Mama Afunuro could feel it, the quaking of the ground beneath her, probably due to the villagers all around her trembling in anticipation. As for her, she was completely still. Only her eyes moved when, finally, the words swept through the village. ‘O bu mmuo!’ the villagers muttered, almost in unison. It’s a ghost. He, the coloniser, was finally here.
‘It's easy to be a judge,’ Judge Collins would say to students, when invited to speak at university conferences. ‘The golden rule is: you must be impassive. You must keep all emotions out of your job.’ He firmly believed this. Heck, it had been his modus operandi throughout his career.
How could he know that his beliefs would change radically, that he would be so rocked to his core by death that his golden rule would feel impossible to abide by?
The lie was never an issue for me. I mean, I was fine with spending the rest of my life behind bars, as though the real culprit of the crime of June, 1997. And the thought of breaking silence about my innocence would have never crossed my mind, had I not received her letter this morning.
Therapy was never an option for me. Therapy was a thing only meant for insane people, I always thought.
‘I’m completely fine,’ I would often say to myself about my mental stability. Especially when contemplating a thing I did which could be deemed a bit crazy.
But I stopped saying this the day I grabbed the knife, looking to defend myself with it, only to find nothing but air waiting for me.
