Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E37

2 years ago

Chronicles Of A Runs Girl - S01 E37

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 37

American boy

I read somewhere that a coward dies a thousand deaths but a brave person dies only once – or something like that.

When I heard the gunshot, I didn’t remember those words but I remembered every other death I’d died – in reverse chronological order.

Kike also heard the bang, but unlike me she saw the overloaded danfo spinning out of control and spraying shrapnel of black rubber at panicked pedestrians.

But I was looking at a gun, so I heard a gunshot, and I died because that is what you do when you are shot. I guess I would have run if I wasn’t already on the ground.

And when did this all start? When did I become so afraid? I wasn’t always afraid. My mother used to say I had no fear. She would lament to my aunts and uncles and anyone else who cared to listen, how Amaka is the child who has the heart of the sacrifice thief.

I never understood what she meant till the first time I saw a sacrificial pot of food placed at a road intersection. I remember walking past the clay pot and slowing down to look as the other kids quickened their steps and did cross signs across their chests.

But not me; I was fascinated by the mess of food thrown together and doused with a generous helping of red oil. So this is what my mother says I’m brave enough to eat? I could not see myself touching the disgusting thing which had attracted flies from a nearby gutter that was also a sewer, but in my child’s mind it registered that she must think me to be super awesome to be able to eat such rotten food. It never occurred to me then that the braveness she meant was the daring spirit of one who eats food meant for the gods.

She also used to say that my braveness would kill her one day – another aphorism I did not understand, because as a child I reasoned that if I was brave enough to put myself at risk, I was the one who risked dying, not her.

But that was then; now I was a child full of fear, and it all started with that London boy who made me run for my life on a deserted bridge in the middle of the night. Since that day I’d been running. Even my own shadow had gained the power to startle me. He had planted fear deep inside me and it had taken root and grown branches. I was now ruled by fear. Where I once was brave now I’m afraid, where I was strong, now I’m weak. No more. No more.

So consumed I was with coming to terms with my demons that I hardly heard what the man was saying.

I had been brought to his office and made to sit in a chair in front of his desk. They had taken me from a cell I shared only with mosquitoes and the acidic stench of urine etched in concrete. I had spent days in there – how many days I do not know, but light had followed darkness, and they had brought food and they had brought water, but how many times these had happened was not something I’d kept in my mind.

I had not seen Kike or the lady who asked me where I’d kept Johnny. I had not spoken to anyone but someone, or some people, had come to speak to me. I cannot say for sure that I spoke to them.