FICTION WEEKLY with Mazeed Mukhtar Oyeleye: Unlettered Missives [episode 9]

Grace, …

Emeka and Bolaji had been friends all their lives, growing up in the same Military Cantonment in Jos and attending school together. Their parents were also friends - they lost their fathers, both majors in the Nigerian Army, to the same auto-crash, and their mothers did not end their friendship afterwards. The only difference they had was that Emeka was from a Christian family, while Bolaji was a Muslim; ‘Bolaji’, the short form of Ọmọ́bọ́lájí, his native name, replaced his Arabic first name, ‘Mahfouz’, because Emeka’s family couldn’t pronounce it correctly. That was the depth of their friendship - and the thought of it baffled you.

You believed in the saying, “show me your friend and I will tell you who you are”.

So you feared that Bolaji, like his bosom friend, Emeka, would dump Fatima whenever he grew tired of her. Immediately you realised the precarity of your darling friend’s situation, you decided, against your plan to read Oyeleye Mahmoodah’s Faded Blues, to repay her visits, as her support had catalysed your recovery from Emeka’s betrayal. You hoped to seize the opportunity to warn her against the possible dangers of being the girlfriend of his ‘twin brother’.

And you had gone to her room and met her in the company of Hauwa, your course mate. She was happy to see that you had regained your cheery disposition. You met them gossiping about the trending story at the University Permanent Site, about which you had not heard: A lady from the Chemistry department discovered that she match-made her boyfriend with her sister obliviously.

Hauwa narrated:

“A lady had a habit of preparing dinner for her boyfriend, but because of the stress she underwent in cooking a befitting meal, could not make it to night class where she would have shared the food with him. Therefore, the lady sought her cousin, a Jambito under her care, to help with the delivery. Little did she know that her innocent sister and darling boyfriend took turns to feed each other the delicious meals she tired out to make, giggling, snickering and laughing as they did. However, because she had so much trust in the duo, she did not suspect anything was amiss, despite noticing that they were slowly becoming distant from her, avoiding meeting her or having extended interactions with her.

“Luck ran out of the lovebirds when a friend of the Maecenas caught them in the act several weeks after they had kept at their forbidden romance. It shocked her to the marrow, but she did not confront them. She grabbed her phone and rang up her friend. The news brought her to full consciousness - she had been dozing whilst trying to read in her room after tiring out from cooking as usual. She had jumped to her feet and hurried to B09. They had finished with the food when she got there, but funnily, she caught them in a more compromising position.

“She slumped even before she could accost them.”

to be continued…

Do you think Grace’s fear that Emeka and Bolaji are the same holds water?

What do you think will happen when the Maecenas regains consciousness?

What else do you think?

The comment section is all yours; let us read all of your thoughts!

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P.S: This work is purely fictional. Any semblance to actual persons (living or late), places, or events are merely figments of the writer’s attempt at keeping in touch with reality.

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