"Bonkers" [Writer's contest 3]

Every day for the last 5years I’ve walked past Emeka’s house on my way to work. It was a small house behind a big water producing factory. It was a modest looking apartment and not much to look at. The walls were painted white and the white was falling off the wall as a result of the water disposed from the factory close to the house. I had always wondered how they cope with the pollution and noise from the factory.  This one time, I walked past their house and canopies were lying around, they had had an occasion. It would be easy getting refreshment for the occasion, because the factory also supplied beverages, so I thought.

Emeka was my high school friend. After high school though, he couldn’t afford college education so was sent to a neighboring town to be an apprentice at a mechanic workshop. I had moved on to college and graduated at a very early age. I studied economics and graduated with a moderate result. I got a job close to the factory around Emeka’s house and thus began my journey every morning at exactly 7:00am to Emeka’s neighborhood. I got a job at a bank where I worked as a teller, collecting and counting deposits and paying to those who wished to make withdrawals.

It was on my 25 birthday that something amazing and bewildering happened. At exactly 7:00am, I walked past Emeka’s house, only this time, his house was no longer there. In its place was a lagoon. There was no water making factory either. I stood there dazed for a while. What had happened to Emeka’s house? Could it have been moved overnight? There would have been debris to suggest it had been demolished. What of the factory? Was the theory of the Mayans at work here? That would mean I was a ghost because the world would have been washed away the night before. I was still lost in wonderland when I noticed some people around me pointing and whispering towards my direction.

I walked past Emeka’s house and got to the bank where I worked. It was an uncompleted building. “I must be going insane”, I uttered to myself. First, Emeka’s house had mysteriously disappeared and now, in place of my bank was an incomplete building. I noticed a very offensive stench; I hadn’t had the time to look over myself as I was in a hurry from home that fateful day. I looked down and my shoes were gone. My pants were ripped in a million places and the dirt was deep in the fabric. There was a mirror reflection from a nearby store. I ran there in my bewilderment and looked squarely at myself. I was a spitting image of a mental man. Thick, brown mushy hair all over my face with half gray dreads on my head. I looked well in my forty’s, I had no shirt on, only the ripped pants.

A passerby dropped some change in a plate in front of the building. I ran after him to ask him if he knew what was going on. He made to run but I chased him a few blocks and held him by the hand. He screamed for help and people gathered around. Then I explained what I had been through. A woman shouted “halleluyah! from deep within the crowd, probably a religious fanatic, but I was too confused to linger on the thought. Some teenagers laughed when I said I had been working at a bank for the past years; “bank ke, beggi beggi don turn to cashier”.

… and then it hit me,  I had been bonkers for decades.

NAME:  Solomon Ameh