A Collection of Short Stories

We only die once
Jumoke Omisore
I
follow him into his apartment because I am tired of running from death. All day, the
sun had baked my head and burnt the skin of my caramel-hued back. My stomach
is in knots from hunger. The last time food came its way was two days ago, when Mama
Aja, the neighbour had asked me to take Bingo its dinner of fried fish. The dog never got its
supper.
Alaba, the Cokers’ housemaid, once told me there are worse things than mosquitoes and
snakes on the streets of Lagos that can kill a girl at night. This is the reason I meekly follow
AJ to his two-room apartment. I hobble, because just that morning before my stepmother
threw me out of my father’s apartment, she had whipped my legs with the biggest rod I had
ever seen. And because squatting for hours has curved my back and bowed my skinny
legs; now I look like my grandmother before she passed away.
“What did she say you did this time?” AJ’s words bring back memories of that frightful day,
as he helps me to a wooden chair that is so ramshackle, it rattles from side to side under
my dainty weight.
I eye the brown sofa in the room that runs from one end of the wall to the other, leaving
little room for the red armchair and plywood cabinet. As if he could read my mind, AJ leads
me to the sofa and covers me with a worn duvet from behind it. I am careful not to lay my
cheek on the wispy cushion that serves as a pillow; not sure if the blood that trickled from
my lips when old stepmother’s whip caught it has finally dried up.
“She says I am a witch, that I keep killing the children in her womb,” I tell AJ. I feel a niggling
of guilt at my stepmother’s allegations. It is because I do not know if I am a witch. I had
not in fact known my stepmother was pregnant; I do not know much about pregnancies,
because I am only twelve.
106
Tales from the Other Side