Short Fiction

chinyerevivian (66)in #fiction • 6 years ago

Hi, y’all. It’s a good day today. I woke up happy. I was having this dream I couldn’t remember, and I got up from my bed and realised that I was smiling. So it’s a good day, considering that I was cranky for a huge part of yesterday. I smell a nasty episode. Anyway, I’m feeling a little naughty this morning so I’m going to share three flash fiction stories, each less than three hundred words. Two of them are a little creepy while the other is just normal. I hope you enjoy them.

The school was in chaos. Another student just died mysteriously. The first time it happened, everyone thought it was an accident. A student had climbed and fallen off a tree behind the school football field.

"He's a boy. They do things like this all the time," was the explanation the principal gave.

Parents had nodded and believed him. It was a boy's school after all. Life went on, till it happened again. This time, a boy died in his sleep.

But the boys knew something was wrong; the footsteps at night, the single word carved on the wall of the principal's office and the way it glowed, the strange dreams everyone was having.

They would later learn, that the school was a house originally owned by a scholar whose son was killed by the local police's stray bullet. He had vowed to avenge his son's death before he died. The principal was his ghost.

"A bottled message," the scholar had said pointing at the wall the day he died.

Problem was, people thought he meant a message inside a bottle. While all they really had to do, was understand the hidden meaning.

The single word read 'Hunted.'

Things began to fall apart the day my sister went for cleansing and never returned. Mama and I had sat inside the Obi in front of our house, watching the girls walk past in twos and threes. Mama would pat my thigh whenever a group approached and Obianuju's slender figure was not among them. My sister was the light in our home; her yellow skin, her throaty laughter. Mama almost died having her, after years of trying and failing to conceive.

"Okwa mmuo mmiri, she's a mermaid," people had said after she was born. Some nosy villagers prophesied she would be a boy, Papa's reincarnation, since he had died six months before she came.

"The gods answered my prayers, nnam. Look at her," Mama always said to me. She wanted a girl.

I shook my head now as I cleaned Mama's body. The smell of the rot was becoming more fetid by the day. It was her punishment for trying to steal my sister from the shrine. She was chosen to serve the gods.

For me, the stillness of the night had become my refuge, for my dying mother and for a sister I would never see again.

Her fingers slid gently up and down the strings of the lyre. Head bowed, eyes closed in concentration; tiny strands of dreadlocks fell softly across her face. Her toes dug into the wet soil as she played and sang , a folksong she learned from her mother. She missed her home and the life she had, before the abduction that stripped her naked and forced her to work with her bare hands.

Thoughts of home and her mother’s warm stew made her cry the first few days. However, when the days began to turn into weeks, and the weeks stretched into months, she embraced her life as a slave and vowed to make the best out of it.

The five long years buried the frightened teenager, and left a beautiful young woman behind. A passionate soul, who found love in her master’s eldest son.

Their affair felt like nothing she had ever experienced. His slow thrusts on the floor of the farm where she worked, always left her aching for more.

The lyre became their mouthpiece. Only the two of them understood the language.

In between passions one night, he begged her to come with him. His father sent him on a journey that would take years before he returned. He made her understand that he would see her safe passage home, should she decline.

Still confused, she played the lyre and waited.

“It’s time, Eberechi. Please come with me.”

Her eyes flew open. She stared at his outstretched arms and thought of her father’s big barn, many wives and siblings. She thought of her mother who had survived years without her.

She went into his warm embrace.

This was home.

This was where her heart belonged.

I love this gif, so I just had to share.