Love Is A Knife!

PROLOGUE

This is the Land of Origins.

            This, you have only dreamt of in your dreams. Amazing. The air is purpled with music of the spheres! There’s no sorrow. No pain. The breath of life is streaked with whitish blue rhythms, at best bluish silver.

            Here. The purple Rain falls lightly. Like snow on Christmas day in America or foggy misty mornings of harmattan on an African village square.

            It is the ultimate sensation. Primordial, like magic hanging on trees. Untinted still. Uncorrupted; by intellectuality or the polarization of North, South, East or West, all things cosmetic or petty or vogue or in between. It is the pleasure of perfection. There’s no wrong. Only right. No evil.

            Mother-nature squats gigantically with her big blue thighs, popping out new babies each passing second.

            Our mother – the harbinger of life; you’ve seen her: But of course you forget, the moment you give their expectant shrill cry. You cry. And then, they clap and laugh. If anyone’s still wondering why fairies cry, little babies, well, it’s simple. We cry because birth, although a process of creation by Adam-Akpancho, God of the skies Owoicho Manchala, the creator and fabricator extra-ordinary of the moon and stars and the nine worlds already discovered, and the eighteen yet to be. Birth is an activity that disturbs the cool “sacro-illiac”, the ultimate high; the audio – life. And the blue of the deep.

            She’s comparable to twelve elephants put together. And she’s black. She’s African sometimes. And white at other times. Pigmented like a karma-chameleon.  Her humungous nudity is bared before everyone as she squats, bearing the fairies. Here, we celebrate only right. No evil.

            The need for clothes is non-existent. So also is that for food. And nourishment. We get our nourishment from the air we breathe!

            Mostly, we are all fairies.

            Tiny little winged Angels and Angellets. Then, there’re some without any sex. They have preferred and elected not to be burdened by any gender. Like oysters habiting the bottoms of the deep, they have remained sexless.

            The genderless fairies never come to the worlds. They are never born. They simply habit the purpled realm and infuse same with wondrous magical bliss of enchantment: The music of the spheres. Theirs are the songs of prophetic greatnesses. Then there’s the music of all beings. All green plants respond to these tender songs and worship same each morning and evening when the sun rises and sets.

            Sometimes. We purpled winged Angels and Angellets could also become genderless fairies, that is after returning from the Worlds, upon passing to and from, the Red gate. Having tempered and weathered the varying labyrinths of love. We’ll then not return again to earth – the world of the living.

            Ours is the world of the unborns.

            The superlative groove of marvelous magical realism. Dominated by the allure and charm of talking flowers i.e. Canantiums and Roslies, the flowers of the future.

            Mostly, fairies bear no names. But not I. I am Oyify-orda! Meaning in my native Idoma: a child is more than material things. My life is a riddle.

            This is the story of my wrath. I, Oyifyorda. Soon, I shall live in the head of a young Nigerian writer. He `s got talents and potentials. And politics.

I shall be his muse, His creative spirit. Well, now, let the stories begin. I, a fable? And he, the fabler, the  fabulator. And soon, my story shall be told.

CHAPTER ONE

       I will be dead tomorrow

At exactly 6.00am. I shall be dead and gone forever. There’s no one alive that could rescue me from this hovering Angel of death.

     My name. I shall never know. My essence and humanity shall be interred, hushed like a bad experiment performed by an erring medic in an anatomy lab. I shall never know the name of my wife. The children I would have propagated. The name of my dog. My cat. Neither will I ever know the political ideology I would have proclaimed.

      I shall never know the scent of flowers. The sweetness of neither chimes nor the agony of tears. Like the pain of Ovoramwen Nogbaisi and the demise of the Benin Empire or the passing of England’s Rose, my candle shall burn out tomorrow. But my legend will never end. The secrets of my murder shall continue to haunt my murderers, in the fervent still of the night.

    The time is 6.00pm. And slowly the clock ticks. Each tock bring me nearer to my doom.

Now I have twelve hours to live.

   My parents are in the living room. My mum is lying on the sofa with her face buried deep in the softness of a puff. She is sporting a pair of faded blue Levis pants and a rather large T-shirt with the inscription carefully lettered on the front “cosmic order”. Somehow the atmosphere around the room is tense and heavy. Anyone entering the room would know immediately that something is just not right. And it would seem as if part of the roof is opened and a blood caked cloud hangs over, dripping. My mum begins to cry.

      My Dad is everything my mum is not. And looking at my Dad standing close to the window with a bottle of Chevalier Napoleon brandy severely clutched in his hand, his hair permed like a lady’s, lying straight on his head and ending in a pony tail, a cigarette burning in one of his hands, I begin to question all at once the meaning of Chemistry and how it could have possibly sprout between my Mum and my Dad.

   “Please Olutu, let’s not do it tomorrow. Let’s not do it all… how could we?” she sobs some more and exhaled very loudly and after a very deep breath, she said again to my Dad, “we will survive! Let’s just put our fate in God! This will not ruin our dreams… things will get better each day and someday we shall look back at this event in our lives very thankful that we didn’t do it!”.

    She sobs. Burying her face deeper into the puff, sobbing so beautifully that even the buzzing flies strolling pass the living room still to listen and sympathizes with her ordeal. I feel for mum. She’s so soft and tender like blossoming roses in June.

   Dad moved across the room and said to mum with a nasal crack like a mafia thug, he said to her, cold and deadly with a deeply measured baritone: “Look here Alache, we have been going over this for three months now. I have begged you. I have cajoled you. I have enticed you in many ways trying to make you see why we must do it! But you are only bent on being troublesome, unreasonable and stupid! Listen well and listen good, we will do it tomorrow at exactly 6.00am on the dot and. We shall do it one way or, or the other and neither you nor any girl for that matter will drag my life to the mud. The sky will ever remain my limit!”

   My mum begins to cry afresh. She is sobbing in earnest now and spasms of rapid fever resonates and reverberates through her frame, perhaps by some inner human squeeze, my Dad becomes moved and he moved closer to mum and slowly kissed her on the head. Gently he reached out a hand and massaged her hair. And proceeded to whisper in her ears.

     From the silence that ensued afterward. One thing became certain in my conscious little mind. They were going to do it!

    I wanted to run away from home that night, but all the doors were locked and besides, my feet were frail. I over heard Dad telling mum with that mafia twang of his that he loved her dearly and when mum’s reply came to me through the crack of the closed door that she loved him too, water blurred my eyes and I could see nor hear no more.

   I was totally and finally cocooned and that was how I laid and waited until 6.00am. The next day when Mum and Dad went to keep their appointment. Mum was immediately led into an inner room where the tick-tock of a clock sounded to remind me of my predicament.

      There was a thick smell of disinfectant in the room and it clung heavily to my nostril.

   Mum was expectedly laid on a table and her legs were widely spread apart and Just then, I began to protest wildly, screaming and pleading all at once. ‘No! Wait! God! I won’t eat too much; I’ll even go without clothes. But it was too late.

    The knife came!