Alhaji Keulere's Goats | Flash Memoir

For it had become as a spirit. When a bullet probed a midnight sky, Father’s fright spun rapid spirals as did his legs. Like a stricken smoke, they awoke every breath under our roof. They knocked the empty purple jar over, fumbled at the helm of our bed and became feeble. Became bare. 
 
Tonight, another bullet stung the silence. ‘Up! Children, up!’ voice when it came, tense and low, was Father’s, ‘Up! Wear something, we must leave for Grandma’s now!’

 

Then mother, it seemed, would not go. ‘Tonight? No how we won’t end up seen or even shot!’

 

It was Alhaji Keulere’s gate. It jangled loudly just again. Three blows, then four. Then five, the sixth so brute and brash. Father sprang again to another curtain and peered.

 

‘What?! If we do not run now, we are next’.  A seventh blow. ‘Iwo woman yi! They would enter this compound and shoot us, all of us!’ Father continued to shout. Mother was too bold. Mother would not bulge. Was Mother not hearing the noise? Why would she not bulge? Was Mother ready to die?

 

She was not.

 

Yet puzzled she was, in the way she had glanced at me, a brief struggle in her eyes; in the way she had opened the gates and not returned to close them. Dark mist gleamed in the headlights as we passed a waving night-guard. When we arrive at grandmother’s flowered compound, everyone’s eyes sleep-stewed; the puzzle is still there, now, in her silence. . .

Morning is here. I hear our night-guards had a drunken festival at midnight. And Alhaji Keulere’s goats too!

 
Iwo woman yi — You this woman.