RUNNING AWAY

It was not even dawn when we left. Mother woke me up and dragged me into my clothes without allowing me to have my bath or brush my teeth. The residue of sleep still clung to my eyelids and I was stumbling into things in the semi-darkness. A small touch with a weak battery was the only light in the room and it flickered as if it would die at any moment. Within minutes of my waking, mother had gathered all of our things into a small bundle and was standing by the louvers.

“Mummy where are we going? I want to sleep.” I said.

She raised her index finger to her lips, her eyes wild in the half-light. I noticed her chewed nails. Mother was always perfect like a well-manicured flower garden but she chewed on her nails when she became sad and worried. As I thought about it, she suddenly rushed to the door and turned the key open in the key hole. She motioned for me to come over and in the breaking dawn, we scrambled like thieves out of our home.

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_{Unsplash: Patrick Hendry}

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People were like ghosts in the waking of dawn as we walked quickly through the dew that shrouded the world. I washed my eyes constantly with my hands as mother made me jump after her like a big rag doll. I saw a man walk pass us with fire in his eyes and smoke coming out of his mouth. He had a big cap on his head and he kept wiping his eyes as if he was crying. One woman passed us and she had three hands. The third hand was coming out of the underside of her blouse and it waved at me even though her face pretended not to see us. I grabbed mother’s hand with my other hand. I was scared but I could not tell her. She had shushed me before. I kept looking back to see as the woman and the man rushed into the gloom. They soon disappeared.

Mother gripped my wrist with one hand and her other hand clutched the big bag that she had slung across her shoulder. She seemed not to have noticed what I had seen, her eyes kept peering into the chill brushed darkness as if she was looking for someone. As we moved, the world became brighter and mother seemed afraid of this because she urged me and increased her pace.

“Mummy where are we going?” I asked, my voice small in the silence of our feet tapping along the cracked face of the coal-tarred road.

She turned to look at me then she shook her head and faced the road in front of her again. We passed other people as we hurried along but I tried not to look at them. They were so silent in that time that I felt sure we were passing through a land of ghosts. The bucket men, the men who came to carry night soil were also moving too and the smell of feces was like a taste on my tongue before we took a sharp turn and entered another street. Those bucket men would be used to moving among ghosts and spirits, I thought to myself as the street disappeared from view.

The new street we entered was a ghost street. It was not like the one we had just left where ghosts walked along it. It was silent as if no one lived along it. There were big houses on each side of the street and the houses were threatening in the shadows. It felt as if eyes were on the nape of my neck in the half-light. The street had streetlights that shone weakly in the thick smog but they were not enough to calm my fears.

The lights looked like big fireflies that were trapped in a spider’s web. They flickered on and off and in between each flicker was fear. Mother’s shoe was loud like a bullet wound in the night and we kept turning around expecting someone to stop us and do something horrible to us. I say us because mother’s grip became tighter once we got on the street and her eyes became wider. She was almost crushing my bones to dust but I didn’t whimper. She had asked me not to speak.

At the end of the street, a distance away, I could make out small soft lights moving about. some were going up and some were coming down. There was a sense of urgency in that place and I could sense a large gathering of people, talking and asking to be heard. I looked at mother with wonder. Are we going to heaven? A light flicker close to me and I jumped at the sound of electricity short-circuiting. It was not a short circuit. I saw a shape curl from the light, wrapped in dew and shadows and fly away into the darkness. My mouth dropped with shock. I looked at all the lights then and I saw that the lights were portals from which spirits were coming out and flying away towards the large gathering that I sensed in a distance.

“Mommy are we dead?” I asked, not knowing when the words fled my lips.

Mother stopped then and turned to look at me. She looked around where we stood then she sighed and squatted before me, so our eyes were level.

“You are a man now Bode. I cannot hide things from you. Yesterday, the police arrested your father’s friends. They are accusing them of armed robbery among other things. We are not dead, my son but we will be if we do not get away from here. Do you understand?” She asked.

I did not understand a thing but I nodded my head and mother rose to her feet and we started to walk towards the many lights. I tried to ignore the spirits leaving the portals and watched the road walk pass me instead. I tried to juggle what mother had told me with what I was seeing and it had no correlation. In the world I walked in now, there were no policemen or robbers, just ghosts and mother. We were running from ghosts who wanted to take me from mother. I knew that to be the truth. Mother was too afraid to tell me the truth. Maybe she thought I would go with the ghosts so that they won’t hurt her. She does not know me. I touched my pockets and sure enough the pebbles were there.

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TO BE CONTINUED...

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©warpedpoetic, 2019.