So, who’s the rant king now?

 

So, I held a pen last night and didn’t stop scribbling till I slept off. NB: This was after the lamp I was using had died. If this piece ends abruptly, it is because I cannot read most of what is at the end and I am afraid I cannot get back into the same zone as I was last night to complete in one breath. If this piece does not end abruptly however, then I confess, you are most loyal of all readers and probably more brilliant than I.

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“How far have you fallen? How far have you fallen,” the wingless bird muttered to the wizened tortoise squatted above him. “It’s easy sitting there pretending to be sagacious when you haven’t felt any pain. Not the pain of loss or incompetence”

The tortoise stared back, her lined face expressionless in the gathering gloom of the forest dusk. Then she turned away and ambled out of the grove and through copse of trees for the rocky cliffs beyond. The bird stared, wet eyes glazing over as they strained to focus through a haze of pain. As the mist came down upon his eyes, washing on both sides in the same hue as the spreading blood around its form, he saw at the end of his tunneled vision, a hunched back figure striding to the cliff’s edge to plunge over to the rocky bottom.

“Daddy, why did tortoise fall? Why did tortoise fall and crack his back?”

“Sadness my daughter, sadness, and the utterly unnecessary need to prove something to a dying friend”

Why do we spend so much on burial ceremonies? Why do we bother about the fulfillment of burial rites and the execution of last wills and testaments? Is it a simple subscription to the uniqueness of a life and the need to allow that life one final undeniable mercy? Or is it simply a more ancient prescription in our belief system that there is a need to respond with respect to the needs of those who go beyond simply because in breaking loose with the mortal flesh and it’s earthly prohibitions and constrictions, they have become more powerful and thus more demanding? Does this in turn intimate an innate belief in the omniscience and omnipotence of the dead – to watch us with eyes all-seeing and unleash terrible harm upon us when we fail to do as they command? Then is death an end – the flipping over of a page to start afresh, the suspense after the opening pilot of a season rerun, the widening of a previously tunnel vision or simply oblivion and we are simply cursed to wonder and theorize?

“It twinkles Mummy, the light in the laptop. It keeps going on and off, like a star. Is it a star Mummy?”

Mummy looked up from the morsel of food and down at the young one beside. Why this one punctuated every bloody sentence with ‘Mummy’ had gone past amusement and indulgence and was beginning to grate on every last nerve. Shoving the short-lived thought away, Mummy faced once more the more pressing matter; how to carry this morsel of food off, back to the hill.

“Mummy, Mummy! It has stopped blinking! I am scared!”

Mummy’s mood soared over the anger threshold with annoyance rapidly giving way to rage, antennae twitching wildly even as the broom sailed through the air with a whine to land splat, completely destroying both termites. As the broom lifted up, trailing termite body parts, the microenvironment grew silent once more save for the twitching of the bacteria as they secreted larger portions of exoenzynes in delirious frenzy so amazed and thrilled at the prospect of this free lunch.

John tossed the broom away and closed the laptop, putting it into his bag, all the while wondering what the ants were doing under the table anyway, more or less watching him as he watched Busty Asian Beauties and jerk off. Oh! Wait, is that semen on the floor in front of the dead ants?

Oh…

What is truth? What is real? Is everything we see not simply a perception of our immediate environment, and what are those but simple layers upon layers of successive microenvironments beginning with incalculable non-particulate matter and energy and culminating with the same? Or in another translation, beginning with GOD and ending with GOD? What is GOD but a power greater than we? No. GOD is in all entirety much more than that. Perhaps, in a simple definition, after taking into cognizance the extremes of the superseding nature of humanity’s power over and every power within the accessible plane – both spiritual, non-particulate, physical, mental and gbo gbo e, you may simply call GOD a power greater than we. But in its entirety, that definition pales.

But I digress. Digress from what? Ah, yes, from digressing of course. Okay back to where we were. Where were we?

“WHERE WERE WE!” Hre yelled. His anger seemed to be reaching boiling point.

Always neglected by all his cousins, left behind and deemed unworthy of joining them on their bold quests, it had not been surprising when he enlisted in the army. Surely, everyone from the village agreed, it was a simple need to prove himself, which was alright but nevertheless, believed to be short-lived by all. On his first day at training he clearly surpassed his class and on occasion his own teachers. Perhaps, now Hre had found his niche. Or not?

Most people claimed Hre’s only achievement in life would be as part of a bad storyline whose only promise would lie in the convoluted nature of the expected twist at its end. Many of them would eventually be proved right, only not in the manner in which they had expected.

“Mix it!” he said. “Mix it, and by jove and the holy Ahmed, if you do not find a solution then burn down the house.”

Thus was the nature of the riddle delivered by the red-haired Kidnapper, his rifle to the heads of Hre’s cousins, as he grinned devilishly. The timer was set at three seconds, time enough for Hre.

Flicking his wrists upward, he let loose with twin darts from hidden recesses within the folds of his long-sleeved jacket, both darts tipped with deadly poison from the abdomens of inebriated mosquitoes only found in a particular forest in the Congo. The darts embedded in the Kidnapper’s neck and shoulder precisely within acupuncture specific nodes that halted all motion of the Kidnapper’s body even as the poison converted his body fluids to acids that ate up his flesh before he crumbled to the floor; an already mouldering pile of ashy bones and other suspicious detritus.

His cousins now free even as the rest of the villagers looked on in disbelief, Hre who had never been completely articulate either due to a certain obtuseness or a special kind of autistic nature suddenly yelled his name, “Where were we!”

Disclaimer

• This is not the product of a crazed mind

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GOD bless Nigerians

Peace