THE CHASE

Stop wasting my time, drunk Trinculo. You clearly have no idea what staying alive entails. You know, I have watched you from a distance and your level of debauchery require a thirty thousand word count for a proper synopsis – oh such a failure; expected debacle no doubts. The barrels you emptied into your protruded stomach suggests you are basking in the realm of surfeiting yet living small with a crumbled marriage and deserted twins all choked in your state of mind that the kegs have tried but will ever fail to take away. Do not think me confused as to the identity that will surely have to choose between the pellet gun in my left hand and the short gun in my right hand. Your name is Andrew Opete. A very promising young man when you were much younger. I watched you from the years when you were skinny with dull eyes. Your every return from hunting, were met with smiles despite the deep lesions on your skin as long as you slayed a rabbit. You grew into a tough man with sinewy physiognomy; I watched you bathe behind the mud house when you were still sixteen years only to watch you bathe girls older than you in size and age – your dexterity at throwing about your huge penis must have brought them close to you at such a rather young age. You were the Okonkwo of your community from twenty two; you won all local contests as well as the heart of your Obi (king). His daughter (the princess) loved your biceps and you admired her waist line. She became part of the profusion of Cinderella’s that had a slot in your bed – you probably must have called your intercourse with her, a royal rendezvous. You remember how your popularity waned after the princess caught you declaring puppy love for Idongesit in your tent, and mourned the loss of her virginity to an insatiable bull? – of course she called you that in her father’s palace. You were supposed to have your head dismembered from the holder, and your stomach wall, dilacerated till red was the only thick liquid available to wash your isolated head as was tradition. But I saved you not then by not pulling my trigger. I regret it.

Look at you now. You have grown to appreciate misery like a spoilt child having a swell time in the dark. You now smoke big pipes and have smokes escape from every necessary aperture in your body. You officially became a recluse whose companion became cheap grog of eight or nine bottles at the usual pothouse. You surely must miss your wife – I hear she parades the market square twice in a month wearing sack clothes, and swallowing her breasts with her palms cussing the day she met you. O Andrew, your children are seven years of age. You know. They have been declared wanting in three villages and have taken to hiding in rat holes or affordable motels in a strange land. But here you are chasing a fetid hobby as perversion. You had a chance to be a good father, you know, but you chased puerility at a rather ripe age. Not like I do not know why you carried different women and called your wife your beloved sister – on days when she attacked your disturbing behaviours, you never ceased punching her and compelling her big buttock to satisfy your defiled cannon with two eggs, spitting on her face calling her a witch. I watched you go mad but you watched you control your affairs – a simpleton you had become. There really is no need to weep my friend. The death will be with meteor and you won’t have the opportunity of examining the torn tissues and lesions that will manage to constitute a nuisance in your corpus. Let me end your miseries so you won’t one day writhe on the hard earth after discovering the grog will never make your operose heart any lighter but light headed.

Here on my left is a pellet gun with blank cartridges and sealed gas vent created not to necessarily aid the excretion of a shad cutter from a barrel. But with deft hands have I perforated the gas vents to accommodate aluminium pins housed beside the blank cartridges so that the pins come out from the flat side and not the ogive side of my barrel. With red wax applied around the vent, there will be pressure upon the intercourse between the primer, the breech, and the barrel. To your left chest will it be – the muzzle just firm on your body. The pins will penetrate your pericardium from side to side and the heart. Do not be tempted to ask if the dumb police officers will find the saver, the pins are not bullets and so there will not be trace to any popular revolver as a pellet gun is just a manufactured dummy gun (laughs). I have never experimented this kind of imposed salvation on a man before so I brought a short gun, it is rifled, and it maims victims – call it mutilation if you so wish, Andrew. Do not be tempted to ask the same question because the saver will once again be saved as the barrel of a short gun leaves no striation or marks on its bullets. It is just an abnormal gun, good for kicking hard against pricks of your kind. It will be your salvation tonight once you make a pick – stop the wailing, you know your soul wants death. Do not mind the flesh, it craves for hope for a no-hoper; I have killed a hundred of your kind to know this. But as is my culture, let me say you a prayer.

The chase of a man to concern things that do not yield fruits is death inducing – so is the fate of this unclean man, Andrew. The chase of a man of such kind, dear Ariel, is a no chase – this is as you taught, great Ariel. The chase can only take three forms which are the chased, the chaser, and the man not chasing; great one, you taught that the chased is the individual that has a dream and lived or is living it, while the chaser is one who has a dream and hopes to sit with the chased someday by zeal and work. You taught that the ones not chasing are those who wake up every day with no expectations; they are the souls that lost their way and created a shindig in their dark route. Some chasers grow with their mature dreams only to dash it away because of a misconception that life is a bed of roses for those who labour; so they find their path in the foyer of the regular no-chasers unfortunately – the dreams die, and they mourn their nothingness with every stipend they get. They burn their chests with hot drinks, urinate on their trousers when drunk, and cuss the day they were born. They all want to die, the grog hardly kills them. You taught that the trio eventually leads to one solid equation. The equation where even the chased keeps chasing more purpose because a man has an insatiable desire always; the equation where the chaser is being chased by discouraging elements; the equation where the no-chasers are chased by the cold hands of a soul-desired death. O I pray that the bullet or aluminium pin will go right into every no-chaser who has chosen to live a purposeless life. Let my bullet or aluminium pin serve as salvation and a grant of the wishes his body language suggested all through his miserable fifty and one year on earth. Because it is normal to have those that will chase and become rich; those that will chase small dreams and be happy with their crumbs; and those that will not chase because verily only a few persons are big dreamers, I pray that upon the fire of whichever weapon of harm this no-chaser chooses, it shall be for him eternal peace in the interim pending the final abode you, dear Ariel, will appoint jointly with Apollos and Abadnoha. Accept the soul of a simpleton who did not multiply the talent given him by you. Thank you for trusting me with errands of this nature.

You may say amen in your mind, Andrew. You pick the pellet gun? I cannot hear you and I do not intend letting out my short gun off your mouth. Fine, I will pick for you (engages trigger of short gun). Goodbye buddy, this time I do not regret ending your wasted life.

(Gun shots)……..hunter walks away.
THE END!!
©OKOCHA OBED