Short Stories: The Three Unused Coverings

The central part looked like the central park; It was quiet that evening. Amidst the ambience of a lush weather stretching to maintain a moment of love among four friends, Feyi wore a moody cloak. She was happier earlier that day, and everyone could always tell when something went wrong with her. But this night was different. She didn’t utter a letter to anyone. She only picked her pen and paper out from her pocket, and began to scribble thus:

This is how we begin to die: we are born, then we grow strong, and we grow weak, and then we die. The same happens to the lights in our bodies. She stopped here and moved on to another paragraph:

Each time the covers gave way, we could see that the light was dimming. Thirty-two shimmering halogens were beginning to look like the old face of a candle lamp; dying. Before now, only twelve of them was needed to blind the floodlights guiding a football field. But now, their fire was going out. Their oil began drying up. They were growing older, and it affected everyone else. The most painful part was the nagging sibling who refused to grow up. He complained about everything. Made us go late to church, complained about the meat being too tough, about the water being too cold, and factored in the fact that the stove wasn’t supposed to heat the water that hot. He held everyone to ransom.

There were times when he was good. He behaved like the others. He fought for good grades, never disobeyed an instruction, checked in with all the others, and never came back late. When it was time to love, he was the fairest. He would make the sacrifice and do the hardest job, and sometimes be the last to go to sleep. And then, all of a sudden, the switch that puts out these lights come on. He gets pretty agitated. He causes a migraine that surrounds your head like a turban. He causes you to have sore chin, and strains under your throat to choke and deny food passage. This for a minute is how you die.

Feyi closed the pad and walked a distance from where she sat. The pressure of her butt on the rock where she had sat, forced a piece of paper in between the many stones grappling to be noticed. I picked it up and opened it. There it all was; the mention of the “thirty-two shimmering halogens were beginning to look like the old face of a candle lamp…,the migraine, the chin, the neck, the ache, the nagging sibling…” The wisdom tooth isn’t as wise as it is called after all.

Leonell