My Promo-Mentors Writing Challenge--Remembering Difon.

Image Source: pinterest.com

This is my entry for the contest organized by @futurethinker.

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The day Difon died, the air smelled of gun powder, and horror took the atmosphere captive. It played out like a scene from a well scripted movie.

The year was 2003 and I was eight. My mother had taken me along on one of her trips to her village—I call it her village because in Africa, we align ourselves with your father’s descent. This was somewhere in the tropic rainforest of Cross River in Southern Nigeria, where the vegetation is a striking lush green, sprawling into endless distances.

The family compound, back in the day, bubbled with life. My granny was alive then—that woman never ran out of stories and she cooked better than anyone that has ever walked this earth. I had many cousins, mostly male. All my uncles, except one, lived within the family stead.

My mother was, perhaps, the white sheep of the family. While her only sister and five brothers sired mostly male children, my mother gave birth to mostly girls. Four girls preceded my arrival. When I came along and it was glaring that, unlike most males from the lineage, I had the tenderness of a girl, my uncles—men with unrivalled sense of humour, always joked that my mother had birthed yet another girl with a penis.

On one particular afternoon, my mother had gone out leaving me under the care of my granny. My granny then told me to go and play along with my cousins. So, I joined Difon and two of his brothers, Onen and Oluwa—it never ceases to amaze me how the lad ended up with that name.

Onen was the eldest, about twelve as at then. Difon was about seven and the boy was physically stronger than I was. He was stout and had a firm grip.

I and Difon were playing floor soccer with Coca-Cola bottle caps(only kids raised in Nigeria understand this game) while Oluwa watched us. And, I swear, the boy could play! Onen was in the sitting room.

A boy came by. He was Onen’s friend and about his age. He went past us by the balcony and joined Onen in the sitting room. We didn’t know what they were up to.

I felt like peeing. I stepped down from the balcony to take a pee against a patch of grass. Then I heard the shot behind me. I turned sharply to catch Difon’s fall. His body jerked and jerked.
The boy was still holding onto the short gun, staring at Difon’s jerking body in shock.

Onen screamed “you have shot my brother!”

The boy dropped the gun and started crying. Difon’s body was covered in a pool of crimson red.

My granny, who had also heard the shot, emerged from her house screaming.

This is it: Onen knew where his father kept his hunting gun. In an attempt to impress his friend, he brought the gun out. His friend asked to have a feel of it, unaware that it was loaded. He came out to the balcony to take a mock shoot, aiming at Difon and shot him on the chest from close range.

I have gone on to attend the burials of two uncles, four cousins and my granny but non of such tragedies left me a scar like when I watched Difon die. It was the first time I saw someone die, the first time I saw the damage that a gun is capable of.

He’d be 22 now if he lived. Sometimes, I wonder what he would have become, his failures, his successes, and the girls he would have chased. Whenever I go digging into the memory of the time he existed, I pause my life and feel my heart wrenching. Then I shake my head and resume this life of mine.