Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Beginning and End (04/16/09)
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TITLE: Alone | Previous Challenge Entry
By Folakemi Emem-Akpan
04/22/09 -
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January 4 1905
Oyo, Nigeria
She was pushed from a safe and dark warm place into coldness, into the waiting arms of the nearly exhausted midwife. They’d been waiting on her, been desperate for her arrival for more than three days.
For those three days, the cries of Kikelomo, her mother could be heard in the neighboring farm. The days were colder than normal and at night, the five other children could be heard speaking in low tones outside the delivery room. They were petrified that their mother would die, were shaken each time her screams rent the still night air, only went to bed when the last candle was put out.
On the third day, on a surprisingly warm Sunday afternoon, Bose was born. She was wrinkled, bald and her eyes were strangely bright, brighter than that of any baby the midwife had ever delivered.
She was an accident. Her father had wanted no more children yet craved intimacy with his wife. When she’d told him she was expecting a child, he’d smiled grimly and spat out the kola nut in his mouth. That was all he needed to do for her to know he wouldn’t care for the baby.
She was the fourth girl. Had she been a boy, her father might have viewed her birth differently, might have been glad to have two sons rather than one. But since she was a girl, he ignored her thoroughly, went out of his way to do so.
The day after her birth, her mother was back in the kitchen pounding yam and sweating over a pot of Egusi soup.
*
June 14 2008
Lagos, Nigeria
Exhausted from the walk from the bedroom to the living room, Bose holds on to the walls for support. She is slower than ever yet insists on walking by herself.
She settles her 103 years old frame into her grandson’s sofa and clicks on the TV remote. TVs have ceased to be a source of amazement to her, for her daughter had bought one as soon as they were mass-produced. Today, Bose is consternated by DVDs, TiVos, and camera phones.
“Mama?”
She turns at the approach of Maureen, her six-year-old great-granddaughter. Maureen is a striking image of Bose when she’d been a child growing up on her father’s yam farm. There is a bond between the two of them, an unspoken emotion that connects them in a way that no one else understands.
“Your legs are shaking, Mama.” Maureen folds herself into a chair opposite Bose and stares at her questioningly.
For the first time, Bose becomes aware that she is cold and that her sight is more blurred than usual.
“Perhaps I need to lie down awhile.”
This time she receives Maureen’s help in returning to her room because she needs it. She leans heavily on the little girl and both of them slip at one time that Maureen misses her step.
In the room that now smells perpetually of an old person’s dying flesh, Maureen buries Bose underneath an avalanche of blankets. Yet the old woman cannot stop shivering.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Mama?”
When Bose’s nod gets lost in an onset of tremors, Maureen races out of the room, yellsfor her mother.
Bose jerks uncontrollably for a while, until the tremors fade, then stop. Her life flashes before her in cinematic blur. Being raised by an indifferent father, sold off into marriage at 15, the loneliness of her marriage, the redemption she’d found in her children, her husband’s death, her children’s marriages, her grandchildren’s birth, then the birth of her great grandchildren.
Suddenly, the images freeze.
She dies as she had been born.
Alone.
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