Be blessed. ❤️
📌Has been published on Wattpad Christian Writers and Readers Club's Short Story anthology.
Genre: Young Adult
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1ST JANUARY, 2017
12:00 A.M.
The sounds around me are much welcome to me, but not so to the squirming baby in my arms.
It's my first new year celebration.
That might look like an absurd statement since I am technically still a teenage girl turning nineteen this year, but to me, it's true.
I never lived before now; I just existed.
I had been melting into oblivion with each passing second.
Until His grace found me.
Until hope broke forth in my thick dark mess.
1ST JANUARY, 2016
It was the new year celebration time in Lagos peninsula, Nigeria. No big news there.
Problem was, I had nowhere to go. I was just another street urchin that people avoided like a pile of faeces.
Lights flooded the early morning streets. It was just a few minutes after the clock struck twelve.
Shouts of "Happy New Year!" rent the cold harmattan morning. Those shouts gave me a major headache because it was the herald of another three sixty five days of misery and hopelessness.
Myriads of fireworks, sparkles and bangers shot up into the black sky. Beautiful displays of light and glory that should cheer every soul that watched them.
They only helped to magnify the growing darkness in my heart.
I sat beside a gutter that stank of rotten fish. Most probably, the owner of the stall behind it was a fish monger. The smell mirrored my life.
I was seriously contemplating suicide. What use was a life as miserable as mine to this already miserable world?
Grandma died four weeks back. My grief couldn't have been worse.
She was my angel in human skin.
She was the only one who took me in and showered me with love. According to her, my mother died due to a difficulty in giving birth to me. I don't know who my father is. Grandma refused to speak of him each time I tried probing.
When the doctor diagnosed Grandma with terminal liver cancer few months ago, I had prayed with all my might to the God she believed in to spare her life. I promised I would serve him all my days, and that I would be a more obedient child to my grandmother.
He didn't answer. She died in my care.
"Don't forget what I have always told you, Joy. A new life awaits you. I'm going home now. I pray God be with you," Grandma rasped with difficulty before breathing her last.
I had screamed and trashed and wailed like my heart had been plucked out of my chest when the neighbours came and confirmed her dead.
I refused to believe it, but it was true. My grandmother was gone forever.
My heartless 'uncles' drove me out of the only place I knew as home immediately they came to pick up Grandma's corpse.
They didn't even allow me to be there when she was buried.
Apparently, to them, I was ill-luck. I was a death-spreading disease to be avoided. They said I was a special kind of witch that sacrifices her loved ones in exchange for powers.
I had nowhere to go, so I slept underneath bridges and shacks for weeks, providing an additional feast for the blood-sucking mosquitoes that thrived in those ghettos.
I joined other homeless people to beg on the bustling streets of Lagos.
It was a dog-eat-dog battle for survival. And I was fast losing.
Once, I got an infection in my blistered sole. Somehow, after bouts of fever, my immune system won and I didn't die.
It angered me. Why didn't I just die?
My only possession I had on, my cloth, was all tattered and dirty beyond repair.
The cold and the heat and the harsh elements of the Lagosian sky did not for once smile on me.
Then, the worst night of my life came. It was three days to the last day of the year.
I was gang-raped by three hoodlums. I had unknowingly wandered into their territory that horrible night.
Those three stinking men who were apparently high on some sort of drug caught me as I was silently walking through an alley.
Coming to the realization of what was to be my fate as they manhandled me and tore at my clothes, I screamed and struggled with all my might but nobody came to my rescue.
Not even God.
All through that night, they took rounds.
One held my hands, the another spread my legs, pinning me to the ground while the last of the trio did the unimaginable, all the while laughing maniacally and passing comments too unimaginable to a normal mind.
I cried and begged and squirmed, trying to break free, all to no avail. Being unable to take the pain anymore, I passed out.
It was the worst night of my life.
My innocence was so easily stripped from me.
My bitterness against God multiplied.
I was sore for three days, unable to walk, unable to do anything else except pray that death would come. Just thinking about what had happened would cause me to throw up.
I couldn't eat. Well, it wasn't as though there was anything to eat.
Suicide seemed very appealing at that time.
Why shouldn't I kill myself? I saw no ray of hope. Not one speck of light glimmered in the hole of blackness that I was silently slipping into.
Nobody even took notice of me. They were all too busy travelling, shopping or trying to make some last bits of money for the festivities of the fast approaching new year.
I stood after those three days of pain and was about crossing the street to get to the bridge.
Since I was so poor that I couldn't afford to buy sniper, I decided to drown myself in the lagoon.
'Grandma, I'm sorry,' was the only thought in my head as I sobbed, walking towards my death.
Suddenly, I heard a voice.
Did somebody just call my name? I halted.
No one had called me by my real name, my full name, for the past one month.
"Joy Bamidele!"
That voice sounded awfully familiar. Like Grandma's.
I turned sharply but could see no one. It was dark after all.
"Who's there?" I asked as a slight shiver travelled down my spine at the possibility that my grandmother's ghost was talking to me.
"Don't do what you intend. Two lives will go for it. Murderers have no place in the Kingdom," the mysterious disembodied voice said.
I frowned, not understanding. Two lives? What's that supposed to mean?
"Go to the last building on this street. You'll find the help you need."
After recovering from my initial shock, the thought of suicide long discarded out of terror, I decided to do as the voice had asked.
I mean, what choice did I have?
The last building on that street was a pentecostal church. It was dimly lit on the inside. They were obviously done with their Cross-over service and there remained only few people in there.
A church? You've gotta be kidding me!
I had wanted to turn my back and simply walk away. I and God were on no talking terms.
Why a church of all places? If this was a joke my mind was playing on me, it was a sour one.
The door of the church opened just as I was about turning away. A tall, fatherly-looking man stepped out, scanning the outside as if he was expecting a visitor.
His sharp, dark eyes fell on me. They lit up, as though he had found a bag of gold. He smiled at me.
I was shocked. Maybe a bit terrified too.
All I had been used to seeing on people's faces when they sight me is the scowl of disgust.
It's not every day a typical Lagosian smiles at a dirty, hungry-looking beggar in tattered rags who is standing without direction in front of the holy house of God.
It actually never happens. Until that morning when that anomaly occured.
"You're welcome. You might as well come in, you know. It's chilly out there," he said in a thin voice, hoarse from shouting 'Happy New Year!'
He was right; my hands were already feeling numb. I followed him into the church.
Long story short, I discovered that he is the parish pastor of this branch of Zion Tabernacle Missions.
His wife was in office. She took one look at me, smiled sweetly and turned to her husband.
"She's the reason He told you to wait behind, right?" she said in a soothing voice that reminded me of how Grandma use to sing me lullabies to sleep as a little girl.
The Pastor, whose name I eventually got to know is Mr Oluwagbenga Lawrence, nodded.
Both of them gazed at me tenderly.
I was too spent, too weak to resist their love. Thinking fate had finally shined down on me, I allowed them.
They adopted me as their child. God had told them he was sending them a child, as they had no fruit of the womb after over fifteen years of waiting.
So, my name automatically became Oluwagbenga Joy.
I stayed happily with them for about one month and two weeks, happy that my life was finally beginning to make sense.
I hadn't told them my past, that I was an orphan, a victim of rape; they never asked.
Then, I got so sick one Tuesday morning that I passed out after vomiting dry heaves.
They took me to the nearest hospital to their house. The tests revealed that I had malaria.
And I was pregnant.
Tearfully, I spilled out my ugly background to them.
I thought that was the end of my bliss. Surely they would throw me out of their house. I, a total stranger that they'd shown nothing but pure love, couldn't repay their kindness with shame and stigma. How would they explain to the church and their families and their neighbors that the daughter they just adopted is pregnant?
So, on that fateful night, I decided it was best for me to simply go through with my plan of suicide.
I wrote a 'thank you' and 'I'm sorry' and 'goodbye' letter to my foster parents and placed it on my bedside locker.
I intented to swallow the five tiny tablets of Cyproheptadine—from what I read from the pamphlet had a side effect of inducing serious drowsiness—which I had snuck out of the first aid kit in the house.
The death would be silent and painless, a noiseless transition from my sleep to whatever blankness existed after death.
Mrs Oluwagbenga, who I was still finding awkward to call Mummy then, barged into my room just as I was about pouring the pills into my mouth.
Oh party pooper!
That's the only disadvantage of being a daughter of preachers. God informs them of my every move, most especially the wrong ones.
She gasped in horror. And started to talk. Real fast.
"Don't try it, Joy. Please, for God's sake don't. Two lives will go for it," she said, reiterating the words of that voice I had heard that led me to them.
There were unshed tears glistening in her eyes as she said that.
It hit me then what that mysterious voice meant by 'two lives'. The baby inside me would die too if I went in with this foolish act.
I burst into tears and allowed the pills to slip off my hand to the tiled floor of my cozy room.
Mummy sat on my bed and cuddled me close. She smelt of vanilla and roses.
I wailed my heart out.
Daddy—then Mr Oluwagbenga to me—showed up at the door.
"Mary, she tried to kill herself again, didn't she?" he asked in a flat, sleepy voice.
I felt Mummy nod against my head. Daddy sighed deeply and came to seat on the bed and stroked my arm.
"Thank God you came just in time. God showed me in my dream. I thought I was too late," he whispered to his wife.
That night I gave my life in surrender to God. Daddy and Mummy made sure of that.
Ironic that I'll eventually give my life to the One I had detested, isn't it?
The perfect epiphany.
In the midst of their love, I found God's love.
Still, I didn't fully understand God's love until nine months later, I was delivered of a baby girl. Fragile, wailing, cute, beautiful.
Just one look at her and my heart melted. Then I understood how God feels when He looks at me.
BACK TO PRESENT TIME
I'm in church right now.
Amidst the shouts of Happy New Year! Everyone is now a family. What sense of belonging.
Shalom is crying aloud now, squirming in my arms, probably wondering why everyone is shouting and disturbing her beauty sleep.
She's my cute little princess. Mummy absolutely adores her.
My life can't get any better than this.
Though the memories hurt still, my scars are fast healing.
I'm sure Grandma will smiling over me and her great granddaughter, Shalom from where she's watching us in heaven.
She was right.
A new life awaits me.
Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, it's not too much to ask for a comment and share, right?⭐
Thanks and God bless you. 😁😁😁
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