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Reason To Leave/Stay: Chideziri POV

Author: Eze Chisom Favour
last update Last Updated: 2024-10-29 19:42:56

I check my phone for messages. 

There's no notification on the screen. At least, no useful notification. Just the expected barrage from Men dem and a reminder of lessons scheduled for ten o'clock at school. 

I sigh and slip the device into my pyjama's pocket. 

A perfectly ordinary morning. 

I go about doing my chores. Sweeping. Dusting. Washing and drying surfaces. A heavy layer of dust has coated the entire country by now. 

Chalkly spicy air which settles brown on our eyelashes, snuff-coloured brown. 

Brown film on the stretch of cars abandoned in that garage on the way to school, for-sale stickers pasted on them all. 

Brown breeze. 

Flowing browned-white kaftan on the mallam's body. 

The sun has already risen when Mumsi emerges, high up above cobalt cloudlessness. She's kept her door locked, bolted from the inside since the police station. 

The police station; th

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    "Abraham, you are deranged! Completely! There is no going back for you." Pascal bellows.You can tell that he's this close to knocking Abe out with the control-pad in his hand.Abe goes about ignoring him, whistling happily.Ahmed nurses his thoroughly beat-up head. He earned it cheating Abe to win the third round of a Mortal kombat match they both played.Abe took up the nearest throw-pillow and proceeded to pound him into a brown-out. Then Chideziri stepped in and it became a world-war.There are tufts of white pillow foam strewn around the house. Pieces of white on the Dining table, all over the couches, trailing the courtyard cramped full of old electronics— they even took the brawl to the toilet.Chideziri's perched on the glass centre table, drinking cool water from the fridge. His hair is a birds nest and holds more foam than the pillow Abe weaponized."You guys know that if Chantelle wa

  • She Belongs To The Sky   A Foreign Place: Chideziri POV

    CHIDEZIRI Even for December, it's an unusally chilly night. But that's probably stemming from the unsaid fact that I wore beach-party-worthy clothes to an evening party. Sleeveless tee and tracksuit trousers, because of the heat. I regretted the decision immediately I stepped out of the house's warmth. I'd forgotten how antonymous December days are from the nights in the Harmattan. Blazing hot days and bleeding cold nights. As soon as I arrived, Abe pointed out my track trousers and sleeveless, joking that this wasn't the Olympics but a 'bash'. Point noted. And yes, another party. Since after we broke the news of Amanda's imminent departure, nothing was the same. Amanda's become quite the celebrity at school with her carefreeness, her poems and easy nature with answers in a test hall, so everyone's feeling the loss, even before it has happened.

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    Amanda "You want something to drink? My throat is parched with all this dancing we've been doing." Chantelle says out of nowhere while we are grooving . I nod in agreement. My throat is a pulsing, raw arid wasteland, too. I let her drag me through the crowd in the courtyard which is swelling by the minute, empty cup raised above her head and the crowd. The evening air is sweet, with lively music and jaunty voices. Dancing out in the open is therapeutic, it turns out. Somebody should have told me.Someone presses me closer to her and my arm sticks to hers, cool with fast drying sweat. "Girl, you are sweating like a pot of boiling water. You came ready to par-te! For real, for real." She swats my butt, and her signature smile-smirk is a torch in the night. She loves parties, like Abe. "I'm only trying to keep up with you." I say. &nbs

  • She Belongs To The Sky   Stay: Chideziri POV

    Late into the night, Abe hijacks the home theatre, links it to his bluetooth and plays Cole's Stay.I asked him to. The loud bass is sweet music to my ears. I look over the crowd and there she is smiling to the music, too. As if she understands, as if she hears me.Amanda taught me about J.Cole. Then she taught me about love. And now...now she's leaving me with all that new knowledge.It's tragic. It's Jack and Rose's retelling without the giant ship or the iceberg. It's the curtains falling before we are ready to stop dancing. It's us.And it's beautiful however you look at it.

  • She Belongs To The Sky   Stay: Amanda POV

    AMANDAStay.It booms through the speakers, deafening and delicate at once. People groan and curse at whoever changed the song.I look up and I'm perplexed to see Abe at the speakers—he gives me a thumbs up—and Chideziri manoeuvring his way down the staircase, hands in his pocket.He's beautiful.Not handsome. Not rough-and-tough good looking.Beautiful."Hey.""Hey you." I reply. "They don't seem to agree with our taste in music.""I thought you might want to listen to some J.Cole," he answers. "I wanted to.""Fuck them." is what he's actually saying. He knows it and I know it. We share a conspiratory smile.Tell me how am I supposed to leave this.~ The lady prosecutor—the one who looked as if she had never before spent a day of her life in a cell filled with mosquitoes and grumpy cell mates—called you a monster.

  • She Belongs To The Sky   Slipping Time: Chideziri POV

    Finals are easy. Mostly.I was the first person out of the hall; the post-school tutoring paid off. That or I just failed the last paper of the term, and year. English. With 20 minutes extra time to go. A combined paper, so everybody wrote.Like most of my mates, Abe stumbles out, cross-eyed and confused, cursing the essay writing. Cursing the English teacher. Cursing Little feats."Write an essay arguing for or against the motion to legalize abortions in Nigeria, giving cogent reasons. And it carried 15 marks. Just fifteen." Abe sparks. He squeezes the offending exam sheet, balling it up in a fist."They are trying to kill us." I say for his benefit alone. Every year, since SS1, Mr Harrison, the Literature and English teacher pulls a stunt of the same nature. Debates. Essays. Short prose writing. Anything to make you "wear your thinking cap" as he puts it.And every single year Abe emerges from the hall, sweating, spewing hate

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    "They are here!" The voice startles us.Abe. And the entire squad. They followed us."Lovebirds." Chantelle chimes.Pascal crows, "Chimaziri." grinning.They all are. That conspiratiory look kids have when they have done mischief and you just can't place a finger on what exactly it is they did."You are kidding me." flies out of my mouth.Chideziri groans, "Seriously?"Abe eyes us. "What? You want time alone to fornicate. Not happening. Not while I'm alive."Chantelle steps up to the edge of the plank, where we sit, and there is amazement in her face at the sight of the water."So this is where you guys stay. It a smart hiding place. It isn't too close to your house or his house. An in between."Abe makes to sit, but we are at the middle of the jetty, and the space is too small."Shift," he says. I groan."Shift, abeg."Half bent, he pauses, na

  • She Belongs To The Sky   Forget Not: Amanda POV

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  • She Belongs To The Sky   Eclipse: Lorita POV

    Calling Ma to tell her the exam is over will only make her rush me, I think.Today is the one day I don't want to rush things. So when others pull out their phones and gather round for selfies and corny posts such as GRADUATE IN A BIT or BEEN HERE, DONE THAT, I push my phone deeper into the slash pocket of my overall."And we good to go!" my best friend appears just as she disappeared: when I wasn't looking, and all of a sudden.She stretches her arms out for a hug."Ewwww." I dodge her. My best friend, Amanda, only seems to want hugs after one of her many visits to the toilets. There's enough bacteria on the doors alone to kickstart an epidemic."You know you want this hug," Amanda grins, inching closer.The periodic toilet frolicking is normal, the usual. The grinning is new. Whatever Port-Harcourt did to her was good. She even let me read her journal for like six seconds—which is a record. She n

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    I slump onto the grass next to Chideziri. He keeps staring up ahead into the tree, as if he's looking for something in particular, not paying me any mind. "G." Nothing. I shove his shoulder. Still nothing. "Are you going to sit here sulking all day?" Finally, he looks at me. "I can try, can't I?" "It's passing out day, you fool. We had plans, remember?" "Frankly, I don't." He says. I raise a brow at him; he only shrugs. I adjust myself till I am lying on my back in the untrimmed grass. "Well, since you don't remember, I'll wait here until your mermory starts to come back." "You'll be waiting for a long time" "I have enough time." I fire back. "Jesus Christ." Chideziri mutters. "Don't use the name of the Lord in vain, bro." "Guy, g

  • She Belongs To The Sky   On The Wings Of A Flood: Chideziri POV

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  • She Belongs To The Sky   Exodus: Chideziri & Amanda

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  • She Belongs To The Sky   Purple Hibiscuses: Chideziri POV

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  • She Belongs To The Sky   Purple Hibiscuses: Amanda POV

    January, the sixth arrives quickly, quietly. January, the sixth steals our time. I wake up not remembering what the day means, at first. It comes to me slowly. The night before we leave, the night before January the sixth, I learn two things: there are two kinds of hunger, and one can keep you up all night, staring at the ceiling and missing a place and people you are yet to leave. It is two O'Clock in the morning and disconcertingly quiet when I decide that I can't endure the trashing and turning. I take a book from the shelf that will no longer be mine by evening, purple hibiscus, with the cracks on its cover and Adichie's delighted face above its blurb, and I go to the sitting room that will not be ours by evening. There, I turn on the light and cozy up on the couch. Halfway through the first chapter, feet shuffle in the hallway and Dad emerges from

  • She Belongs To The Sky   Yultide: Chideziri POV

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  • She Belongs To The Sky   Yultide: Amanda POV

    Christmas is explosive. Literally so. The number of fireworks produced in a single annum is alarming. But what is even more alarming is the fact that the effing hoodlums that deadbeat parents in my neighbourhood call their children seem to think that detonating all those fireworks in the street just beyond our gate is cool. On Christmas eve, after one "knock-out" landed on our roof, I reached the end of my thoroughly stretched patience. I stormed out to yelled at a couple of them loitering in the street. All of which I did barefooted.Don't blame me, I was spectacularly pissed.The twenty fifth—Christmas day itself—is spent out of our house and in Aunty Seedy's, with her and Ozo. Dad wanted us to go to Chicken Republic, or one of the many fancy restuarants he made it his business to locate in the area once we arrived, since neither of us can boil an egg.

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