Ember fever

“I cast out every demonic agent that doesn’t want you to make it into the new year,” the preacher roared from his back seat in the bus with a few passengers and the driver echoed with an amen.

Prayers are meant to make people feel better, but somehow, it made the driver feel more nervous. The year which was going to be over in a few days had been a hectic one. For most of the year, he spent on the roads across Nigeria, from Aba to Abuja.

He decelerated as he approached his worst nightmare, the infamous death trap called Benin-ore road. He remembered the statistics he had seen in the news the night before about how road accidents increased during the ember months. People believed it was the devil making last minute efforts to make sure people didn’t make it into the next year. God, he hated the devil. It was the devil who had sent the highway robbers on that fateful night sometime in March. It was the devil that still put him in a tight corner with a female passenger the other night.

His mind went back to the statistic as they passed the site of an accident six days ago. God, I don’t want to die, he thought as he began sweating in the air-conditioned bus. He was too caught up in his fear that he noticed the pothole at the last second but was quick enough to swerve. It took only an instant for him to know he shouldn’t have swerved, because by the next instant, the bus came to its final stop.

“Another fifteen people dead at the Benin-Ore road in seven days,” said the headlines the next morning. Everyone agreed that the devil had struck again.