Creative Writing - A THOUSAND NAIRA - Orginal Fiction Story

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Officer Dike swiped his face with his dusty handkerchief, frowning at the moving traffic. The sun gave him no respite as it beat down on him wickedly from its comfortable place in the sky. He’d have shot it down if he could; the nuisance. He felt the trickle down his back and fingered his gun, then wondered how many bullets the old metal still had.

“Officer!”

The obsequious bus driver was waving. Maybe today wouldn’t end badly, he thought as the bus stopped.

“Tony, no give me that nonsense chicken change you dey give me,” he warned.

“You no wan chicken change?” Tony asked, smiling strangely.

Near Tony, Dike noticed that he smelled and his teeth were more crooked than he thought. Stained with ‘igbo’ smoke, they reminded him of a burnt house.

Tony pressed a bill into his hands and drove away. He unfolded the money that Tony had crumpled and stared at a thousand naira note. A smile slowly creased his lips. This one was his, he wasn’t going to submit to any superior. He glanced quickly at Akpan and Ade sleeping under the mango tree by the roadside and quickly pocketed the money.

---

That Saturday night, Dike was dreaming of the ugba he would eat at Madam Sharp’s place tomorrow and the generous tombo when something woke him up. He cursed. The noise came again, a dragging sound on top of his cupboard. It wasn’t his son, the boy had traveled to the village with his mother. He fumbled for his torch, found it and switched it on, then he walked to the table with a stick to kill the stupid rat.

There was no rat, there was only the thousand naira he had come home with. As his torchlight fell on it, the two images winked at him. He blinked and went closer. They winked again, then the paper grew in length, longer and longer.

The watchman outside heard a scuffle from Dike’s house and mumbled in his sleep. The scuffle lasted 30 seconds before silence reigned again.

Dike’s neighbours would find in the morning that he had been strangled when they’d come to call him for drinks. Ibeka, the shifty-eyed thief and his drinking buddy, would quickly pocket the innocent-looking thousand naira bill on top of his cupboard.

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