Young and Soulful

For the first time, she cried.

Chinelo stared at her friend and sister as she cried for the first time in years. She had catarrh running down her nose and her sniffles came at uncontrollable intervals. It felt to Chinelo like watching her candy fall in the mud, a terrifying sight for sore eyes.

"Dora, please.."

But she didn't know what she begged her for. 

Pain gripped Dora's lungs, and squeezed the breath out of her, and maybe her essence and purpose too. Her heartbeat slowed as scenes floated in the large space in her head. 

She remembered when her father fell off a building as he worked on a contract, and died from the neglect of the same company. Her mother was heavily pregnant and there was little she could do. 

Tears poured down her face as the memory of when her mother slipped and fell in the bathroom, and had to be rushed to the hospital drifted by. She went into labor from the shock and didn't make it. 

Her baby brother came out as a stillbirth. Watching her mother being buried with her baby brother at 17, just a few months after her father's quiet burial had created a darkroom in her. She couldn't find a switch in it.

Chinelo thought crying made Dora look so much like Ade, her five-year-old brother, crying whenever mom went out without him. She cried with the same tenacity.

Dora was never one to cry. Not even when Uncle Chucks, her father's stepbrother had announced that they had to sell the house because, according to him, the house wasn't safe anymore.

 "It is haunted and evil. The forces behind it will take you too." He said. But, she couldn't tell him she wanted to be taken too. She couldn't tell Chinelo's parents, who had been kind enough to take her in as one of their own.

They probably would just tell her to shut up, like the blind grannie she had always gone to sit with after the Universe took her whole world away. "You are only a child dear. Those words are too strong for a child, even one your age."

She looked at the headstones and the graveyard felt like her life, dead.

The words of that woman played back.

"You look so much like your mother."

The last wall she had up against her emotions came crumbling down with that thought.

Oh, fairy godmother, I want to go home to mama.

Author's Bio

OLANREWAJU FUNMILAYO, a young writer, is a fresh Political Science undergraduate at the University of Ibadan. She writes short stories and essays on diverse subjects and is also intrigued by music and art.