"A derivative, weaker form of blame arises when an agent is aware of a substantial risk that it is wrong to do something and unjustifiably does it anyway. The complementary position concerns those who are not even aware of a substantial risk that they are acting wrongly. As Husak puts it: 'no one can be blamed for failing to respond to a reason of which she is unaware-"
On Blame and Punishment: Self-Blame, Other-Blame and Normative Negligence by Alec Walen*; awalen@rutgers.edu.com (Draft: 10-21-2021.)
Chikamharida's POV.
Once I was out, the cool breeze hit my skin. I knew where I was heading so the bus stop was my first stop.
Without delay, a white bus pulled up and I got in, to be ensconced by the environment.
Our bus was moving with a snail speed, its tyres dancing below us while also gliding against the potholed road. It's been about three hours since I left the hostel to Kuto Park. To be honest, counting every second away from Praise felt like torture and I couldn't continue.
However, that wasn't the only thing that occupied my thoughts. My thoughts? I had a whiplash of them, both traumatizing and soul crushing of what it'd be like to be stuck with my family again without room for a well developed future. Those familiar times, saddled to me like my negligible existence!
To steady my feelings and emotions, I decided to study the dawny sky; specked with blue dots of different shape, from my perspective, they were mostly triangular and trapezoid, nothing like the perfect circle. Still and all, there they were, and I seemed to be the only one who noticed them unlike the other passengers on board with me who were occupied with various succour that made their journey more conductive. That being said, I can not deny watching them with least happiness, especially the mother beside me wrapping her child with oja-the local baby cloth, and a wrapper.
She was eating walnut and had bought ofada rice at the last traffic we'd meagerly escaped. I watched as she held the lean baby boy in an arm, his eyes close and pouty lips open, obviously disinterested in discomforting his mother further so that she used her other hand quite effectively in cracking the nut she would noisily chew.
The ofada rice was in a takeout plate, neatly placed and kept away in her bag which was on her lap closest to me. You could see the oil from the stew decanted at the bottom of the container, and there existed flashes of the infamous oval shaped local bean as it discretely glared at me, or maybe I did at it.
When I noticed the persistence of my gaze, I had to quickly avert it to the window, the mirror and the headrest of the passenger seat, all of which were inedible and incapable of over-exciting my salivary glands.
Not long again- almost like a routine, did the crawling bus stop at yet another traffic! We'd just passed Ibadan-express way with its windy landscape of trees and were on the Mowe-Ibafo road. Mowe I could tell it was, from the mixture of yellow and white buses on the road, and the dwindling population of factories by the side of the road which had almost became the landscaping of Ogun state.
Of course, we were approaching Lagos and due to the lack of movement, we were parked on the slow lane, behind a trailer emitting an alarming blast of sulphide gases directly into our space. While I was trying to use my worn out handky to wade of a few, my benevolent seat partner was dutifully searching for her next edible target and she did, much to my dismay, successfully procure one attractive to her—and I had to pass it over to her despite my obvious disinterest. I was the middleman between her and the hawker dressed in corporate and after passing the carbonated drink over to her, she had given me the money to give the hawker.
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Crimson Mists
General Fiction«Even with all the dust, the flower still outshined the sun» ~~~~ Meet Harida Bick, the product of an unwanted relationship and also Adele Jones, a teenager in another country subjected to same design. When both girls began living together through...
