I shot him deliberately, with a near perfect aim that took off half of his neck with the bones and all. What I felt afterwards, was a deep regret. Not for killing him, no, it was for loving him as a brother.
The day he died. He came to the house when I was away at the school, left a message with my mother for me, to meet him at his father's farm in the evening. He knew my family needed all the help we could muster, not because he was very close to me, no, it was obvious to the community as well. The ordeal my family was passing through was a common knowledge to all. We were living on the grace of people.
Not everybody was kind to us, but Akin and his family were. They helped a lot. The community helped too, but mostly in the area of security for the nights around my father’s house. The community’s support surprised me, much unexpected. It was contrary to what I knew them for, or what they were, probably both. I knew them as mockers. Mocking my mother, my toddling sisters and my late father (a remarkably fat man) was their hobbies. My family was their usual mockery subjects. So, there was no farfetched reason for me to hate them. It took time before I trust them with my family’s …show more content…
He worked at a private bottled water company. The company folded, a week after my father's death. Father was found, drowned and bloated in the company's water reservoir after a week. We had searched high and low for him, before we found his body in the water. The community religiously rejected the company's bottled water henceforth. Because a corpse spent a week in their water reservoir. The company's talks and explanations on how sterilization worked had no impact in the community. "They want to be selling us egret's husband fat! I am fat enough!" They were saying. One of my mother’s community given names was egret.
Time of his death was not good for the family, especially for me. At fifteen, I became the head of my family by default.
My parent’s initial plan was to have me as their only child. But, the twins forced their ways into the family when I was already fifteen. Father died same year when the twins were just few weeks