Stories About Women

PRECIOUS STONE

Onyema was the dullest boy in the clan. His actions; talking, walking, eating, and basically everything were done sluggishly. Most of his days he spent thinking of the yam in his father's barn.

The sun had peeped the sky before Onyema ducked out his little mud hut, his back grazing the thatch.

His other brothers sat around father's hut and as they noticed movement towards his end, they looked at him and spat.

They cursed the day he was born, but Onyema was too distant to have heard anything. He slowly stretched his back but his bones didn't crack.

He craned to the mural he was designing on the wall of his hut. Apart from thinking of his father's yam, he spent the rest of his days drawing abstract art with his precious stone which his father gave him-which was, in fact, chalk from the shrine. He knew that because he stole the same type from the shrine when his father tugged him there for consultation and prayers for fear that he was abnormal.

The flowers Onyema drew had thorns and the faces of the gods he mimicked, had no ears or mouth.

He lowered to the ground to complete his painting of yesterday-a headless pregnant woman standing on boney legs.

Ojiri, his eldest brother, who went in search of greener pastures said Onyema has a brilliant mind. Onyema would smile shyly, wanting his brother to praise him more. Since his brother left, no one appreciated him or give him roasted yam and oil for a work well done.

He broke part of the chalk and crushed it in a little bowl untill it powdered. Then, he began to spit in it until it. He did so slowly, but no one was close to watch saliva ooze through his lips. With his index, he mixed it into a paste then dipped the feather he plucked from the rear of a black cock into the paste and continued his painting.

But before he did, he revved back and admired his work. From the white astral sphere shaded with charcoal. To the thorned rope that girded hut. To Something that looked like a tuber of yam, probably a look-alike, because it didn't quite look like yam. To the faceless gods and the bony pregnant woman.

It was an abstract piece of mural that was quantum leaped for a yesteryear boy Like Onyema. His relatives and kindred were too primate to recognize. This was a time when men girded goat-skin leather around their waist and the women walked bare-chested. The young, adolescent, old and even the married, their skin marked with charcoal that was renewed every two days. But Onyema's body was free from these markings. Things like that needed a companion or member who was willing to spend their moonlight gathering drawing lines on one's body with charcoal. Onyema had no one like that. No one spared him a second thought.

Apart from his prodigal brother, who his father had disowned, kneeling in the middle of the compound, he pined his head to the ground and called his name three times. "Ojiri, Ojiri, Ojiri" he raised his head and looked at the crescent moon. His children stood by their Hut, watching. He continued: "Under the same moon that bore witness at birth, I cast you out of the sphere of my family. Since you have decided to live like an osu-outcast-You are no longer my son."

So apart from his disowned brother who was in search of greener pastures, the only other person that tried occasionally to paint Onyema's body died two days ago and she died pregnant. Her name was Ebere. The daughter of Ogechi, his father's fourth wife.

That was why his brothers were sitting around his father's Hut. He gazed at them for a while before turning back to his hut. They all had their head craned down except Dabiri, the first son of Nkechi, his father's first wife. For a while, he thought Dabiri would point to him and say "Onyema killed Ebere!" But for the seconds their gaze locked until now he dipped his feather in the white paste, the compound was quiet. It was only broken by a bleating goat.