By Joseph Jegede
This is your second attempt at his life. You are sitting on the cemented staircase outside the
backyard, watching the expanse of oleander flowers sitting before you as you draw in the
smoke from your cigarettes. A keg sits beside you. Your mind tells you if you take ten steps
forward you will find yourself by the flowers. You should listen to your mind. It tells you to
water the flowers and you wonder this time whether you should heed.
Your mother told you yesterday to stop drowning the flowers. “I don’t need your help,
don’t kill my flowers.” She said and you wondered what she knew. Standing before these
yellowing oleander flowers you feel a familiar urge. The urge to disobey your mother and get
these plants drunk again. The urge to watch Tola die.
Tola was on his way to nine before he died. He was a picky eater. If you must serve
him rice it had to be jollof rice, if you must serve him beans it had to be unmashed. He didn’t
eat swallows, too, except the swallow was pounded yam served with vegetable-egusi soup.
Your mother never complained as she went about attending to his cravings. Sometimes you
thought he deserved all the care he got. For a child who always stayed at the top of his class,
and who wouldn’t eat until he was done with his homework, attending to his needs was the
least anyone could do. But it wasn’t an easy task for you when it was just you and him at
home on most afternoons. You would serve him a plate of jollof rice and serve yourself one
too, but he would demand pasta or noodles or something else and add a mischievous smile
afterward. So you concluded he enjoyed troubling you.
You were a child of few words, at least your parents thought so. You didn’t demand
too much because making demands made you feel uneasy. Often reminded you of your place
as a child born by a whore to a nobody. Even though Tola’s father was not often at home
because work carried him around like the wind, you still never felt like you belonged in this
home. Sometimes when she thought you were not looking, you saw that you are the
punishment for all my sins look in her eyes which often pushed you to ask yourself whether
you had chosen, of your own free will, to be born.
When you served him lunch on an afternoon when the weather was so hot that you
didn’t protest when he told you he wanted cold water, you told yourself you wanted him out
of your life. You were resting in an armchair fanning yourself with a plastic fan because
NEPA had refused to bring light. You watched him as he took small spoonfuls of rice into his
mouth. You thought of those moments when, nine years ago, it was just you and your mother
and you were her world; of that day Tola’s father walked into your lives, and you heard a
cough; of the change that accompanied his birth as you heard another cough; of now, as the
cough intensifies; of what it would be like to be the centre of your mother’s world again,
cough, cough, cough…. You thought and thought, you were still thinking when your eyes
travelled back to him where he was coughing profusely, saliva mixed with food and phlegm
soiling his body. Your mind tells you to attend to him but something seemed to be glueing
you to your seat. You watched him suffer with a languorousness that brought a smile to your
lips. And when you finally heard the sound of his petite body on the floor you heaved.
Nothing has changed even after half a decade since you got rid of him. Your mother goes to
his grave from time to time and weeps her eyes out. She seldom talks to you except when
necessary and you often see that accusative look in her eyes whenever she looks at you. And
despite her husband’s protest to let go of this child’s memory she still goes ahead and plants
oleanders on his grave. She trims them regularly, waters them moderately. She takes care of
the flowers like that child you killed.
You pluck out a flower, examine its yellowing pink, bring out your lighter, and set it
on the flower. It takes a while but it burns. You smile a knowing smile as you exhale smoke
out of your mouth and puff ash off your cigarette. You stare down at the keg sitting at your
feet, pick it up and begin to wet the flowers. When you are done you throw the keg
somewhere at the centre of the flowers. You take a few steps backward and dump your
cigarette amid the flowers. It births a fiery furnace. You stand there, feet apart, arms akimbo,
chin up, watching as it burns. The smoke envelopes you. And the sight brings you a deluge of
pleasure.
You hear the door to the balcony open. “What is bur-?” She starts to ask but freezes at
the sight before her. Even her muffled sobs do not move you to turn to look at her, yet you
can feel every bit of her. A smile crawls to your lips and you do not know whether it is the
thought of your mother breaking down in tears that causes it or it is the sight of the burning
oleanders.
Joseph Jegede hails from Ondo state in Nigeria. He recently graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He is also an alumnus of Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich, Germany, where he attended the summer school after he was awarded a scholarship by the DAAD in 2021.
As a thinker and interested observer of social affairs and human nature, Joseph Jegede expresses himself by writing fictional stories. His works have appeared in The Kalahari Review; Novelty Fiction Gazette, Kepress Anthology and elsewhere.
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