Manifest

Twenty-three

Two hours and thirty minutes of the most boring and painful ride of his life, Eddie began to recognize his surroundings in Antaikot. Sitting up with his notepad and pen, he took down the man's name and phone number and waited as the driver called out his bank account details.

"I'm so sorry about this," Eddie said as he tore off the paper and put it in the pocket of his shorts.

"It's fine," he said, waving Eddie off as he turned into Eddie's street.

Eddie spared a glance in the direction of his house and blinked, cleaning his eyes as he saw the high pillar of smoke rising into the night.

"Is that my house?"

He jumped out of the car, leaving the man behind as he ran into the compound to find a crowd of people he didn't know. Eddie coughed, covered his mouth with his elbow and ran forward, pushing through all the strangers who were standing around, till he got to his backyard.

"What's going on?" Eddie asked, jumping away from a big whoosh of fire. His father's shed was open and on fire and it had spread out from within and was following the clothes on the line and the wooden stands that had been erected to hold all the cloth lines. Around them, people were trying to put out the fire with buckets of water. "Dear god."

Eddie ran to the front of the house where there was a tap with people fetching water. He recognized a lot of them from the village and many of them ran to him the moment they saw him.

"Edidiong, where have you been?" they asked as he ran past them to the gatehouse where there were cleaning and gardening utensils. He searched around and pulled out the long, thick hose from within and took it to the tap. As he got closer, the people with buckets began to move aside. When he dropped the hose and started attaching it to the tap, he felt people unravelling the part of the hose with the control nozzle behind him as they started pulling it towards the back of the house.

He forced the hose into the tap and pressed it in, strapping the harnesses around the tap to make sure it didn't dislodge itself. He turned the tap up to its highest and took off to the back of the house. People were shifting away as one of the boys from the village had opened the nozzle of the hose and was spraying it into the shed.

Unable to hold himself up, Eddie's knees gave way beneath him. His father's shed was gone. His father's work, his legacy.

Everything was gone.