STORY(1)

I sit here on a wooden stool in an ambience that reeks of the smell of garbage and urine and sweat. The odour is nauseating. The troublesome flies turn my pallid skin into a playground of some sort. But I'm too deep in thought to care. The rumbling and churning of my stomach brings me back to reality. I understand its message. It is saying that it urgently needs to be filled. It has exercised enough patience and has a right to complain at this point. But is there food? I count one to ten in a bid to build confidence, confidence to go begging for food again. After counting one to twenty, and still bereft of the needed confidence, I walk into my shack of a house. I live alone. No, I have the company of rats and cockroaches and geckos. There are also the Agama lizards that visit from time to time, sometimes running around in pursuit of their female counterparts. I stagger to my bucket of garri and pour every bit of it into the first plate my eyes find. I wearily reach for my old jug and pour some water into the waiting dish. It is then that I see it- rat excrement staring at me from my plate of garri-in-water.
'Waa-waa-what kind of life is this?' I blurt out in frustration. Still I have no choice. This is my last foodstuff. I scoop out the 'black stuff' and settle down to eat, pushing down one spoonful at a time, down my hungry throat. I think about two Bible stories. One is about the widow of Zarephath whose jar of flour and jug of oil never ran out till the drought was over, and the other about the Prophet's wife whose small jar of olive oil filled many containers. I know deep down that even if such miracles still existed, I was completely undeserving.