Short Fiction & Essays
Published across literary journals in Nigeria and worldwide since 2014.
Short Story · 5 min
She shrugged. “I can tell you the date of your birth and what happened when you were born. I can tell you the kind of food you’d ever had… even, young man, the number of women you have bedded. . .” she paused. She held my gaze and said, “I know that you are going to die by this time next week.”
Temitayo closed the door. He peeped through the keyhole, watching her unbutton her shirt. His mouth flew open. Her breasts were massive and threatened to burst the brassiere. She folded and laid her shirt gently on the plastic chair by the foot of the bed, on top his pile of clothes. He swallowed all the saliva in his mouth and watched as she hesitated before unzipping her skirt. She pulled it down and folded it before placing it on top her shirt. She lay on his bed. He continued to watch, uncomfortable, filled with uncontrollable desire and lust. He heard her snores.
I know a man who concluded he had had enough of the troubles in the world and decided to kill himself.
So the night he talked about a second wife, she read him Haruki Murakami’s Scheherazade. He found it interesting. When the story ended, he took the iPad from her, placed it on the bedside stool and wrapped her in his arms; perhaps the affection between the characters in the story had affected him. She thought it possible that if they made love that night, she might conceive, and she cried—the kind of weeping that one does without producing any sound, yet tears stream down from the eyes.
Then the sky changed and shadows were cast to the earth, the wind blew and raised some dust, and the deity rose from the mask. It was in the form of a beast with seventy-seven horns. But the head was that of an elderly woman, for women were the greatest of deities and the most wicked of all, but when a deity was of good spirit and generous, it was often found to be female – such was the nature of female deities. Such was the irony of nature.
Literature is the only tool we have to interrogate the silence of history.
Obinna Udenwe
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