Waiting: A Collection of Very Short Stories
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| Photo Credit: Som Adedayor |
for lydia
Therapy
On WhatsApp, the guy texts that he can't do without the exclamation mark and “...”. He replies the guy that the guy needs therapy.
Italicize
To italicize on WhatsApp, put, before and after an indentation, an underscore before and after the mark, the phoneme, the syllable, the letter, the morpheme, the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph, the discourse, the book, the dilogy, the trilogy, the tetralogy, the pentalogy, the hexalogy, the septology, the octalogy, the enealogy, the decalogy, the polylogy, the series, the collection, the section, the shelf, the library.
Wet
He is exhausted of making his point. He stops his speech mid-sentence. By now, his shirt is soaked at the chest with sweat, his thought wetting the parsley patterns.
Might
You should/might want to:
a. Contract/shorten “I am” as *I’m* not ~Am~
b. Put a space after a comma
c. Put a full stop after a complete sentence
d. Put a space after the full stop of a sentence before putting an emoji
e. Repeat the above suggestions, especially (a), (b), & (c), every time you type
Ask
You ask what punctuation marks she least uses. She texts back, saying the exclamation mark and ellipsis. You ask if those two still exist.
Bluest
She is everything that shifts in the air when dawn is at its bluest.
Green
It’s been long since it rained, but it drizzles tonight. The ground is wet. The grasses jive to the sound of water as they receive new charges of fresh energy, alive in their wet green robes in the streetlight florescence. With such ease that softens the world, the breeze float around wet and damp. It's been a while it rained, but, tonight, as it drizzles, I am thinking of you.
Off
The bird softened her wings and took off, flying into the future.
Big
I wonder what big questions of life are concealed in the folds of his big beard.
Spill
The bucket idles in the corner of the room, its water threatening to spill over.
Shine
The daylight struggles to outshine the distance.
Seated
With Popoola Filling Station a stint behind us, the bus stops in front of a line of shops and vendors selling corn and walnut. The man beside me at the front seat steps down in his jeans and white polo. He walks towards a triangle of short street side bush and urinates. There, he empties all the water he has drunk all day. He comes back when he’s done. When seated, he begins to eat the walnuts he bought from the vendors who earlier approached the bus, filling up his water-empty belly. The bus soon taxis off, and the man carries the walnuts in his belly into the rest of the trip.
Mood
The moody morning issued a sorrowful mist.
Seaweed
His beard flourishes like seaweed.
Rush
We are jetting from New Garage to Iwo Road in a red Nissan Micra. We are six, the driver and five of us passengers, two in front, three at the back. No one talks. We only keep an expanse of tarred road rushing away from us.
Pretty
Only with a new pronoun could he write of her: third person pretty.
Slow
Outside, the rain is scanty but steady, a slow music on the concrete downstairs. Behind the closed louvers and white-painted burglar proof, the curtain is a splash of condensed cream and a disbursement of brightly-coloured flowers. Patiently, it floats back and forth. The motion is slow. But it communicates well with the swirl of breeze in the small room.
Colourful
The flat-screen TV on the left at Remight Viewing Center is dulled in colour. Perpetually tinged, it has a woozy orange hue, as though, far up inside of it, a cracked yolky sun about to spill over is permanently frozen in time. The people living life inside it have their figures retraced slightly with colourful shadows that sometimes whorl about them.
Was
The world was in a sad shape.
With
He fiddles with the thought.
Custard
Someone shared a picture of a middle-aged man talking on Channel TV to his class WhatsApp page. The first lady said she thought they said ladies disliked light-skinned guys. The second lady said na just mouth. She said some women love their custard buckets very much. The third lady asked if you couldn't see good gene written all over him.
Only
Only the corpse cannot die at a funeral.
Randomly
Every now and then, I randomly wonder about my least used punctuation marks. I can't remember when I last used a semicolon. Surely, it must have been more than a year. If I could go one or more years without it, why use it at all? I'm gladly declaring a death sentence on it. Goodbye, God's speed, good luck, good riddance, semicolon.
Soon
He soon falls asleep, his final sentence spilling into the pillow.
Small
She is your kind of person: small people, big vibe.
Gambling
The wind gambles on the trees, flirting with their leaves.
When she was given her not-yet spiralbound eleven pages at the photocopy stand at Law Basement, she rearranged the A4s against her lap and said they were hot. With the start of a smile, he said: “Like you.”
