• Heavy punishment is looming for a crime that does yet not fit the bill
Image: PIXABAY
Diary,
How’s 2024 coming along for you?
Great, great. Oh, you want to know how mine is going? It’s just fine and dandy. I started it by attending a New Year’s Eve party with a beautiful woman called Akinyi.
No, no, no. We didn’t screw or anything close because we were too drunk, had no money and spent the night in the gutter. Then her fiancé, whom she was supposed to marry on New Year’s, beat me to a pulp and promised to repeat it when I got out of the hospital. So, ask me again how my year is going.
If it’s true that when it rains it pours, then Akinyi is Noah’s flood multiplied by the hail of fire in Sodom and Gomorrah. I’m beginning to think, without a hint of parody, that she might be the death of me.
It’s been three days since Akinyi’s fiancé (did I mention he’s as tall as Goliath and as wide as two Mike Tysons?) threatened to end me. Three nerve-racking days of constantly glancing over my shoulder to see if a human Kenya Bus is after me.
But if he is stalking me, he must be invisible or something. Even my patients are noticing everything isn’t quite alright with me. And it’s more than the bandages on my face and the slight wince every time I put weight on my right leg.
“Why do ghosts ride the elevator?” a patient asked me today.
“Ghost?” I asked, more scared than I should’ve been. “Where is it? Have you seen one?”
“No, doc. It’s a joke. Why do ghosts ride the elevator? To lift their spirits.”
I can’t believe another human being, a red-blooded homo sapiens like myself, has reduced me to the nutter afraid of jokes. So today, I decided to stop being a coward. If that bully dares show his face, I will stand up to him, and if it comes to it, I will pound my dignity out of him.
It is, therefore, with utmost shame that I have to say this. When there came a knock on my office door and I heard a voice say, “Dr Ojiambo, it’s me, Akinyi. Would you please open the door?” I immediately hid in my office toilet and locked the door.
But as it so often happens, bad things happen to good people. After a while of sitting on my toilet, a regular patient comes for his appointment and my nurse, who doesn’t know I had sought asylum in the loo, opens the door for him and flushes me out. And there is my patient, and next to him, who else but my worst nightmare.
“I was here first,” Akinyi tells my patient. “I won’t be too long.” After the man leaves, she begins taking off her blouse.
“What are you doing?” I ask, only then noticing the bruises on her face. “What happened to you?”
“Do you have to ask?” The blouse out, she goes for her trousers. “And you know something? I’m tired of being battered for something I haven’t done.”
“Are you kidding? Your fiancé will kill us both.”
“Then I suggest you make this an experience worth dying for.”