(inspired by a real life event that took place in port harcourt nigeria, in a market in 2017)… enjoy

a girl wakes up frantically out of where she must have fallen asleep at the door post of the shack of her favorite snail vendor. she looks at the time on her phone, its 15 mins to 4. the seller, already done plucking from their shells, the now bag of snails sitted by the girl is seen to be busy with other things. the girl thinks to herself that her friend must have let her take a nap “i say make i live u make u sleep small” the seller says with a smile…the girl thanks her, pays for her snails and hurriedly leaves the stall…

“chai, i don late for church” she reminds herself as she quickly runs through the rowdy market, she is alerted by a crowd gathered around somewhere by the flyover and her curiosity gets the best of her, she decides to take a quick look, who knows what cheap stuff she could find from there. She is startled to find what seems like two little humans unconscious on the floor with people gathered around them “accident victims” she murmurs to herself but on a more careful look, she notices that there are some men in the crowd who are infact clubbing the tiny humans with enormous sticks.

She draws closer to investigate, and to her greatest shock, she involuntarily yells “dem be small pikin oo!!” but nobody seems to have heard her or even cared to listen because the crowd is focused on what we the readers now know to be kids. At this point, it is revealed that more people are stumping, beating, yelling and manhandling the unconscious bodies of these kids, “wetin dem do?” she asks a bystander “dem tif garri” is the response she gets “the big broda bin tif garri wey him and im smal broda go chop but pesin come catch dem as dem dey chop am raw for unda bridge” the bystander concludes.

she watches as tires are rolled out and placed on the necks of these unforgivable offenders and then an expensive amount of often scarce gasoline doused on them by a mob that look like they have never erred in anyway shape or form. As she watches, something peculiar catches her attention, in the crowd, she notices two people that stand out from the uniformed faced horde; one, a mopol with his rifle by his side, standing and watching as one man tries as best as he can to light a match in the windy late afternoon and the second, a woman in a sun hat, a large bible in one hand and a portable speaker in the other, someone she immediately recognizes as the street preacher that never stops bickering about eternal life after death.

She is stunned and wonders why these two who seem to have an albeit somewhat different authority over the mob just stands there doing nothing, “it must be as a result of that BYSTANDER EFFECT i read about in that one article” she says to herself. The man with the match manages to light it and it is thrown to the older boy. His scream couldn’t have come from a child, let alone one who is already half dead. He runs around, helplessly, with all the strength his feeble wounded body can muster, trying to put away the fire that has already engulfed him, his little brother, presumably already dead, up in flames blazing like a bonfire. The boy yells, pleades and begs for help until he can yell, plead and beg no more, but the crowd avoids him the way magnets with the same poles avoid each other, but at last there is a calm. The girl notices him staring at her and she leaves the scene, maybe because his dead unconscious stare makes her uncomfortable or maybe because she just remembered that she really needs to be in church.

Church is over, some glib sermon about prosperity and how the week wont pass before the entire laity is somehow blessed financially beyond their…………..insipid imaginations. She is back at home, her snail stew almost ready, she is flickering through channels on her tv when one channel draws her attention to the news about two boys, one a 12 year old and the other, an 8 year old who were burned earlier that day for stealing a cup of garri. It’s almost 11pm, she’s beginning to dose off and in her drowsiness, the death stare of the flaming dead kid floats to her consciousness, it scares her and she wakes up frantically in the stall of her favorite snail vendor.

By her side, a neatly tied bag of snails and at the other end, the smiling familiar face of her friend. “i say make i live you make you sleep small” her friend says. The girl is perplexed but thanks her and pays, she looks at the time on her phone, it’s 15mins to 4, as she hurriedly leaves the stall she catches herself saying “chai i don late for church”. As she walks quickly through the crowded market, seeing people she feels she had seen before and bumping into others she feels she had bumped into before, “must be a terrible case of dejavu” she murmurs to herself, Something……catches….her….attention,……the noise of a crowd, gathered by the flyover, gives her a shrieking terrible sensation like she had never felt before, or known that she even had the ability to feel.

Slowly now, she walks closer to the crowd, her heart thumping, sweat forming on her forehead, what she sees nearly makes her heart jump out of her mouth, a bloodied half dead 12 year old and a mass of unrecognizable 8 year old in a pool of blood, surrounded by the vengeful intolerant justice-demanding angry mob, beating and mocking these…unforgivable offenders. She cannot believe what she is looking at, surely this must be some kind of dream, surely she is running mad she tries to assure herself. “Ww-wetin dem d-do” she forces herself to ask a bystander “dem tif garri”… and then she finds herself murmuring word for word what the bystander is saying “the big broda bin tif garri wey him and im smal broda go chop but pesin catch dem wia dem dey chew am raw for unda bridge”