Bloody, bloody

 

O.W.O: Friday 4 May 2018

 She attempts escape twice, both tries fail. She is locked in her room, fed through the barricaded window. When she tries to slash herself with a fork, cousin is ordered to supervise her.

The day approaches as a snail. Her wails torment their sleep. Cousin commits suicide.

The day comes. She is not caught as she slithers a knife into her wedding gown. Mother sprinkles frankincense and frangipani essences on her face, Sisters rub sunflower seed oil into her feet.

She glows.

With hatred.

She is led to the town hall, Mother squeezing her hand, smiling at her. As a rock hardened by the sun, so her face is. A bald man engages the ceremony. For a score minute he rattles on the divine intertwining of man and woman.......

"Do you, Aseki Aseki Morunwa, pledge to accept Tundila Burewad as your lawfully wedded husband, in circumstance good and bad, true and false, in health and death, in more and opulence, till the sun ceases?

The wind howls. Her skirt bellows. Her hair is a halo. "Over my dead body!" It turns into a movie. The crowd do not believe. The knife she brandishes. His neck she slits. The hall erupts into screams. She is not finished. She turns the wheel. And drives the knife in................to her chest.

The crowd is still. It cannot be real. They squint, they see. They are dead, truly? The bald man collapses. This is the trigger. The whole place scatters. The groom's mother wails, flails, scratches Aseki's mother's eyes.

People flee, fearing they have been cursed by the blood spilled.

"Let us go and wash our eyes, so we shall not see such again."

The Sun Is A Tornado

She is nineteen, but she loves him. He is sixty four, a widower, with two children half the globe away. 

She packs her little belongings and goes to meet him. She is labelled a gold digger. A prostitute. An uncontented witch.

"She is under a curse, a curse to chase after men old enough to birth her father."

She does no expect people to understand. It took heavy convincing before Ional agreed she was not out if her mind to reciprocate the attraction.

In a letter to her sister, Kamaria says:

I love him. I know this makes you and the rest of the

family disappointed in me, but I never obliged you to 

understand. I do not want to know, or care, what people say, but a part of me wants to scream in the streets, " Stop judging me because I live with an old man." 

Mother cursed me, didn't she? Well, her curse did not stay, because happiness is yet to leave me. Tell her I am happy here, full and content. If she turns her blessings to curses again, it will heap on her head, because I did her no wrong. I was not there to tell her not to marry our father.

You said you want to visit. I cannot allow you to. I cherish the bubbled privacy Ional and I have. If you visit, mother will visit, father will visit, the devils will visit. You must wonder what I do. I attend a part time sewing program. Ional goes to the library, I draw, he paints, we have a picnic on the balcony, we go fishing (I caught eight mackerels last week!). In the evenings he plays the piano, while I sing a good song. We live these days like they will be our last.

Send me a reply so I will know you are still alive.

With nonchalance,

Kamaria.

Brain On Fire

Even without allegiance to God,

one relentless conscience stays.

I cannot, still, do some things,

and I, still, am bound by the principles I created,

by the standards I set for myself.

I cannot lie,

I cannot steal,

I cannot cheat,

or take advantage of someone else's 

weakness.......

These personal principles give me a kind,

a sort,

a type,

of confidence, self esteem, a satisfaction, 

a small kind of happiness.

I have left my faith. 

Halfheartedly.

Guilt shrinked me when I 

broke the law of 

guarding my mind against 

the sin which begins in the mind.

The sin which no one sees, my which no one knows......

only you, God, and you.

I turned depressed with the guilt, 

and one slip led to 

a fall to 

a crash to

 an end.

And I stopped trying. To talk. To God.

And it was so good, 

a lease of freedom.

I felt free.

I was never tethered firmly to begin with, no?

To choose. 

To do it and get away because others get away. 

To be in the crowd. 

I could shut that importunate conscience out, I could tell it to go away,

I could kill it without trying.

I did not, though, 

because even without allegiance to God,

I am still bound by the unwritten.

So my brain is on fire.

Amen.