Love is selfish

There is a knock on the door.

'Check your hands, look at your palm, it will testify against you on this day. The book of revelation sae And, behold I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his works shall be." Their father’s radio is still playing.

The knock is not stopping, Bola wakes up. She looks to the floor; her brothers are still sleeping. They sleep like they don’t hear the banging on the door that seems to be synchronizing with the beating of her chest. 

She’s going towards the door; she doesn’t want to go towards the door. She opens the door; she doesn’t want to open the door. The hearts stop. 

A naked skinny man is standing in front of her. It seems his flesh has vanished under his skin; leather skin stretched on roburst skeleton.

“My owner.” He kneels. “I have come to ease your ascension to your throne.” She wants to shout for help, for she knows it is the normal and clever thing to do, but she doesn’t.

“Good afternoon sir… wait oo. I know you. But I don’t think I have seen you before… Gbakanagbo-- Mr. Gbakanagbogun…How did I know that?”

“Come, my owner, and all your questions shall find answers.” He gets up from kneeling and gestures she comes out.” 

She doesn’t want to come out, she comes out. It is not her compound, anymore; she knows, inside of her, that this place is not a place. They walk on together but weren’t walking at all; distance come to them.

'The kingdom of God make we dey wait for, don come. But our prayers go to those that refuse to take the hands of Jesus Christ. The end is here. What shall you gain, I say. What shall it profit you oh mortals when you gain the whole world and lose your soul for eternity? Ah!' the radio went on and on; still sounding in her ears.

She and her brothers had gone from one abandoned building to another, gathering batteries for their father’s radio; it also had a cassette player. Their father use to play Buju Baton’s song-- destiny, all the time. 

The song started playing in her ears, replacing the preachers voice; like her ears are now antennae.

“Do I have like… superpowers now?” She asks him. She feels as though before she woke up, someone had turned her inside out to dispose off of all her organs for her to be light like a balloon and at the same time heavy as a… a planet. That proves that light and heavy float. 

“Author of my faith, you are much more than that. You are a god.”

“A god?... can a girl be a god? I thought God is a man?”

“Gods are sexless. We humans use gender to oppress and feel powerful, because in truth we are powerless. ”

She just wanted to know if she had one; she does not fully understand what he’s saying. It sounds like what adults should be discussing; she is only fifteen. 

“Yes, I suppose that would be the fact that you can never be hungry. Half of the world has starved to death and the other half is starving to death. Your office gathers power from the world’s hunger.

“So, yes my lady, as long as the world remains in starvation, you can do anything. But be careful; you can give any food to anyone but you can never give food to anybody, for the day you do, you will end. And yes you are immortal now. ”

“I am not understanding you... immortals don’t die na.”

“My owner, everything ends. Even ends end. Ends are only final or unending because of our human level of perception. Everything is a circle.”

She remembers how it all started; they all thought it will end but it didn’t. The Novok Virus entered their small town. And brought the end closer to them.

Nowhere was safe; no vaccine or cure for the virus, they say. People started growing grass on their body; and they mostly die after twenty-four hours of contracting the virus.

She remembers she, Joshua and Shola digging a hole. Norris, crying, held crying Junior as they planted their dead parents on the ground. 

“Why are you so skinny? Is it the virus?”

“No, my most high. When I served your predecessor, I vow not to eat anything again. It is disrespectful to your office. I only drink water. besides those that walk with you walk for and on eternity without food.”

Another series of flashes, like frozen realities overlaying each other, blast her. But each separate one tells of an unending stories; she sees herself roasting the chemist man, Mr. Okon, that was killed during all the looting.

She remembers how she fed her brothers part of him, when they couldn’t walk and told them that it was the flesh of a dead goat she saw.

They had stayed three day without food afterward, before the pang of hunger, like insects chewing their stomach walls, subsided again; leaving them in a state of mortal weakening and numbness.

At some points they played Buju Batons songs and danced; the music serving as momentary energy that filled and fed their cells and animated them to ecstasy that forgets hunger. But it got to a point listening to music became harder than lifting a car.

She had told her bothers to lay with their stomach to the floor that the UN would soon announce on the radio their town as among the zones they will be dropping small bag of garri(cassava flakes) from passing airplanes.

“Sir, I need to go back, my brothers are at home and they have not eaten for two weeks now.”

“My lady, there is no back. Or front, for that matter. Those are human concepts. And, my lady, if you help or intervene in the food situation in the world, it will end you. humans are too egoistical; all they want is to satisfy their natural urges. Hunger, sex, toileting, madness… name it.”

She remembered crying herself to sleep after hiding dead Junior inside carton in their backyard.

“And besides, my lady, they won’t even remember you. To them, you never existed. You died and were reborn. Even if they remember you, they will not accept you; humans already have problem with their fellow humans with different skin colour, talk less of someone of your might. They will attempt to stone you to death.”

“I died?” This seems to bother her a little. “You said I can give people food? Where is the food?”

“Yes, my lady, but if you do, you will end. It is directly against the essence of your office.”

“I don’t care; if I don’t give them food, they will die. My mama and papa are no more.” As she is saying this, another blast of reality touches her; two hundred thousand people – including children -- dying in a camp in North Africa. She knows this one has not happened and is not happening but will happen.

“They are not in your now, my lady. Let them go. When the last human die; me, if it pleases you, my almighty, you will become the god of the gods.”

'If you had two mangoes that you will eat in the morning and evening and then you starve to death, would you give one to another that doesn’t have any at all?' The woman on the radio had asked.

She didn’t like her brothers that much but she loves them. They are always fighting and scattering things. But since the death of their parent, she had become their parents.

There is no argument of what she would do. Love is selfish.

XbX