
Cheers to 2025
Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of
“A new mystery novel is berth”
Danny’s first mistake was not turning back when he noticed a few cars reversing in a frenzied haste in the opposite direction.
He was slightly distracted watching a funny skit on his mobile phone at the time and didn’t notice a few cars hitting the reverse direction. When he finally spotted them he dismissed it as some reckless drivers who got so distracted themselves and must have missed a turning.
His second mistake? Driving with his side glasses down! He wanted the fresh gush of air to replace the stale dampness he perceived inside his car as he wheeled it out of his home that morning.
In a swift move, the vicious sight of a gun wielding scar-faced young man right on his side of the road reminded him to be even more vigilant and spewed his glaring mistake right in his face.
“What the hell” he muttered under his breath. His voice quaking in dreadful panic. His car was unfortunately locked in.
He had gone too close to the sedan in front of him and a truck was edging closely on his tail.
He was stuck!
Without notice, another scallywag turned up on the other side of the window. His face nothing but fearsome and menacing.
When the side window glass broke into shards of hundred brittle pieces, he felt beads of blood trickle down his cheek in torrents.
He was panic stricken and somewhere between his thighs, he let go streaks of hot urine in total resignation.
The stern looks and voices came at him like lightening flashes demanding for money, his wrist watch, his wallet, his phones, his laptop bag, his rings and accessories.
They assaulted him, yanked off his wrist watch, tugged at his pockets while it felt as though everything froze. Time stopped. He was in some sort of trance. Lost in the eerie moment. His view tainted by blood trickling from a cut on his forehead and above his eye lid as he watched the last of the vagabonds leave in haste.

He had just been robbed. Not only of his properties, but his senses.
He sat transfixed in that position, horrified and drifting into unconsciousness as the shock from the robbery left him helpless.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed. The smell of anti-biotic rented the air. A pillow propped behind his bandaged head and the back view of the nurse reading his vitals was his welcome view. He had no clue how he got there, but the first question he asked was;
“where is my car?”
“Please relax Mr…….. Ehr” the nurse enquired
“Danny, Danny Augusto” his voice raspy and his throat parched.
“Do you not remember?” she pressed further. “You drove yourself to the hospital yesterday night. Your car is right at the car park downstairs”
Still he had no clue. One thing he wouldn’t be forgetting is the pain he felt on his side, arm and body. He felt like his body was wrecked from being under a moving train.

He could barely move his arm.
“Do you have a relative, wife, family we can reach out to?” the nurse asked calmly as she walked closer to his bed.
“My wife”
Can I dial her number so I can inform her that you are here? We found no form of identity in the car?
“Please do nurse”
He managed to reel out a number so swiftly, there was no doubt it was a familiar contact.
A female voice answered at first ring.
“Hello, good evening, my name is Daniella, your husband was involved in a car robbery last night and is hospitalized here at the St. George Hospital in marina”
“My husband? How the hell is that possible? He was home last night and just had breakfast, he stepped out a few minutes ago to get newspapers. I am sure you have got the wrong phone number”
“Your husband is Mr Danny Augusto. He has been unconscious all night and is right here with me. Perhaps you would like to speak with him ma’am” the nurse insisted.
“This is certainly not possible. You probably have the wrong number, he was here last night and……….” she stopped in her tracks when she heard the familiar voice of Danny.
“Hello sweetie…” Danny struggled to speak. But the voice was none other than the husband she lived with for 18years and known half of her life.
Bemused and shocked and with trembling hands stricken from fear and confusion, she paced quickly to the front door with hopes to catch a glimpse of the man she had spent the night with. He was nowhere outside. Nowhere in sight.

Her thoughts flashed back to the passionate love they made and the unusual grace he moved and how much he loved every cell on her body. His kisses felt like they had honey dripping from it. It left hot trails of coal as he explored every crevice of her body. She wanted it to last forever.
He came home, the same time he always arrived from work. There was nothing amiss. He didn’t turn up with his car though. And that wasn’t unusual either. Sometimes he came home with an uber ride after an excruciating and busy day. He looked tired and walked in with his usual laptop bag. He barely spoke a word. He was a man of very little words.
She heard him having his bath in the room they shared and asked if he would have dinner. His response was the same he gave every time she asked- a curt No.
She then sank into the comfort of the sofa in the living room to see her favorite soap. The kids were in boarding school and the house was empty save for both of them. She stayed up very late and only joined him when he was fast asleep just before midnight. That was the decent routine they had developed over the years.
There was certainly nothing amiss. They had the most amazing sex that night and she was still smacking from the glow in the aftermath of the romp.
She made him breakfast and admired his every face and smile. It reminded her of the first few years in her marriage. It felt magical. He looked just the same. No facial hairs, a full fleshy lips doted on either side of the cheek by a cute dimple. His round face and bald head looked the same as she remembered. He even smelled the same.
With trembling hands and her voice quivering she says.
“Danny he looked just like you”

“Who? …….. Who?” Danny mustered as much strength as he could to ask. Again and again. But the phone was tone dead.
Just that moment, he reappeared at the front porch and she felt blood draining from her head as she collapsed lifelessly into the dinning sets.
Post your questions. I would like to answer.

Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of

In an era that increasingly demands hyper-specialization, Akin Akingbogun stands out as a refreshing anomaly. He is a man who refuses to be confined to a single box.

There is a particular kind of silence that falls on a man when the phone stops ringing, the proposals go unanswered, and the diary that once groaned under the weight of appointments sits quietly — almost mockingly — open. If you have ever been there, you know it.

Let me tell you something uncomfortable: the most generous person you know — the one who volunteers every weekend, donates quietly, never asks for anything in return — is probably getting something out of it. Not money. Maybe not even recognition. But something.

Adaeze had been awake since 4 a.m.
Not because she was anxious — though she was — but because this trip felt different. After eighteen months of follow-ups, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations polished to a mirror shine, the deal was finally ready to close. An investor meeting in Abuja. A partnership that would change the trajectory of her small but gutsy consulting firm. She had triple-checked her flight, her documents, her outfit. She had prayed. She was ready.

When he told his father, Dare’s first response was a sigh. Then: “I told you to practice more. I told you months ago. You don’t listen. You never listen.”
There was no “I’m sorry, son.” No pause to let the boy simply feel the loss of the thing he wanted. Just a swift, seamless pivot to what Temi had done wrong — and, by extension, how Temi’s failure was evidence of Temi’s failure to take his father’s wisdom seriously.

I want to tell you something that took me embarrassingly long to learn. Not because the idea is complicated — it is not. But because it cuts against something deeply wired in us, something we are rarely honest enough to admit.

You are somewhere between forty and fifty-five. You looked in the mirror recently and had a thought you immediately dismissed. Maybe you googled something at 2am that you would never say out loud. Maybe you bought something expensive and impractical and told everyone it was an investment. Or maybe you just feel — quietly, persistently — like the life you built was supposed to feel better than this by now.

Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician and playwright — a man trained in the discipline of diagnosis before he became one of the most precise storytellers in the history of world literature. That combination of sensibilities matters, because the principle he articulated in the late nineteenth century was not merely a rule of dramatic craft. It was an observation about the nature of significance itself. About what it means for something to be present. About the relationship between introduction and consequence.

There is a prison that has no concrete walls, no iron bars, no guards posted at the gate. Nobody built it for you. Nobody sentenced you to it. And yet, for many people, it is the place they spend the better part of their lives — circling its perimeter, brushing their fingers against its invisible boundaries, and quietly retreating each time they feel the edge of something that might require more of them than they believe they can give.

Picture a hand holding sand. The tighter the grip, the faster the grains escape between the fingers. Ease the grip — open the palm, allow the hand to become a vessel rather than a vice — and the sand stays. This is one of the oldest paradoxes of leadership, and one of the least learned: that control, pursued too aggressively, produces the very loss of control it was designed to prevent.

There is a version of ambition that builds. And there is a version of ambition that consumes. From a distance — and especially from inside it — they look almost identical. Both are energetic. Both are forward-moving. Both speak the language of vision and possibility. The difference only becomes visible later, usually at the point of fracture, when what was built begins to come apart under the weight of what was promised.

There is a particular kind of organisational absurdity that most people who have ever worked in a company will recognise immediately. It is the policy that was clearly designed by someone who has never had to implement it. The restructuring that looked elegant on a slide deck and chaotic on the ground. The customer-facing process that was overhauled by a committee that has not spoken to a customer in years. The directive that arrives from above, fully formed and non-negotiable, that causes the people closest to the work to exchange a look — the kind of look that says, without words: they have no idea what we actually do here.

We have built an entire mythology around exhaustion. In boardrooms and business culture — perhaps nowhere more so than in the high-pressure, always-on professional culture many of us inhabit — busyness has become a currency. To be tired is to be serious. To be overwhelmed is to be important. To be burning out, quietly, is somehow proof that you are fully committed.
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37 thoughts on “Waste of Sin”
Mirror image twins?
Facts based on corroborative evidence –
He was admitted into an hospital the previous night. So definitely he wasn’t the man who went to his house.
The man reappeared- so he is real.
How does this unravel?
Author playing our head,what’s going on, definitely Danny is a twin does he know or not is the question,who did Daniella sleep that night? Danny or the twin??
Is Danny a twin? We ll see!
Engr Akin ‘Hadley Chase’ Akingbogun. My question is how come she wasn’t able to decipher from the romp? Had it been with this same gusto and rhythm all these years? The new-normal or abnormal in the intertwine of bodies should have sounded a mental alarm except emotions have sent reasons on override…
Wow,I actually read this story twice!!! Is Danny a twin? Why do they have contact to the same wife?
And if that was Ghost Danny at home why did he not discern and disappear after Daniella received the call from the hospital? Please I need answers!!!
I can’t wait for the next episode…explosive…my mind wondering
I want to believe Danny has a twin… .. It was a good and smooth read!
Huh, so who exactly did she spend the night with or is the Mr. Danny a twin? And so many questions you have to provide! We are in a serious state of suspense right now.
Good write-up.
See you at the next episode
Just don’t come and tell us she later got pregnant. I know you o!
When is the continuing part coming out sir???
Interesting how the story changed to mystery sharply in a concise manner! Well done Duke!
I hope it’s not gonna be a case of identical twin or ghost? Can’t wait to read till end.
I believe Danny has a twin. No explanation seems justifiable right now .
Now I believe Danny has got to be a twin and has a real badass twin brother
Waiting to read the continuation ……
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He is a twin jorrr. No two ways to it.
Okay. Please send me the next episode that you have with you. Lemme compare with mine
Waow,the man he spent d night with definitely wasn’t her husband,there is sure more mystery to unravel in this mind blowing tale
Glued to my seat already
I love.this!!weldone omo Akin
How do you know this Flakky…….. Do you have the next episode with you?
It’s.okay
I think the other dude is his doppelganger who has probably been watching him from afar waiting to steal his life lol!
Lola of life. Is he? We ll find out soon.
Whilst trying to get a hold of the robbery scene, I delved into the possibility of an unknown albeit evil half.
Fictional as it may appear, it certainly is filled with suspense.
Coincidence? Part II will surely tell.
Well done sir…..
I am glad you find it worthy of your time
This is intriguing. I can’t wait to read about what happens next.
Thank you for an exciting story
I started thinking Naija men and thier games is playing a nice one on Danny himself. but it looks like he’s clean. we ‘ll see sha..
Sorry am behind the series..
Good one! good suspense…don’t tell me someone is been dreaming 🙂
So relieved it’s a fiction. Great piece filled with intrigue
Seriously?
A ghost?
nhmmmm!!!
Short, sweet but didn’t see d twist at d end. Gunning for d next episode
That’s the idea bro. Thanks for the message.
Good read man, love the twist and the plot, read other comments and am hoping it’s scifi or supernatural..
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I think I’m a little bit late to the party
But this story is intriguing indeed, I can’t wait to read what happens next….
Its never too late to catch up!