Ìjì (Thunderstorm)

You don’t like a lot of things.

The heat of an African sun which does not care for those without shelter. The dirt of a walk of a thousand miles that clings to your battered skin.

You don’t like a lot of things.

The stale smell of sour sweat that lingers despite the thorough washing you try to give yourself every chance you get.

You don’t like a lot of things.

And you’ve learnt that a lot of things are unavoidable. You have learnt to live with them. But dislike is starkly different from loathing. And you especially loathe one thing. The angry raging of storms in the middle of a miserable night. The biting cold is inevitable, no matter how tightly you curl up. The wrathful roaring of Ṣàngó in the thunder. The shrill whistling of the àjé that flies on the wind. The dampness of the ọmọ omi that lingers on your skin. The stupefying flash of Elédùmarè’s lightning. If your mother was here, she’d say the Ìjì is a gift from God. You’ve never cared for this gift. You despise the God that gives this gift.
Your loathe burns for thunderstorms.

You spend your days with two people. Ishola and Hauwa. They had found you wandering the streets after your hospital discharge, lost and forgotten. They had taken you in and had become everything to you.

Hauwa is the oldest, the streets have been her home for the longest time. Her life despite being the roughest, is spent trying to make the people she loves happy. Every day she wakes up with a smile for both of you, every day you frown at her lack of awareness. Most times you look at her, and you forget that she’s fighting the toughest battle within. Her sickness which ravages her inside doesn’t surface unless she lets it. During those moments you respect her more than ever.

Ishola is a kid of eight, but the stories his eyes tell make him seem much older. Late at night, when his underfed body is shivering in the cold of a windy night, you wonder about his lost innocence. An innocence the cruel streets of Ìbàdàn has taken from him.

You remember when you were eight. Your mother’s sweet voice singing those beautiful Yórùbà songs to your baby sister while you watched. The comforting smell of the egusi soup that was cooking in the kitchen. Your father coming home, lifting and swinging you around with a big grin. “You’re now a big boy o!”

A sad smile blooms on your face.

Ishola coughs in his sleep.

At the very least you were loved. At the very least you were happy. Ishola has none of that.

You put the extra sack on him. A soft sigh escapes his thin frame and he curls up tighter. He doesn’t have everything. But at least he is not cold.

You quietly promise his sleeping form. “You’ll never be cold.”

When the storm rages, you know it’s an ominous sign so it doesn’t come as a shock when it happens.
The world is always cruel like that.

After a long night of endless rain and freezing cold, Ishola was found in a gutter. That dirty disgusting place where all useless trash lying on the street tends to end up. He had been clearly beaten into silence, the clothes on his body were the same he had worn for the past two nights when he’d left to work his night shifts at the local bakery.

He’d been happy when he got the job, you had all been. Now he was still. Quiet and still.

That little boy who had suffered the terrible fate of being born into a cold and heartless place had died the cruelest of deaths. Alone, afraid, cold, and in pain.

You remember that silent promise you made.

It has been six days since that awful morning. Hauwa has been crying at night when she thinks you’re sleeping. She doesn’t say it, but you know what she’s thinking. You can’t bring yourself to weep though. Not even if you tried. Your tear ducts feel drier than harmattan dust.

Instead, you roll out of the sack mat, where you spent your night and watch as the sun rises over the slums you’ve spent the past six years of your life. You should be choking with fear as the memory of Ishola’s stiff, dirty, and battered body surfaces in your mind. You should be going mad with pain over his eternal absence.

You should.

But as the sun climbs higher in the sky, you can only be numb. You can only remember to blink away the tears from staring at its glaring brightness. And you curse the sun with its blinding brightness. The children’s books you sometimes find in the dumps depict the sun with a smiling face, its wide grin had always seemed mocking to your sad circumstances. And so you’ve learned to hate life and its gift. Because they had slowly become curses.

The thunderstorms at night. The burning afternoon sun. You curse them both.

Once, you were quiet. A husk of meat and bones with no need for connection and communication.
Hauwa had hated you at first. She had called you ungrateful for loathing even your own existence. An idiot for not knowing just how much bearable your life was compared to others. You were too angry to yell. Your voice which had been rusty with disuse croaked quietly.

“I never asked to live.”

And she had slapped you. Over and over, until Ishola begged her to stop.

“Ódé ni è.” (He is a dullard) She had said angrily, her eyes had been full of tears. You had wondered why she cried. But you were too angry, too hurt. So you left. For days you slept under damaged trailers and inside dry gutters. Roaming the streets in a daze of confusion and anger. Wanting to die, but still desperately wanting to live. It took weeks before you went back to that old container.

There were no dramatics when you came back. Hauwa and Ishola had been huddled on the metal floor, sharing some jollof rice from a takeaway plate. Hauwa had asked you to join them. So you did.

Later that night, while Ishola had slept. You had talked. Talked about your survivor’s guilt, about your anger and loss. You had talked for hours. You had talked until the stars filled the night sky and the roar of traffic lessened substantially. And Hauwa, with her but pure and bruised heart, had quietly sat and listened.

It’s been ten months since Ishola died. You had both tried to continue living through the brutality of the streets. At first, you felt like you were succeeding, but Hauwa’s sickness worsened. With the life you both lived, there was no way to treat it, no money and no people. So she endured it, and she did it with a smile.
Now she is quiet. Too quiet.

The only times you hear her voice is when you prod her. Even then her replies are monotonous. Lifeless and sluggish. You try and try. Hoping for a change. You can’t lose her too. Not after all that has left you. You beg her to consider your presence in her life. Your pleas become prayers. But just like all the people in your life, just like the thunderstorms you’ve always loathed, her sickness ravages her body and leaves nothing but a quiet corpse in its wake.

As you cling to the still and cold body, you notice that the rusty roof sings with a steady staccato of rainfall. There is no sound after that.

Everything is quiet.

You have never liked a lot of things.

The stale of sour sweat after a long day of hard work. The fact that you have to smile through your yellowed teeth every time someone comes to ask for your assistance at the shop where you work part-time.

You hate the put-togetherness of all the women and the cocky smugness of the men who look down at you because your clothes are faded.

You have never liked a lot of things. But you’ve learnt that some things are inevitable. But dislike is starkly different from loathing. Now you loathe one thing and one thing only.

With each day that you leave the noise of the world into the single room you managed to rent with the money you had saved, you are reminded in the quiet of that box space that you have lost a lot to the anger of storms. And all that ever remains is the longing and pain in nothing but…

Silence.

And in that silence, you remember…

Check out the next story from our finalists in the Short Story Challenge#1