Stomach Heart

The sun shines on everything but inside this room, light ceased to exist. A loud voice rang through the air, its welder somewhere within, with feet thudding the floor as he spoke.

“These guns be better weapons oh. Na the inventor sabi pass.”

His name was Baba, and no, he did not invent guns. But he was ranting his mouth to Usami, the gun merchant, who was getting tired of his haggling.

“You see these big countries, America, Russia, tell me wetin them get in common?”

With a smile, yellow and wide with tobacco smell.

“Big guns! Na big guns give them level. Na big guns make them fi choke anybody for neck.”

This forty-six years old man was in a state of fascination, and even though Usami only wanted to sell his wares, his lips remained sealed and his ears hopped to Baba’s incessant rambling.

Naija opposed him, however, from the center of his chest, in the darkness of the room, the silence of his mind. His memory of gun power was bitter and he lacked the courage to speak out his thoughts.

He had this memory of a market, where protesters gathered together and flung stalls upside down. Armed with iron in their hands and frowned veined bursting faces, they marched among clouds of dust, shouting, "We no go gree oh, we no go gree,” twisting clenched fists at the policemen who hassled them with a barrage of bullets.

Like lightning, they flashed to different corners of safety, but when they noticed the bodies among them that ran not, the bodies that were stuck to the ground, never to rise up again, they groaned and evolved into a monster swallowing the policemen and spitting them out.

In the wild adrenaline amidst the towering dust, Naija cried like the corpses on the sands, like the heavens in the sky.

“Forgive me, I have family. Chisom, my son would want to see his father this night!”

This policeman's head spilled like an open coconut dripping red water on the floor.

“Please, are we not one of your own? Call the ambulance please.”

But the deaf ears roamed and hollered, danced in justified jubilation.

Everything is ignored, even life and death. Everyone is too much in themselves.

And Naija sealed this thought and warped himself back to the present, where Usami listened with a hand on his chin to Baba laughing at vanity and danger.

He was a young boy of 12, a young worried boy.

Baba had pulled him a few weeks before while they ate lunch. He said:

"Naija, I try for you. Shey I no try you?"

Naija nodded.

"Shey I no treat you like prince. See bread and beans now. See ass your mouth full, belle-ful."

Naija shied and tucked his smiling face away.

"I get this hustle wey mad. Na you go be our lookout, Naija. You go carry gun, and you go stand for gate. Anything wey you hear, you go telezzo."

Naija opened his eyes wide with a stunned face and fallen mouth. He began his protest but was disconnected by a slap which made him choke on the morsel in his mouth.

"Ah, ah. Take am easy."

Baba stood and brought him some water.

"Oya, drink."

Naija puppied his eyes, and sipped on the sachet water, tears falling from his eyes.

He swallowed thick spittle. He hated robbers and the art of robbing.

His job was specific. He did not want to do anything else.

To roll in pain beside bushes flanking a brown path was not easy. He had to do that several times in the day, hoping for one kind person that his crew would jump out of the bushes and kidnap.

He got his share though, and it was fair. But you must not tell his parents. Their memory was like a slap on his face that flung him into tears.

He had shut out the memory of Baba’s menacing form pressing a gun to his head, his knees grazing the jaggery stone floor, and his sobbing softly singing through the silence of the night.

Beside him, his dead mother lay, fixed to the ground like a heavy log, but he did not scream for her.

He trembled with shut eyes and clasped hands, screaming to God above, and clinging to Baba’s bulky leg, swearing to “God who made them both.”

The night was dry except for his pleas, and Baba had smacked Naija with his left hand.

“I go break you inside out!” Baba threatened, poking his gun at his skull.

“Comot your hand. Ah, I swear, I go scatter your brain for wall.”

Naija intensified his cries to God. Baba caught him mid-prayer with a knee to his nose.

The force flung his face backward but his hands did not leave Baba's legs. He kept on crying to God like every man who had not remembered God in his life. His feeble hands clutched that leg like it was his own.

When they returned home from Usami, Naija wrestled with his worries. Unable to court sleep, he fixated his mind on Besi.

She was known to all and sundry as the Dirty Girl, but he was fond of her. He remembered cold rain beating on the back of his neck, and his face became plastered with a dumb smile.

Besi was a unique girl, dwelling in rubbish heaps and hunting dustbins for food.

“Dirty girl! Dirty girl!” Everybody taunted her as she searched.

Unknown to them, she had fled a chair-throwing father, who held her down and forced himself inside her; whose new wife found peace in pressing heated stone and mortar on top of her breasts.

“When I do this for you, my husband will chase you no more.”

But she never whispered love in Besi's ear, never prepared her for the longing of man, or human desire. So Besi scattered her legs and escaped to the life of a trash vagabond, and the collective people, the blameless people, will always pass judgment on their "lessers."

“Dirty girl, Dirty girl, no come near my house!”

But in Naija’s brain box, Besi steered him to sleep.