The Break Out (Part One)

khojo (52)in #writing • 6 years ago

Hello lovely steemians. It's been a while since I've posted something. I am all taken by academic activities but it doesnt take a light of shine away from the fact that I endeavour to be with you guys at every chance. I come your way with a two-part or a three-part short story. The first of which I drop after this......

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                            **PART ONE**

Bob stood in the small prison staring unseeingly at the dark little room which would be his new home for the next few years. There was only a thread of light which crept its way into the room, through a window fixed very high up the room. The room held a very foreign smell-- it smelled of the previous lives which had been there; it smelled of the bags of blood which had been spilled there as one inmate sought to kill the other; it smelled of lost hopes and dreams. The bunk on which he’d rest his tired and remorseful spine for the next five years sat in the corner beside the door on four projected legs.
He sighed and sought to rest his oars on the bed but it only served to induce a creaky cry from the bed: It was all worn out from years of use and abandonment.

There was something about prisons in Ghana. The hope of coming out as an ex-con untainted, rested entirely on one’s strong attitude and nothing else. The conditions there, did not serve to make one feel better. If anything, they only doubled, if not tripled, the task.

As Bob remained seated on the bed, he thought about all the stories he had heard about foreign prisons. Out of his unfailing curiosity, he had learnt that you could be a prisoner and still sit for various exams--there were reports of people having attained degrees while prisoners. He had also learnt that they served great foods, delicacies which made you want to remain a prisoner until the end of time. One time he had heard on radio that, foreign prisons were so bureaucratically regulated and managed that you could get a vocation there and come out pure as rain. There were loads of things said about foreign prisons—some of which were unfounded fallacies, cooked up by the media to sell their stories to the average man who didn’t take a liking to reading widely.

Despite Bob's justified inclination that foreign prisons were miles better than African prisons, and that he would trade his current situation for some federal prison in the United States, there was a minute feeling of dread which always crept up into his heart whenever he thought about the number of times he’d seen people get stabbed under the sun’s watchful brightness as prison authorities watched on unflinchingly. He had seen them in movies, yet he wondered if those were just movies or they were real?

One thing was for sure though, that foreign prisons didn’t smell as badly as did African prisons, especially Ghanaian prisons.

Bob grew up an astrophile; he took such unbridled liking to the astronomy of God’s green earth, especially stars. He liked to wait up in the night as the stars majestically aligned themselves in the sky. Sometimes he couldn’t fathom what it was about stars that he liked so much: maybe it was the fact that stars depicted hope in a world which had been tailored against people like him—people who couldn’t fund themselves to three-square meal daily.
But it wasn’t Bob’s fault. He had been born into that world; a world which had not the faintest hope of breaking its financial barrier. He had been thrust into a family confined within the unbreakable walls of poverty. All his life he had, had the chance to meet his father once; when he was a naïve child who was susceptible to candies. He grew up under his mother’s umbrella after his father, as you may have guessed, abandoned the family. He had promised his wife, a thousand stars of hopes and better days, but when the baby gave its first cry, all those promises which he had couched to lure her into his bed, eroded along the disjointed notes of the baby’s cry.

Bob grew up under his mother’s umbrella which meant he hadn’t ever been starved of love. Mothers were known for their unyielding love, and Bob’s mother, was the pick of the bunch. Even though they were mostly pegged back by financial shortfalls, she always endeavoured to take care of Bob as good as could be. Sometimes she’d take him into her lap, ran her fingers down his temples and tell him that he wasn’t the same as the kids out there. She hadn’t kept what was under the veil from him: she unveiled the truth to Bob that his father had abandoned them. So Bob grew up what we call today, ‘mummy’s boy.’

Even as a kid Bob always knew that his mother never meant to say all those things to him. He could sense the feverishness which ate up in her tired eyes. He could also sense how many times his mother had held back whatever it was she wanted to say to him. Maybe she feared it’d break him into two unfixable parts. But when he had attained 18, BOB’s book of life had been opened, and out of it, crept truths which ripped his heart out.

Unlike many Ghanaians kids his age, Bob was rather timid and reserved. Many a time, he found himself sitting in a corner completely adrift the world of gregariousness age mates who played out there. Sometimes he grew jealous of these kids but not once did he dare to play with them, especially, when he saw from the corner of his eye, how one moment of fun-packed jocosity, could turn into an unceasing moment of wails and teardrops. He dreaded what would happen to him if he said a joke which was out of place or if he overthrew a ball—maybe he’d get beat into a pulp.
Being timid, reserved and cladded in the ignominious clothes of poverty were a combination every young man dreaded, and someone should have told Bob.
Unfortunately no one did, not his mother, not her.

Several years down the line, despite being bullied out of many opportunities, Bob was still the timid guy wearing a telling cologne of shyness. Once he had been bullied out of an opportunity to work for one of the biggest tech companies in Ghana. But none of that bothered him. As far as he was concerned, his generosity, rather patent timidity and shyness, had taken him so far in life, and he banked his life on it, it would take him wherever he went safely.
However one evening at Techules Ghana Ltd, one of the largest companies in Ghana, where he was registered as one of a handful IT gurus, his overbearing timidity and shyness would throw him a heavy ball, which he would fail to catch properly…….