FICTION — SHORT STORY

Rest?

‘Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.’ -Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I lie here in the stillness of this dark embrace. Red earth embraces the wooden box that has become my home. I’m not supposed to feel anything; I do.

Days ago, I was once part of the ceaseless rhythm of this city that never sleeps Lagos, the home of the ever-rambunctious men and machinery.

My muscles, once taut from daily grabbing onto the rusty doors of Molues and Danfoes, from heaving sacks and boxes from overfilled ships to cavernous warehouses in Apapa, are now slack. As each second melts into the other, they yield to the barrage of soil and worms. It is a slow, deliberate unraveling, an intimate tango with decomposition.

In this place, I am no longer conscious of time. No watch is strapped on my wrist, and no annoying clock is positioned on any walls above my head or on the phone. But I can tell that time is passing, and this is the way it shows itself.

The first signs of my body’s surrender reveal themselves subtly. My flesh is softening like some over-ripe fruit, like those bananas I always bought in Ojuelegba: the ones with more blacks than yellows and greens on their skin. The ones I get for almost nothing because that’s all I could afford.

I can tell that my body is yielding to the relentless advance of microorganisms who toil tirelessly as I did daily. It’s like I am in Oshodi again because I can almost hear their chatter; it’s a symphony of decay that is gradually breaking my body into soil, corroborating the words my wife screamed into my ears as my body grew limp in her arms on that road not too far from where the police shot me. Gbade, you will finally rest now, she wept. In this also, the priest was right- to soil shall we return, he said. I am returning to where I belong.

I have become a part of the earth’s ceaseless cycle.

Beneath the soil layers, I sense the ebb and flow of life above - the rumble of the trains and buses and their blaring horns, the vibrations of advancing and retreating footsteps. The sounds initially scared me when I lugged my bundle of clothes from Abeokuta to Lagos several years ago.

When they lowered my body into the earth, the air thick with the ceremonial dirge, my wife and her relatives screamed, “Rest in peace.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, a sound reverberating within the confines of my decaying chest.

Rest? Peace? Is that what they think is happening, that death is an end, that peace is the destination of the dead?

Yes, life flashed before me at the moment of death, the relentless pursuits that had defined my days. The toil that characterized my life as the first son of a polygamous union who lost his welder father at fifteen. In our family, our community, to be a firstborn is to be in constant battle. My mother and friends knew that.

Nobody becomes anything of worth in Abeokuta, my contemporaries had told me; you have to go to Lagos, they said, as though it was heaven, as though in Lagos I would find rest from my troubles. For ten years, I didn’t. In Lagos, I encountered a new reality as I segued from laborer to welder, from welder to porter, until the trigger-happy policemen chasing a yahoo boy pulled the trigger.

As the world above moves on, I find a peculiar comfort in knowing that even in death, I remain a part of the eternal dance, a heartbeat within the ceaseless rhythm of life.

I should be resting in peace, but in this, the priest is wrong; there is no rest for me or anyone, even in the grave.

This story is entirely a work of fiction inspired by my thoughts about life after death. It was initially submitted to an online magazine for publication.

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