A young boy threading through a dying forest on a wheel barrow in Zimbabwe, trying to understand why it weighs so much to get so little. What I mean is the currency to acquire a loaf of bread weighs more than the actual bread it self. “I might as well eat the money” the little boy said out loud.
He tore a note and munched on it. “It doesn’t taste so bad” he thought but the need for water and the salty taste caused by the exchange of the note from so many hands made him rethink the idea of munching on more notes. He didn’t mind.
He was ok with eating dirty notes before he started to imagine where those hands have been. An image of an obese market woman who clearly doesn’t care about her personal hygiene crossed his mind. He imagined her squeezing the money and tucking it in her bra. He then imagined her in the toilet taking a dump, trying really hard to wipe her butt with a thin tissue paper that obviously wasn’t able to do justice to her enormous behind.
He imagined her fingers picking up feaces from her butt and she wiping it on the wall of the toilet. All of a sudden the salty soggy notes in his mouth began to feel like feaces even though he never tasted feaces before.
His mouth began to water and his stomach rejected what his mouth was entertaining as it defied gravity and made him spill the contents of his stomach. “I think I’ll stick to the loaf of bread. This evil land has become a slave to these pieces of paper. Not only physical borders but also mental ones divide us!! We are doomed!!” He cursed angrily as he wiped his mouth with his shirt. It was a captain America T-shirt with a star on it.
He always enjoyed the captain America cartoons they showed on tv when he was little. He wanted to be that kind of super hero. Not the kind that carries a wheelbarrow through the bushes to get a loaf of bread for breakfast. The kind that couldn’t save himself from hunger.
He looked to his left and saw his friend Ndebele. She too was on her own saturday morning duty. A beauty she was. He never got the courage to tell her that he liked her. He thought he wasn’t ready. Involuntarily moving towards her. She waved as he approached her. Mesmerized, he was stuck in a trance. All of a sudden her cheerful expressions quickly changed to horror. “Anopa!! Watch out!!!” She screamed at him but it was too late.
Already in the middle of the road without checking for any vehicles, a lorry laded with yam was uncontrollably speeding towards him. For some reason not known to him, he felt at ease and smiled. “At least I won’t worry about eating notes in heaven” his last words were inaudible to Ndebele.
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Abdulwahab Abubakar is a part time writer and a full time imaginator( yeah he imagined the word too). He blogs at oshomahabu.wordpress.com
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