Short Story

The Phoenix
By A. Igoni Barrett

Due north of the conflux of the great rivers Niger and Benue lies a plateau inhabited by many tribes and village kingdoms. For as far as the eye can travel unimpeded the green plains of this land roll on gently, so level in parts that the storm waters stand nonplussed for a slope to run off. A cluster of hills span the eastern horizon of the fertile tableland, their distant peaks daily lost in morning mists until the sun’s rubicund face emerges from their midst. Giant-sized outcrops of blue-black marble dot the landscape like broken eggshells. A sweet-smelling carpet of succulent-stemmed elephant grass dances slowly in the perpetual breeze of those rarefied heights. Furlongs separate the few trees that rise from the earth, each one shorter than a man and with near-leafless branches so intertwined that snakes dangle from them like macabre festoons, fatally ensnared. A thin trail from the far hills meanders through this land—now a sludgy footpath, then the treacherous currents of the muddy River Mada. From its riverbed net traps dredge up finned relics of the dinosaur age. The pastoral calm of this sprawling land is now and again splintered by the mating cries of wild guinea fowls. The mighty elephant once strode these plains, as did gorillas, ostriches and white missioners: of them all what remains is bleached bone.

This was the land of Tartius Abrachius’ birth, the Shangri-La that he loved with a savage passion—until he lost both arms to the swing of a machete that had coveted his life. He was lucky: he was the only survivor of a party of school children whose pearl-clear laughter was cut short in an ambush mounted by warriors of a neighbouring tribe. This slaughter spelt the deathblow to a decades-old truce between centuries-old enemies. Reprisals followed, and were endlessly reciprocated, and then succeeded by powwows that served no purpose other than as interregna during which the belligerents—exchanging the sword for the scythe—gathered in their harvests. By the time the conflict had exhausted its fuel of angry young men, Tartius Abrachius was in the prime of manhood.

In spite of his handicap, which had lain heavy on him, and had nearly broken his spirit (both arms lopped off at the elbow!), Tartius Abrachius had from the outset refused to resign himself to the sad fate of a beggarly existence, forever dependent on the pity of strangers. He had shrugged off the fears of family and friends and had chosen a trade. He had learnt it well, and with resourcefulness he compensated for his physical shortcomings. Tartius Abrachius was an itinerant tailor.

Two days after the termination of his tailoring apprenticeship Tartius Abrachius, again scorning the easy advice of kith and kin, abandoned the scene of his woe for the Big City. It wasn’t an easy decision: the beauty of those verdant plains tugged at him like an umbilical cord, and almost turned endurable the memory of his loss.

Plying his trade in the Big City, Tartius Abrachius was at first a novelty, and attracted custom only on the strength of this fact. For, at the sight of the armless man with the headless horse-shape of a sewing machine riding on one shoulder, and the twill cap of his trade set on his head at an angle decidedly rakish—as if he had hands and they were thrust into his pockets; at the sight of this curious figure, Pygmy-short and as slim as a starved tomcat, his features genial and untouched by his misfortune, the spring in his step disavowing worry; at the sight of Tartius Abrachius the housewives abandoned their chores and trooped out of their houses with armfuls of clothing that suddenly required the sartorial touch. And while he snipped and stitched away these busybodies hovered about, ostensibly for the gossip. He did not disappoint: he regaled them with tales blatantly traitorous to his own sex and astounded their sense of wonder with the ease with which he executed the ‘sleight of feet’ involved in wielding scissors and threading needles.

Over time, seeing the quality of his work, and coming to regard the moments spent in his company as respite from the trap of domestic monotony, he became a favourite amongst the housewives of the Okobaba and Makoko slums, and made a good living off their loneliness.

In the split-second before Tartius Abrachius was forever parted from his arms they had been outstretched, this following a mock throw-in to demonstrate the finer points of getting one’s weight behind a hurled soccer ball. He was a soccer-fiend. At an age when his counterparts were aspiring no higher than to become cartoon characters, he had decided upon his future profession. And, at a precocious twelve years of age, he had put the finishing touches to a work plan for achieving his goals. But that was the year that destiny intervened, and as no contingency plan of man can salvage a dream that the fates have repudiated, he watched his ambition shrivel and die.

Second to none on Tartius Abrachius’ blueprint for world domination was physical training, specifically running. Born in a land whose span intoxicated the wild stallion in man, running was an activity for which the opportunity and incentive was never lacking. And Tartius Abrachius could run. When he sucked in his breath and dove headlong at the world it was no exaggeration to aver that none in ten villages could touch his coattails. He ran like Atalanta reborn: with supreme focus, supreme confidence, and the effortlessness of a falling leaf. He was beautiful to watch, and he was beautiful every day, his slim form cutting swathes through the sea of emerald bushes that caressed his legs with delicate slashes, and swayed in obeisance to his dedication.

Though on that fateful day unable to do anything for his arms, instantaneous to the blow his feet unfurled their wings and bore him away like a billet-bound bullet, thus saving his life. That, however, was the last time he ever ran those fields.

Tartius Abrachius, with his sewing machine on his shoulder and sauntering even in the heat of midday, raised his hand to scratch his nose—and saw the stump. He wrinkled his nose and smiled wryly. Even after all this time he still wasn’t accustomed to his lack of hands, and the situation was not helped by the fact that he could feel them dangling at the end of nothingness; he could feel every muscle spasm and flex of a finger, and the weight of fingernails growing untrimmed, and the itch in his palm whenever money was expected. He jabbed at his nose with the stump and turned his thoughts to football.

His dream, years dead, had been transfigured from beyond the grave and now thrust itself once again upon his consciousness. The rolling away of the stone from the door of the sepulchre, so to speak, had begun with a football match he had stumbled upon. Mrs. Akoy, a friend and customer, had recently lost her youngest daughter, and it was while on the way to her house to offer his condolences that he came upon a grass oasis in that desert of brick and corrugated iron. There he experienced a vision: he beheld a group of disabled men engaged in the Beautiful Game. On sighting him they had let out whoops of brotherhood, and had invited his participation. He declined, seeing as the house of the bereaved was within sight of the field. But, after verifying that they were a club, and that some of their members played professionally, and also that they convened on that field of dreams on the same day of every week, he promised to put in an appearance at their next meet. That was today.

Tartius Abrachius’ feet trembled at the thought of kissing the round leather. It had been years: years of stagnation, years of no passion. Yet there were others like him out there playing the game, living his dream. He would reclaim it. Maybe not the major leagues, the big clubs—but then again why not? Prosthetics: an addition to his diction since moving to the Big City. He had been saving up towards that new goal, though what he had managed to gather so far was still only a drop in the ocean. But no matter—the important thing was football. Maybe he would make the Paralympics, or, why not even the first armless man to play in La Liga. The Guinness Book of Records. A blessing in disguise. But the important thing was football. Tartius Abrachius’ feet trembled.

“Thief! Olé! Hold him o—please hold him! Olé!”

A shape hurtled past Tartius Abrachius. The woman who had raised the alarm, the victim he presumed, was running towards him, her efforts hampered by obesity and a wrapper that kept coming undone. Her cries had sent some pedestrians in hot pursuit of the culprit, with more joining the chase as they comprehended the situation. Then the woman, still screaming entreaties garnished with imprecations, fell flat on her face.

“I am not disabled—I just have no arms,” Tartius Abrachius whispered; then he flung aside his sewing machine and set out after the crowd that had formed on the thief’s tail.

At his first step there was an explosion in his head; then a strange calm descended on him. But, with no arms to steer with, he ran awkwardly, like a flightless bird. It was the same way he had run on that day, the last day he had run. His spirits began to flag. As his calf-muscles bunched in preparedness for pulling up, he remembered his soccer game. He exploded forward.

With the wind in his face Tartius Abrachius recalled the wide-open fields of his childhood and the velvet softness of the earth beneath the feet and the perfume of crushed grass, and his ambitions—and he ran. His legs pounded the pavement like their joy had suffered no hiatus and tears squeezed from his eye corners and got sucked into the whoosh of his slipstream. He ran.
The crowd ahead had become a mob, but when the stragglers heard the rapid-fire slap of feet from behind them and, shouting encouragement, dove out of the way, the mob parted to let Tartius Abrachius through. As he streaked through their centre, like a bullet train through a tunnel, they let out a roar of approbation and followed him. Tartius Abrachius, running like a banished demon, soon left their shouts behind. Pictures flashed through his head of him in La Liga, tearing past the last defender, bearing down on the goalkeeper. . . Tartius Abrachius ran like his life depended on it.

The quarry, fewer paces ahead of Tartius Abrachius than the mob was behind him, threw a wild look over his shoulder and saw that Tartius Abrachius was gaining. His face held a plea, but Tartius Abrachius, blind to it on account of the dream that hovered before his eyes, tucked in his chin and ate up the distance. The man, on his last legs, reached a road junction and dove into it. Tartius Abrachius ran. He turned the corner just in time to see the man veer into an alley. He ran like he had never run before—he ran to catch a dream. As he approached the alley entrance something on the ground caught his eye. Then he heard a hubbub of angry voices approaching from the road opposite the alley, and, so as not to be robbed of his prize, increasing his speed with an effort that caught his chest in a vice grip, he ran headlong into the arms of a second mob.
“Thief! Olé!” the tapestry of inflamed faces chanted at Tartius Abrachius, and as he grinned in breathless bewilderment, unable to speak for the pain in his chest, they plonked two tyres over his head and, dousing him in petrol, set him alight.

“Tailor!” he screeched, before the flames engulfed him.

The first mob arrived just as the charred mass that was once Tartius Abrachius gave the last whirl of its dance of death and collapsed to the ground, never to rise again. They joined their cheers to those they had met. Then the woman who had given the alarm appeared. Her stolen purse was thrust into her hands. They had found it at the spot where the thief was caught.

“But that isn’t the thief,” she said, looking about fearfully.

“Na him—how you know—e no get face again!” came the angry replies.

“But this person doesn’t have hands. The thief had hands—how else did he grab my purse?” the woman argued, with irrefutable logic.

The mob fell silent, staring at the smouldering corpse. Someone burst into a retching fit. Another remembered that he had left his shop untended. Then, in little pockets, the mob disintegrated, leaving behind Tartius Abrachius in the ashes of his dreams.

(Published with permission from A. Igoni Barett. )

FICTION: Short Story

Tough Guys Write Poetry
By Maxim Uzor Uzoatu

On the first day of my honeymoon, I hardly thought of my wife and me. I spent the hours thinking of another man. Chike literally stood before me, his large and impish eyes boring into mine with characteristic abandon. Then I would recall for the umpteenth time the moment during the send-off party when he kissed Victoria and soulfully told her: “When I look into your eyes I see the Statue of Liberty.”

Until recently, you could not quite count Chike among my friends. We had been classmates at the University of Ife in the early 1980s, and I can count on my fingers the number of times we ever exchanged pleasantries. We met infrequently at parties and tutorials; he complained to a couple of my friends that I ‘carried a permanent chip on the shoulder,’ while I felt he was an insufferable wag. We naturally drifted apart after our university studies, and it was such a surprise when I got to the office one Friday morning late last year and a saw a note that simply said: ‘Bala, I’m around.’ – Chike Ofoedu.

The Chike I met later that day looked emaciated, his head somewhat larger than normal and his scrawny body hiding inside a red jumper some sizes to big.

‘I’ve been down, my brother,’ he had said, as though reading my mind. ‘But now that I’ve found you I shall be up again.’

Chike regaled me with stories of what he called his misadventures since graduation from the university. A frustrating job as a teacher in a rural secondary school ended on a ‘quit or be fired’ note. During the long period of unemployment that followed, he made do with creative writing, churning out a rash of manuscripts that only fetched rejection slips that usually said, ‘Fine writing, but what are you saying?’ Abandoning writing and the rural haunts, he travelled to the city of Onitsha to do a bit of trading with an uncle. The business went as catch-and-catch, spanning the selling of foodstuff, second-hand refrigerators, books and clothing, with a wee bit of money-lending on the side. The deal became sour when Chike was conned off a substantial amount of money by a dupe who introduced himself as a money-doubler. Chike thus left his uncle’s business in disgrace and soon joined up with an itinerant Zen Buddhist who took him to Ghana.

‘It was sad day,’ Chike narrated, ‘when I suddenly found myself back on the streets of Onitsha naked as Adam.’

It was while undergoing psychiatric treatment in an Onitsha hospital that Chike chanced on an article I wrote in the Daily Times. He could not convince himself that I was actually the writer of the article, doubting with the benefit of his appreciation of me that I could ever muster the gumption needed for the journalism trade. In the university most people called me Bala Mohammed – after the erudite scholar murdered by Muslim fanatics in Kano; only some close friends or classmates like Chike knew my real name, Stephen Nnopu, with which I now wrote articles for the Daily Times. At any rate, Chike made the point of buying subsequent editions of the newspaper until he saw my photograph against my name.

‘Boy, you looked heavy,’ Chike said. ‘Like Ernest Hemingway.’

The hands of the office clock then stood a few minutes before eight, and Chike appeared in no mood to stop talking.

‘Let’s go to the canteen and get some food,’ I said, expecting Chike to jump at the offer.

‘Don’t you have a house?’ he asked.

Taken aback, I made awkward noises, unable to mobilise coherent words of reply. ‘We can eat in your house, can’t we?’ Chike laughed a throaty laugh that reverberated through the office walls.


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In retrospect, I cannot now say that I regret taking Chike to my one-bedroom apartment in Surulere, a crowded suburb of Lagos. At first it was like taking a certified lunatic to the church. Chike was a nuisance in overdrive. What I initially thought would at most be a one-weekend affair turned out to be a yearlong wedlock of strange bedfellows. Chike never thought of leaving once ensconced in the ambit of my narrow and stifling dungeon.

My neighbours had become used to the rather aloof journalist who stayed home all morning and afternoon only to saunter to work in the evening. I hardly exchanged a word in greeting with any man, woman or child. Nobody in the neighbourhood had ever paid me a visit, social or otherwise. All that changed with the advent of Chike. From morning to night, he made it his duty hosting all the children on the block to raucous session of story-telling. The overflow of wretched and grimy brats always spilled into my bedroom, and I could not but remonstrate with Chike about this. He answered me with a laugh.

‘At the university you were so full of talk about doing work for the masses.’ Chike said, presiding over a melee of children. ‘These here are the masses. Do some good for them. Go buy us some buns, will you.’

With Chike, one could swallow as much disgust as could brim the Atlantic. He carried on as though he had not a care in the wide world. My apartment soon became known to all and sundry as ‘Chike’s place.’ His capacity for comradeship was quite astounding, and he gravitated with fluid malleability from gruff market women to slick young ladies, from street urchins to smart lawyers. Everybody it appeared accepted him on his own terms. He would borrow from me to lend to people not caring that I needed the money back. I once in exasperation asked him to pack out of the house.

‘Of course you don’t mean it,’ he had answered with his trademark laugh.

Chike would not be frustrated into packing out. In fact he revelled in my wickedness.

‘I am the mosquito in your scrotum,’ Chike would say. ‘Smack the mosquito and you ruin yourself.’

It took me more than a dozen weeks and as many hear attacks to realise that instead of asking Chike to pack out of the house I should direct my attention to getting him engaged in some kind of occupation. This way, I reasoned, he would no longer have idle time with which to frolic with ‘the masses’ and engage in those other pursuits that played havoc with the palpitations of my heart. I was thinking of when best to broach the issue with him when he suddenly pulled me aside, abruptly breaking his early morning Zen meditation ritual.

‘I suppose you must be wondering why I’m not looking for work,’ he said, staring up at me from his Buddha-like sitting repose.

I sighed, startled. I stammered for some moments before I managed to bring some coherence to bear on my words. ‘If you need work we’ll try to find one for you.’

‘Working in Nigeria is nonsensical suffering!’ he shot back with a grimace.

I could not offer a reply. There was the insult to deal with, smouldering anger at the hypocrisy of Chike living off the meagre benefits of work he considered unworthy of his while. Let the truth be told, Chike took me for a fool who must do the dirty work for the sustenance of rare genius like him. I was so annoyed I was way past explosion. I was stiff and shaking and no words could form in my mouth.

Chike smiled. ‘You are a great soul, Bala.’

He paused, a new seriousness showing on his lugubrious face. I did not know what to make of his words, except that they helped in an imperceptible way to assuage the hotness of my anger and the deadly imperatives of my implosion. Time stood at a point, and I could only stare and wonder at the sitting and inscrutable Buddha.

‘I was lost and gone in darkness until your light beckoned,’ Chike continued, bulbous tears clouding his eyes. ‘You have given me the choice of life and I can never forget that. I shall forever be grateful to you, Bala.’

I saw a shiny tear fall down his cheeks; it dropped on the carpet with a plop. I was soon finding it difficult to see through a haze of my own tears; the image of Chike that formed in my eyes was a hoary pantheon dominated by a goddess with a bosom of gold.

‘I hope I can pay back just a little of what you have done for me.’ It was Chike’s voice all right, but it appeared to come from recess only the sublime can reach. ‘Ours cannot be an unhappy story.’

I awoke with a start, finding myself cuddled on the floor with Chike. The sun filtered in from the window eaves, forming grotesque patterns on the khaki-brown wall. A sharp ray stabbed me in the eyes and I stood up. Was it a dream? I furtively looked at Chike and images of things flooded my mind. I took my eyes away from him, involuntarily fiddling at the creases of my orange pyjamas.

‘I think I have had my fill for now,’ Chike said, sitting up. ‘I feel I should make it to the United States.’

It is infuriating, Chike’s insane capacity for talking profound philosophy one minute and uttering wooden-headed nonsense the next minute. What would one make of a jobless pauper talking of travelling to the United States currently when they do not grant visas to the U.S. to even wealthy Nigerians? I felt that what Chike’s utterance deserved was utmost mum. I kept mum. He repeated the utterance.

‘Don’t you know that procuring an American visa in Nigeria is tougher than crossing the old Berlin Wall?’ I said, glaring at Chike with the searing scorn of my bulging eyes.

‘But you can help me with that Bala.’ He said it as though it were the most matter-of-fact of truths.

‘Journalists like you do not find it difficult securing the mighty American visa.’

I laughed. ‘Like George Orwell’s animals, some Nigerian journalists are more equal than others.’

‘So?’

‘Even if you do get a visa how would you pay your passage into America?’

‘You wait.’

I expected Chike to keep pestering me with his dream of America in the following weeks. Nothing like that happened. He never again mentioned the United States to me; he just kept on being his ebullient self, entertaining the children and writing new chapters into a book of bad behaviour. He brought a hirsute magician into the house. After a week of complaining, I hired a bald-headed fetish priest who chased the magician away. The crazy confrontation brought the neighbourhood on its knees.

‘Good theatre,’ was all Chike saw of it.

On the morning after the celebrated confrontation, Chike literally dragged me out of sleep. He had a compelling object he could not wait to show me. Pointing through the window at the statuesque lady opening the door of a posh Mercedes Benz car he hollered: ‘Do you know that girl?’

‘She lives there,’ I said with a weary shrug of the shoulders.

‘What’s her name?’

‘I don’t know.’

Chike sighed, looking on in a naked adoration as the girl cruised away in the car. He shook his head, moaning wistfully.

‘You chased the girl and she turned you down or something?’ Chike said.

‘Who told you that?’ I cried, grimacing. ‘I’ve never spoken to the girl. Ever. I only see her from time to time. I guess she equally sees me. And that’s just about it. We mind our own businesses.’

‘My friend, stop being worked up,’ Chike said, ‘smiling. ‘Boy, if the girl should come to confess love for you, tell me, won’t you collapse with joy?’

‘I need my sleep to catch,’ I hissed, walking back to bed.

‘Chike, why die in silence?’

I got back from work at about ten in the night that day. A note was waiting for me on the table.

Bala,
I am at that girl’s house.
-Chike

I decided against going to look for him there. Just as well, for he came home with the girl within a handful of minutes of my return.

‘Bala, meet Queen Victoria!’ Chike was in his elements, shouting as though introducing the girl to the gods in the sky.

I could not look into her eyes. She was that intimidating. Heavy. She stood tall and cool and clean, an angel of the ages. I was all nerves and jitters and clumsiness. Would to Paradise the earth opened up and swallowed me!

Chike and Victoria put me in ungainly contortions of speechlessness. Getting into their groove was way beyond me. Mercifully Victoria eventually left.

However, she would always be there every day, doing Chike’s every wish, making spirited play and wondering at my lack of joie de vivre.

Chike had turned a girl I had at a distance thought more aloof than a parish priest to a frolicsome tomboy. Before, she could have been a statue for all I cared. Now I was the statue in the pack.

‘We make statues of one another when we fail to communicate.’

I cannot now make out whether she said the words or Chike did. No matter. The point really is I needed to come out of the shell into which I had been inexorably cast. Nevertheless, I cannot in good conscience blame myself. My upbringing was in lowly poverty, and tangling up with the rich and famous was always awesome. It comes naturally to the Chikes of this life. God bless them.

Chike now spent as much time in Victoria’s burnt-brick duplex as he did in my place. Victoria was always around, vainly striving to draw me out of my shell and into the family that their company presaged. On occasion I would wake up and go to work without seeing Chike; and I would come back and fall asleep without setting eyes on him. I was preparing for work on Friday afternoon when Chike burst in on me, smack in this dark and trendy double-breasted suit.

‘The American dream is real,’ Chike said, presenting me with his passport.

The sun slowly descended from the sky, exploding on my face.

‘How come…’ I said when I found my voice.

Chike smiled. ‘Victoria fixed it.’

Victoria put up a splendid send-off party for Chike on the Sunday. It was my first time inside her house. Marble columns, brass balustrade, chandeliers, Persian rugs and curtains, opulence. The music was hip and the dancing more so, and Victoria succeeded in making me uncomfortable by jigging unrestrained blues with me. The real highlight of the night happened when there was no music. Chike had all the attention and he called Victoria ‘the Statue of Liberty.’

Chike travelled out of Nigeria on Wednesday night. Victoria and I were the only ones at the airport to see him off. Tears stood in my eyes and Victoria could not be consoled. Chike was different: his face was sunshine.

‘Bala, take care of Victoria.’ Heart-rending parting words delivered as only Chike could. Driving me back from the airport in her Mercedes Benz, Victoria pulsated with distressing sobs. Smack in the middle of Isolo Expressway, she collapsed against my lap, unable to drive further. The car managed to slowly stop on the curb of the service. It became my duty to drive her home, but I had to own up to the crushing shame that I had never learnt how to drive.

She would later recover and drive us home. She passed the night in my place – and several nights thereafter. She was too afraid to return to the emptiness out of which Chike has so sweepingly drawn her. She was the most vulnerable I had seen a human being. She laid open the book of her heart before my eyes: her unhappy childhood after her Nigerian father left her English mother in London; the tragic death of her mother when she was barely ten; the unpleasantness of a foster home; her training as a lawyer; her return to Nigeria and to a wealthy runaway father…

I didn’t not need to propose to her. It stood as a given. Some lives are much too dramatic in the living to bear a rehearsal. Our marriage was a forgone conclusion. Even so, Chike beat us to the hallowed institution. His first letter from the United States, a month after his departure, talked of his recent marriage to an African-American.

‘I entered into this marriage simply to secure the American Green Card,’ Chike wrote in his spare cursive. ‘I can only pretend to love the woman and she somehow knows it. I’ve been reduced to a grinning statue. I write her love poems to patch up the rough and tough bits.’

The onus was on me to prove that my reason for marrying Victoria was something loftier than Chike’s predation.

“My dear, no love poems please,’ Victoria said, shuddering.

I smiled. ‘I’m not tough enough.’