Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E21

2 years ago

Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E21

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 21

Mirror Mirror

Till today I don’t know what made me have time for Janet that day.

For a long time she had been using style to tell me about one Brother Jeremiah like that. At first it was a just random mention here and there then it became ‘you know Brother Jeremiah, nau’ until finally, maybe when she saw that I wasn’t biting the bait, she came out with ‘Brother Jeremiah is my spiritual father,’ to which I said, ‘The same Brother Jeremiah ?’ and she triumphantly said, ‘Yes!’

Now, I know that girls have all sorts of people and places they go to – we watch it in Nollywood films after all, but it never for once crossed my mind that any of the girls I lived with had a spiritual anything that they took thier problems to. Kike goes to Church, I manage a few services once every few months, and Mama remembers she’s Muslim and covers her head with a black scarf when it’s Sallah. But Janet was the least likely person, if anyone had asked me, to take any form of spirituality serious beyond exclaiming ‘God forbid’ and snapping her fingers over her head in the middle of a heated discussion. So it came as a shock when she confided in me about Brother Jeremiah and the strong spiritual things he had given her. Well, sold her, more like.

We were alone in the room but she still spoke in near whispers, looking over her shoulder as if she expected an eavesdropper to suddenly materialize behind her.

“He is very powerful” she assured me, in between digging in her box for something she had hidden at the very bottom.

She brought out a round mirror enclosed in a cheap plastic frame. It was a just a mirror like any other mirror that you can buy for N200 in traffic, but according to Janet it was a special-special mirror that Brother Jeremiah had prepared for her.

“He has prayed and fasted on this mirror,” she said. “He made it specially for me. Anytime I’m going somewhere, I just look in this mirror and the way my face is is the way the place will be.”

My amusement grew as she narrated how she had once gotten all dressed up to go out to a party where a friend had arranged a big boy for her; a guaranteed paymaster, she said. But when she looked in her mirror she saw that her face was ‘one kind,’ and she knew she shouldn’t go out that night. The spiritual warning was later confirmed when the man she should have seen that night had an accident on his way home from the party. He didn’t die, but according to her she would have died in that car with him that night if she hadn’t looked into her mirror. In my mind, the man would probably not have had the accident had she been there, had they met and talked and his timing being thrown out by a few seconds.

“This mirror that you see, it has helped me many times,” she said, “It cost me an arm and a leg.”