Shadows --- A fictional on unfettered passion...

Image source: The Sun

So yes, this fictional work is a little bit eccentric in its bearing, having to do with incest and the reality of it. It might not exactly be what finds credence in this part of the world. But it sure deserves a telling, it is worth rendering a voice to. @Onequality is about voicing out the “unsaids” and this is what this short story does.

"Make a wish." Her voice trails and gathers like a whisper held captive in a cylinder.

“A wish?”

“Yes”

He smiles, “I have all I need. I need all I have. There is nothing more to wish for.”

She giggles and bites her lips, looking at him from a corner of her eyes, as if from afar, as if she is an intruder.

“What?”

“Nothing. Only that we all have many dreams. Some are beautiful nightmares.”

He appears confused, apparently needing to know more; but he diverts his asking to feathering the lighted candles on the calligraphed cake. Little wisps of smoke escape into the air paying him the gratitude of a sneeze.

The room became nearly dark, the only visibility coming from a lamp-stand that revealed too much of nothing to be relevant, but he could still make-out the thick lines of her contoured face.

She speaks, and in the darkness, her voice sounds like Tinkerbell spraying magical Dingdong twinkles on her Peter pan, “let’s play The Shadow Game.”

He laughs with the intensity of a disconcerted Santa Claus, “I am too old for that.”

“But you are not too young”, she replies in a pleading tone.

After a moment of soliciting, blinking eyes, he finally gives in and together, they lay on their backs and lift their hands up causing silhouettes of four strange variables to appear on the wall.

The girl moves and twists her hands slowly, calculatedly, and indeed, her every movement paints a lucid picture of dancing shadowy tentacles on the white wall, the frog princess is gradually, steadily taking form.

The boy moves his silhouetted hands too, but in a different way, it is not seducing and twined like the girl’s, it is rather rigid and stiffly balancing; a frog’s tongue that is unwittingly forced out to catch a roaming fly.

A long, somber silence is maintained, the silhouettes are uncannily moving towards each other, and in a flash second, they become intertwined so that balance does not mean stiff anymore; the fly suddenly discovers the frog wants to play too.

It is at this moment of masculine frailty that she, like a sorceress reading the palms of her crippled lover, speaks

“What is your greatest fantasy?”

The hands are moving, dancing with the rapid interlocking of spiral lines when he responds in a husky voice, “I don’t know. Maybe I do. It’s hard, I can’t seem to put it in words, but…I guess it has more to do with being in you. What’s yours?”

She laughs like the nineteen-year-old she is. Her laughter is the weaving of coral stones.

"I…"She hesitates, “I dream of a happily ever after with someone like you, I like the feel of your shadows…”

She looks at him in the near darkness, “you are my wildest fantasy”

It is at this time the frog swallows the fly.

He suddenly takes her word for it and takes her hand out of silhouettes. As if obeying a command, he begins to show her new horizons, old places in new ways. He leaves her to expose by herself his famine privacy and dig her hands voluptuously into his earthy skin.

He, beginning at her lips, nose, drooling jaws, down to the nape of her neck, plays out his visions, silently eating her up with a trembling appetite, just as he had always dreamt of.

She calls his name, another whisper, but one free to rove and wander. At the same time, she is deciphering the features on his passion struck face and heaving chest with sudden clarity. He heeds her knowing call, and lifts her under him, making himself suspect of besieging an insect without antennae.

For a brief insignificant molecule of time, he sees her face, who it is he is doing this to. But he tells himself- it is just going to be once, one shot at real genuine passion and that will be all.

As if awake to his offside thoughts, she opens the portal into her other world. It is not too wide, yet once he entered, he totally forgot earth and is immediately transfixed in another world.

In this new world, he is a Thulak, a shadowy underworld figure that wraps her like a dark shawl, wriggling out her history and replacing it with memories.

She is a twig that refuses to be bent by the tingling tornado. He is the mamba that curls around her green and chokes away her colour.

He is Aladdin that has Jasmine, but craves the ecstasy of a magical experience. She is the genie that fulfills his wishes. She is the enchantress that holds him under manacles of moans with the torture of her warm skin. He is a prophet that lays his lips on her breasts and exorcises her from possessed innocence until she is sprawling in passionate deliverance.

In this new world, nothing else mattered.

Not that there was anything to acknowledge, except that he was 24 today and she will be his fiancée’s bridesmaid in two weeks. His fiancée chose her to please him; she knew how so much he adored her. He always said he had watched her grow stage after stage and had stealthily admired her silent curves and crusty erectness. He had constantly fed her his Golden Morn when she decided to hate every cook Daddy brought home to perform all the duties of a proper wife material, and had recited his awkward nursery rhymes to her every night since there was no Mommy to read her bedtime stories.

In reciprocation, she called him “Brotherly”, not that she was entirely thrilled with the title. Left to her, she would have simply called him Josh, but there must be some honorary title bestowed on someone who saw your mother’s womb before you did.

He, on the other hand, didn’t like the title. In fact, it had always bothered him that she called him that name while he simply called her what she was, Juanita. He liked her name, liked how it tasted like salted prawn crackers on his lips, tasty, crunchy yet soluble. No, not just her name, he liked everything about her, how her shy eyes yet whiny waspish manners affected his heart and how her bronze skin suddenly blurs his memory especially when she needs him to stand in Daddy’s place at the PTA meeting. Her Physics teacher always seemed to know her too well, she always hinted him, at these meetings, on her recent crush and latest successes, so he decided to marry this teacher, alongside her knowledge. At least, she might be the reason why Juanita stopped failing physics. Never could he reconcile the fact she had reduced him, her everything, to “Brotherly”.

But when she knocked on his door that midnight, with a funny pink cake in her outstretched hands, the one she had made herself; when she said, “…to celebrate our henceforth, Josh…”, he knew she didn’t feel right about “Brotherly” too.

And right now, penetrating into her world of many stories filled with Mills and Boon fantasies, he didn’t care he had broken her naivety and hymen; he didn’t care they were only making true a prophecy. He didn’t care she was called Nnenna, because she looks just like her Grandmother. This same Grandmother that listened to her cousin, Nna’s wishes, and danced for him in the pit of passions, making him see revelations in the between of her thighs. Her vestal voluntarism and his virile voracity found both of them at the market square with cries of “Aru” piercing the air and cane bites lashing out from all corners on their naked skins.

He didn’t care for anything at all, because right at that moment, amidst shadows, silhouettes and a wishing cake, his sister was his most beautiful nightmare.

Thank you for reading,

Blog Contributor: @funmiakinpelu
Blog Editor: @pangoli

---

_{This article is a community contribution to the @onequality community-based magazine. If you would like to know more or be a part of the contributors, please refer to this post. Thank you.}