“And I have found surrealism to be the one door to self-transcendence”. – Omodero David –
The anguish that had ravished that moment was of a striking kind. And it hadn’t helped but had rather became clear to us, that the elves, to whom we had entrusted our bags of trusts, had vanished in the sublimity of the confronting mist.
Bode and I were two unlikely likes. And for a tiny while, we had been privileged by the great courts of time to be part of a vital allegory purposed by the universe itself. We were unlikely, in the sense that we had come from different families. Bode was Yoruba and I was Igbo, but were likes, in that we’d both, been beneficiaries of this mystical trip.
It was at dark, when the night had just began presenting its special elegy – of bereaved crickets and of coughing owls. But this ardent song could not even for a moment, interrupt the whirling sensations that had performed on the stages of our heads.
Bode’s bed seemed to have been designed to host the one ray of moonlight that’d always force its way through the almost shut doors of our curtains. Mine on the contrary, had remained in its lurk – six-feet away from Bode’s, right inside of the stomach of darkness.
The whirlings had persisted until it transcended into a trance of a mysterious kind. We couldn’t tell if this was a kind of joint dream where we both saw each other in our dreams, or if this was one of the many rare chances the universe had given away, like the unstable eclipses – where the moon was permitted to come between the sun and our world. Maybe this had been a rare chance for us to come between surrealism and reality, whichever way, we had to go through this obscure cave that’d stood before us.
Everything in the wonderland we’d stepped foot on, was dressed in enchantments. The ground upon which our feet had crawled, bore sheeny fruits lined in ridges, and as our feet sprawled on every kiss of each plum, they had lessened in weight. So we’d grown lighter after each step. We could see the fauns in their beautiful shades high up, heralding on golden flutes, the brightly ornamented fairies, basking on the comfy grasses that’d resembled soft yarns of green, caressing the edges of the stars of their wands.
We were welcomed in an usual courtesy by three elves, and just after exchanging warm handshakes, a red rimless rollercoaster bridled by some giggling child sprites had sped over our heads so fast that we had to cock our heads to avoid being birds. The elf that’d dominated most of our discussions had now quoted, in a weird but soft-spoken accent; “My friends, you betide this place for a cause, And if you may let us lead, you may cross”.
He’d said this lyrical utterance, repeatedly, before the two others had joined, one by one, then in unison. We’d asked for what they’d meant, but they kept on running that amusing machine of obscurity. And after this tangled moment, after bode and I had resolved to go the other way by replying that they may lead us, they’d yet again lunched into another recitation :“You give us the bag of trusts in your hands, We’d show you the way out of these strange lands”.
A boy about our age, identifying himself as Ahmed, had come to join us, he’d explained that he had been following us and that he himself had, moments after we’d appeared in that land, also done so. We looked to our hands and there hung these bags. The elfin breeze of that land had been, all along, slapping against them, tossing them sideways. We weren’t aware.
We’d barely released our bags to them, when an earthquake started to growl. At this, the elves vanished from our sight with our bags of trust. We were torn within. We could see the child sprites and a host of others scampering to a highly elevated pavilion. And when we’d made to join them, we were being stalled by one of the faires. She was beautifully adorned, her blonde and long fozzy hair curled in a knot with a barn red tie.
“You have no place here, why do you pace?”, She’d asked. “Yes ma’am we have no place here”, bode said, conscious now, of what had happened earlier, so that she wouldn’t go ahead to repeat.
She’d then spoken: “An allegory was told in two minutes, you have two minutes to tell that wit or spend that same time going home on your feet’s digits. The three of us had wrestled with answers that came out unbred, and Dayo suggesting the most; “Maybe this whole land is the allegory, and hey it’s like two minutes since we arrived here”. But all these had just been dredging up the pit of our undoings. And at the end of our given time, at the end of our fruitless guesses, we were all done.
When the digits of the feet of our brains had returned from this trip, we had become so tired that bode, my best friend who had come to be living with us, eversince he’d lost both parents in a car accident, that morning slept like the dead.
And just by yet another chance given to me by the universe, I had come to understand that we three, had represented Nigeria generally as the three major tribes in Nigeria, and that the three elves had symbolized our bad leaders, to whom power was given, to whom our bags of trusts where handed to in the hope that they lead us across this Land of tribulations – economic crises, educational scandals and bad governance, but had now left us in these times of crisis, as the elves had done.
Written by Omodero David
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Thank you Pride magazine for this publication!