denis post

TALE OF A BOARDING HOUSE We were in class but not receiving any lessons two hours after the assembly had ended. It’s not that we had a free period it was just that our teachers were not coming and we who weren’t interested in classes anyway didn’t bother to call them. Besides, it was easy for any teacher to forget us as our class was a small one in between two noisy classes and somehow, most of the time, our door usually seemed to be invisible to the outside world. A class of two girls and two boys who had gossip to listen to hardly made noise and so, we were virtually invincible to the school. Today, we had been talking and somehow we had begun talking about boarding houses. Of the four of us, I was the only who hadn’t been to a boarding house and Emmanuel was the one who had stayed in the boarding house for the longest time and he was also the oldest of us so, he had a lot of stories for us. Today’s was about a strange experience he and some other naughty boys had once at night. “It was lights out but we just couldn’t sleep besides the next day was a Saturday so we felt we could always catch up on our sleep sometime later the next day. We tried playing games but we couldn’t do so without some form of noise. If we continued, we knew the house master would come for us and that wouldn’t be nice so we decided to climb our beds and just stare into darkness hoping at some point, sleep will take us for its own. Finally when we grew quiet, we then heard the strain of some song and gradually it became clearer and so we sat up to listen. The song goes like this: ‘I saw Michael Jackson in a laptop drinking garri, and he said “Do you want some, do you want some, do you want some more.”’” “What a weird song.” I chipped in. “Yes it was weird.” Emmanuel replied and then paused. “Continue.” Theresa prompted. “Ah yes. So we woke one of the prefects up and told him to listen. He heard the song too and decided to go out and see what could be causing such a song. Some of us, most rather, followed him and what did we see when we got outside? A red sack filled with red garri and then red cups and spoons. We searched our hostel’s compound but we didn’t see the source of the song but only the strange garri at our doorstep. Then one boy decided he was hungry and wanted to take some garri.” “Is he mad?” Shalom asked. “Toh! Na so we see am. Anyway, we couldn’t stop him and then he got water and sugar and took the strange garri. Nothing happened to him there and then but none of us dared to take the garri. We later went inside and back to sleep.” Emmanuel continued. “So nothing happened?” I asked slightly disappointed. “Something happened. We woke up in the morning and couldn’t find the boy. He vanished without a trace.” Emmanuel said. “What!” We all chorused. “Didn’t his parents came to look for him?” I asked. “They did but I don’t know what the school told them because we later learnt his mother ran mad and was roaming around the school claiming she saw her son.” He finished and then left us to our thoughts. Just then a teacher came in and we tucked the story somewhere in our minds to think about later.