his part of the house, he wished he was as fortunate as his friend David, who could choose between his lousy mother and purse snatching on the beach.
David, who complained about his mother and the drunkenness of her endless partners while eating the supper she prepared. Or Nonso who could tell his mother that he would rather be rich like many of the older guys who had left the Bar beach for the Island than go to school.
There was something about family that Ayo had noticed and craved. Family, even the quarrelsome kinds, that one can always return to offer a sense of ‘normal’. Even the chickens and goats that roamed the beach all returned to the same place at night. He had observed.
The boom of the 808’s from hip-hop music mingled with the report of firecrackers, excited voices, and the rich sound of talking drums from Fuji music coming from the different giant speakers positioned on the beach. As Ayo walked away from the building, he turned from the partying and cavorting. He still wanted a quiet night. His friends had teased him, calling him a softie for staying in during the Christmas season.
For them, Christmas meant more; more bags to be snatched, more phones to be traded in for money with the Egbon Adugbos; their elders in the thieving business.
The ones who paid them to burn the plastic voters’ cards that had names like Chioma and Nnamdi before the last elections. The only more he wanted was a family; people like the families that descend on the Bar beach during Christmas day, sitting on colorful mats thicker than the ones he slept on.
People who ate and laughed so much that Ayo wondered if they were on a suicide quest.
All his life, he had known food as a thing that was taken in bits like a pill; to keep hunger at bay. And laughter was for special moments. These were his thoughts as he neared the water’s edge, which glinted with the reflected moonlight. The edge of his denim jacket flapped in the cool night breeze, and his feet sunk into wet sand. “Jesu,” Ayo gasped as he stepped back. His heart leaped into his mouth, and his hands clutched at his chest.
A carved wooden effigy lay in a black pot. It leaned against its edge like a tired traveler, like a fallen stem. The beach was always filled with similar-looking pots. On some days it was eggs, coconuts, or colored candles wrapped in red cloth. Or severed goat or chicken heads grinning in red oil.
He had heard several tales about them, none ever good. But mostly he had seen people in white garments bear them. On some days at dusk, while hawking, he would watch the dreadlocked men swipe at men, but mostly women bearing these pots with brooms while both moaned and writhed. And because of what he had heard about these pots, how they contained the evils and misfortune of the bearers, he had dreaded them like a plague. Always avoiding them or their bearers if he could. But as he stared at this, he remembered a story that was whispered a few months ago.
About an Egbon that had carried one of those pots and had become rich. What made the story believable was that the particular Egbon with a penchant for cheating Ayo and his friends of the proceeds of their stolen booty, no longer lived on the beach.
His absence, like all absences or scarcities, convinced Ayo of the possibility or even the veracity of the story. This story buoyed Ayo. He would try; perhaps he also would be fortunate to have his wish granted. It was a little wish after all.
He assured himself. So, with cautious feet, a throbbing heart, and darting eyes, he approached the pot. Ayo picked up the wooden effigy with his sweaty fingers.
He shivered as a tingling warmth spread through his hands. With the crashing waves as his witness, he whispered his heart’s deepest desire–a home and family for Christmas. The wood shimmered and, as though responding, a sudden gust of wind blew.
Glossary
- Egbon Adugbo- is a Yoruba word for “elder” or “big brother,” in a particular community or group
2. KWAM 1 — King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, is a Nigerian Fuji musician. Fuji is a popular genre of music in Nigeria, characterized by the use of traditional Yoruba percussion instruments and vocal style.
This story was written in response to December Photo Prompts (Photo Prompt 3) by Susi Moore.
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