Chapter summary
Karo’s Sunday vanity curdles into terror when a ritual calabash appears outside her Lagos apartment.
KARO
Sunday Karo was looking down, her head bent into her mobile phone, as she crossed the street. She did not have to worry about running into a vehicle that Sunday morning. Most residents were either in church or somewhere loafing between the sheets.
She had taken a quick dash to the store around the corner from her apartment, where she lived alone, to get breakfast. She was an early riser, and breakfast sat at the top of her daily to-do list.
Everything about her latest Instagram post amused her. She had taken a picture with the store owner, an elderly acquaintance, to celebrate Mothering Sunday.
Mama Bolu ran the only store in the neighbourhood that opened early on Sunday mornings. Karo thought it was a smart business move, one that guaranteed her a decent queue every weekend.
The post showed Karo’s smiling face and Mama Bolu’s, the old woman sparing the camera a quick look while she attended to the growing queue in front of her stall. Behind them, the line was a blur of Sunday faces and one helmeted okada rider, bent over a bunch of ripe plantain.
Karo’s fresh tattoo, a red rose and its stalk, peeked from beneath the collar of her shirt.
“Mothers like her are the reason we get healthy breakfast,” she had written under the picture.
In real sense, she was showing off the tattoo she had gotten a day earlier, sponsored by her rich boyfriend. He had likened their love to a special rose, each petal hugging the bud, protective of its sweet centre. Her centre, he said, was what kept him excited.
The like icon under the image showed it was getting good traction. Some comments praised the tattoo, others thought she looked pretty on a Sunday morning. A couple of trolls showed up too, as always.
She had mentally set a target for the number of likes she expected. The number was growing, and it pleased her.
Then a stranger liked her post.
“Who the hell is Fatbabygirl?” An irritated, puzzled look distorted her face. “Fatbabygirl,” she muttered, tapping into the profile to see who her new admirer was.
There was nothing to see. No picture, no posts, no followers. Just a name and an empty grey circle.
That was when she noticed the calabash.
She was only a few metres from the door to her apartment when she saw the disgusting, large, hard-shelled gourd, carved into an open orb and dripping on the sides with red palm oil. A feather stuck out of the concoction while flies danced around its content. Karo had seen enough.
“Oh my God.” It was all her ragged breath, moving in and out of her mouth at irregular intervals, could allow. She dropped the polythene bag with the loaf of bread and the raw eggs and clutched her phone tightly.
She ran as far as her legs could carry her, five blocks away, and from that vantage point she scanned every adjoining building for signs of anyone lurking. She told herself it was a dumb prank, or some stupid, ill-timed joke.
But everywhere was calm, an eerie calm. Not a leaf out of place, not a stranger out of place. Everywhere was just as it should be.
Her heart kept pounding as she struggled to focus. Something was not right. She suddenly started feeling cold.
“A calabash. Jesus!” She knew the dreadful import of it.
Growing up in Isara, a small farming community in Ogun State, it was not unusual to see these calabashes at road junctions on her way to school in the mornings. Her mother had warned her never to look at their content. They belonged to the local gods worshipped by the community. “But is Alani, the destitute, a god too?” she had asked her mother.
Alani would sit comfortably at the roadside and devour, with relish, every piece of uncooked yam, licking the oil down his arm as it trailed to his elbow.
She was still waiting for the answer to that question, till date.
Perhaps Alani was a god after all.
Now she had lost her appetite at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, and a calabash full of ritual food sat right at the door leading into her apartment.
Peace had been murdered!
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 2
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Featured and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence and are illustrative; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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