FORGED THROUGH DARKNESS

und of receding footfalls one

emanating from some drunken place in her mind, she heard the living room door creak open. Her heart lunged in terror. It was abundantly clear now that someone else was inside the house with her, someone who seemed to have carried out their operation and was now leaving. And then the door slammed shut. The person made no attempt to be surreptitious about that one. It seemed calculated to let her know that someone was at the door, or that someone had been inside the house, for the sound the door made when slammed jolted her out of

of looking at the floor and at once she felt a flicker of vertigo and lost her footing. She staggered back and propped her

he window and thunder rumbled outside

ing in space, suspended between two planes of existence, with everything rotating, nay, spinning so fast, so maniacally, racking her and tossing her to a place she had never been before. And then there appeared to be a l

She cri

because she had spent the last two decades hating her mum and cherishing the hatred. The hatred had grown from visceral to pathological, carefully tended and fed each day by her; preserved, reinforced to last through life and in death, to last for all eternity. Whenever she so much as felt a letting up, an unwelcome softening, or sanctimonious scruples within her arising from the impact of random words of street preachers, or that of Reverend Onoja's, she was swift in stoking the flames of hatred by peeling back the layers of her bitter

mmy," and in which her mum hadn't rebuked her outright, was in 1968, when she was six. That was to be the last, because l

mpelled to utter it

he open the door? Didn't she lock it? Yes, she was muddled but she rememered the part where she locked the door before she started gulping down beer. She rememered tossing the key carelessly and happily on

some far away place in her

she could try to recall the name of her Saviour, she came crashing down, head firs

en to the en