CHAPTER ONE: THE STORM

It was a darker Friday night for the nimbus clouds had cast an opaque vail over the stars and the moon, such that a shadow of a beaconing catastrophe fell on the earth. The rage of the upcoming storm thundered in lucid intervals with sparks of flushing lights, lights that periodically sparked in counts of seconds. I had shortly retired to bed after a long hectic day and was trying to get some sleep through the noise of the hoofing wind that was stronger than usual, to the extend that the rusted iron sheets kept on cringing one on another, and from outside I could hear the sound of tree branches cracking, breaking and falling, and of doors of neighbours carelessly left unblotted bunging themselves on the steel iron frames—unable to resist the harsh strong force of the wind. For a moment, all would go silent, but again revamp when least expected, startling me from bed. Occasionally I had to hold my chest to make sure my heart was still intact, safe and sound—that it had not beat out of me. But the storm didn’t hit my side, it hit the other.

As the sky started weeping, from a not so far distance, I herd echoes of sounds of mourning. I threw a way my thread bare blanket, jumped on my feet, put on my shirt and pulled on my pair of trouser and rushed out, banging the door behind me whose sound faded with the uproar of thunder that hit like an atomic bomb. Through the terrace of buildings, new and old; through amaze of corridors, I ran following the sound. Yonder, I beheld a throng mixed together with a mob, and from behind me I could hear sirens of police cars. The mob kept on shouting, “to hell with the boy, he must pay for this!!?” A man who I presumed to be in his late seventies kept on nodding his head in unbelief, cursing and lamenting: “ what a disgrace to childhood.”
“ If we cant be safe with our own children, who shall we be safe with?” another old fellow added.

I squeezed myself through the crowd trying to get a clear view of what lay in the midst, for yet I couldn’t make sense of anything. Standing next to a man who all along kept a cheap cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of liquor tightly gripped in his armpit, I inquired of him what exactly had transpired. He puffed smoke from his nostrils, took a sip from his liquor bottle, carefully taking his own time, and said to me, “ didn’t shark spear write of this? I think the book was called Romeo and Juliet—that in the end times, children shall turn against their parents.” Shark spear! I said with eyes wide open. But then I realised I was at the verge of jeopardizing the mans self proclaimed sense of Intellectual superiority.

I squeezed myself further and in front of me , in the loving arms of his woman, lay a man, but lifeless. She wept and refused to be comforted, for he was gone. Could any amount of grief have the power to give him back his breath I suppose he would have resurrected. Much as her tears faded with the rain, the mere sight of her husband lying dead was a far much depiction of the reality of her pains. I could only imagine .

Blood was still splashing from the deep cut on his head, like high pressure water from a broken pipe. On the ground lay the butchers knife socked in blood, save for the fact that the rain kept washing it a way, as if helping the assailant erase evidence. Soon the police arrived. The crowd kept on banging the door desperate to get hold of the boy. Had it not been for the police, he would have been torn to pieces.

We all left, but not without wounded hearts. Such a sight was unforgettable. Lucius was famous amongst us. Not because he was successful, for he wasn’t, but because he had a golden parental heart. For if at all youth had spared him any chance to live abetter life, he would have traded it for his children.

And as we walked a way, different accounts were given by different self proclaimed witnesses to the extend that it was impossible to know which was true and which was false. One woman who lived a few yards a way from the crime scene said unasked, “ I was struggling to shut my door against the wind when I saw Timothy staggering home drunk. He kept on swearing, ““today I am ending everything.””

“What about the machete” an elderly man inquired.
“ May be it was hidden in his pocket.” The woman presupposed. We would have all burst out laughing, but then, it was time for grief. Another woman who walked next to me said, “ its rumoured that they were hard having a bitter argument.”
“Leave the boy a lone. He merely walked home and found his dad lying dead in the pool of his own blood. He stood there dump folded for it was obviously unimaginable sight. Luscious might have been murdered by thugs. You know they like carrying out their operations in rain.” Another added.

I played the role of the listener. Reaching home, I retied to bed, but what I had seen was unprecedented, unbelievable. Death is an inevitability, a door that we must all pass through in the time of life. Knowing that we are all destined for the same end, isn’t it selfish to so early rob one of his already numbered days?

...to be continued..