I didn’t have to worry for so long because something happened that changed my life forever.

It was very late on this night. I noticed a body being pushed out of one of those big cars; I ignored it because I thought it was another corpse being dropped but my attention was drawn to it again when I heard sound coming from it. Whoever it is is definitely alive! I walked over to the body and realized it’s a man but I couldn’t see his face properly because it was very dark. I brought him under the bridge. He had bruises all over his body but he was okay. I placed him on my mat and cushioned his head with clothes and he slept off. The face I saw in the morning gave me a mini heart attack.

Let me tell you how I got here.

I was the only child of my parents and they died in that stupid sosoliso plane crash while I was on holiday at my uncle’s place. That was how I started living with him but my uncle’s wife was harsh towards me. She practically turned me into their housegirl and when my uncle died, she sent me out of the house in anger asking me to go and look for my family. Once I stepped out of that house, I never looked back. I ended up here and the face I’m staring at now is that of Jide, my uncle’s first born. He was kind to me back then, he was away at the university when his mother sent me out of the house.

He was surprised to see me when he woke up. He told me the people who pushed him out of the car were robbers and that was his car they went away with. He called his wife to come pick him and he refused to leave me here.

That was how I left this place that was my house for six years or is it seven? I can’t even remember.

Jide and his wife were nice to me. And when I gave birth to my baby, a beautiful girl, they took care of her like their own. I do not know what happened to Rosco but my worry is no more. I know you will want to ask if I did not miss Rosco’s thing and if I’m still doing it, but all I can say is, that is a story for another day.

*********************

Oluwatofope closed the book she has been reading to the audience for the past one hour or so. She has just finished reading the last of a collection of short stories she had written. Her new book reading event is about to come to an end. The audience rose in a standing ovation but only three people in that audience knew that the last story she read is an adaptation of her mother’s true life story. She looked up and smiled at her mother.