We were children playing games, picking fruits, seething about the river's edge like ants, swimming and dreaming of leaving this town some day to the city where everything is alive as noise and fast and tall buildings with expensive things and airplanes and money for our parents, though they were trying their best and the company had not paid salaries for two years and we had become used to breaking palm nut shells to get to the flesh, edible worms, salted garri and chicken feet. It was all survival and survival then wasn't some neat trick on tv where people attempted to light fires with sticks, claim honey from a hive with bare skin and smoke, sleep in a curled forest where cameras caught their snores, their racing through the bushes, skin dipping, lusting and all the shenanigans that make good tv. No, survival then was real as eating stories for dinner and drinking herbs for medicine because who could afford the doctor or drugs? And families were breaking up, many we're leaving either through disease or weariness or knowledge that love had grown too thin, too jaundiced to be sustained by mere wishes. This wasn't a reality tv show. This was our lives and we were just children, just beginning to see the paths, yet to understand what it meant to walk alone, to often fall, to never rise.
In that time, a drought came to the town and we grew thinner and fainter as dew at dusk. Our parents grew hollow and quieter and somehow we had freer access to the world outside our homes. We journeyed, hunting grasshoppers and bush rats, small fishes in the caked gutters, digging half formed yams and groundnuts from abandoned farms, stealing the worm ridden guavas and pawpaws that still straggled at the edge of the forest everyone in the town knew not to cross and we were curious and hungry and hunger has made all of us do stupid things at times and so, one fateful day, when the sun was high and the heat was melting us into puddles around our toes, we sought the fresh green trees of the forbidden forest, we sought the breeze, the fat looking fruits that lined the trees further into the forest's dark blossoms. We ignored all warnings, rolled our sleeves, tightened our school belts around our waists and trudged into the gloom. We were hopeful that this adventure will yield gifts that would supersede our disobedience. We were sure we would be heroes. We were children.
We grew bolder the further we walked along a clean path that looked cleaved just for our feet; straight and narrow, allowing only one person at a time. We were six of us on this journey and we walked talking and jousting, listening to the free sounds of birds frolicking about their private business. We soon found fruit trees and filled our bags with fruits. We found easy game; bush rats, snakes, lizards and any sort of meat that we could get our hands on. It was a hunt that bested all the hunts we had in the past. We were elated as a sky getting ready for rain and the drought was so far away from our thoughts. We found a gentle river some distance into the forest. It never occured to us to ask where was it's mouth as there was no river like it in our town. It was clean and we could see the fishes flicking in and out of sight at the bottom of the river, we could see the white sand at the bottom. It looked cleaner than the water we drank back at home. Someone suggested a bath and we stripped and dove into the water. It was cool and sweet. We swam and splashed, laughed and plunged; we fished and filled sticks with dried fishes when we looked through the foliage to see that dusk was returning to darken the world.
It was time to return home. We had gone to the forbidden forest and we were returning with gifts. We had not encountered any demon or ghost. We had not caught the scent of any rabid carnivore. We were alive and had more fun than we could remember and we would be praised and worshipped by our parents and the hollowness would leave their eyes and they would smile more and maybe they too would want to return to the forest with us and we would live happily ever after. We gathered our belongings and our hunt and together we wandered back out of the forest but dusk quickened and soon it was almost impossible to see the path that we once freely walked upon. Soon we were lost or rather we didn't know what we thought was familiar. After all, we have never walked the path before, we had trusted it to take us to where we were supposed to be; roads implied someone had journeyed it before and safety too if it was well used but is this always true. Do roads take us on exciting journeys all the time and return us gently to our family? We did not know. We were children.
We wandered in the forest, moving until it grew too dark to see and still we walked and walked until our feet grew tired and we grew sleepy and sticky and found a tree which we climbed, hoping to avoid nocturnal animals who might not be as welcoming as the ones we had met during the day. It was a big tree but we've been climbing since we could walk so it was nothing for us to climb this tree and soon we had found comfortable, at least in the sense that they could take our bodies, to lie on. We laid but we did not sleep. The forest seemed to stretch fingers towards us and squeeze around us like a net. Deep in the night, a huge roar filled the sky and a sudden silence descended on the forest, a sickening smell floated towards where we shivered and we almost threw up then we heard a cock crow. A cock crow meant a settlement of sorts. We were ecstatic, it was almost dawn. We clambered down from the tree and began to run towards the sound of the crows. We burst out of the forest into a path that looked like the one we had taken in but now it looked unused and overgrown but we ran on uncaring, our arms gathered around our bags of fruits, fish and game.
It was already day when we burst out of the forest into the family open space we were familiar with. It was a bit greener than it was when we left but that meant nothing. We ran towards our secret place to share our spoils before heading to our homes. Then we slowed down. Something was wrong. First of, there was a wide black road running from somewhere towards where we stood dumfounded, then a big building stood where we used to rehearse our masquerade dances. It made no sense. We struggled to understand as we walked slowly, eyes wide, mouths open, out hands clutching our shirts to retain a sense of reality. It was unreal until the first of us got to where their home used to be and there was a school with children in strange uniforms screaming the multiplication table. We stood and stared at each other then at them wistfully.
"Hello gentlemen, do you seek someone?" A voice asked.
We turned and it was a policewoman. We frowned at her. She looked familiar but we could not place her face.
"Excuse me, we are not strangers. This is Tope's father's compound. When was this school built?" I asked.
The policewoman rocked back as if she had been punched in the stomach. She counted us with her fingers pointed at us then she screamed and fled. We stood there confused. What had we said or done? Before we could moved, the policewoman returned with some persons and the school teachers and their charges came out to sate their curiosity. The policewoman pointed at us and the crowd walked a bit closer to where we stood and stopped.
"Strangers, you say you know Tope?" A man among the others asked.
"What sort of question is that? I'm Tope! What is going on here?" Tope replied.
The crowd seethed and shifted like a restless sea. A withered crone pushed through the crowd and came to the front. She drew closer to us and inspected us with rheumy eyes. Distasfied, she took our hands and began to pinch through each of us, searching for whatever. We let her because we were quite shocked with the display. Suddenly she screamed! She was holding Ghenero's shoulder. On it was a scar. He got the scar two months ago, when he fell from a window while trying to dodge his mother to come join us for play. The woman screamed again and again then she began to cry. She held Ghenero and began to cry and then, one man came and dragged her away from Ghenero.
"Why have you return, ghosts of our brothers?" The first speaker asked.
Ghosts? We are not ghosts. Did the woman not touch one of us? Can they not see us?
"I don't know what is going on here but I am going to my father's house. We have hunted for a whole day and I know my siblings will be hungry. Maybe after I have seen them, I can make sense of this rubbish," Kabiru replied, hitching his shorts and turning away.
"You will not enter this village. It seems you do not understand us. You're the famous six who went missing over twenty-five years ago. Do you understand? Where have you been?..." The policewoman said.
Twenty-five years? We looked at each other. Twenty-five years! It was just a day and a night. Twenty-five years? No. That's impossible.
"Ha Tope, you do not remember me, your own eldest sister?" The old woman asked.
Tope peered at the woman and started laughing in disbelief. He turned to look at us, then he began to cry. We began to cry and the people began to fade and soon there were no longer there and we stood before our town and listened to its empty wail and the half eaten houses that stared at us from open eye holes and dust rolled all over and we could hear no baby or man, no woman or fire speak in the dawn, the dawn opening, opening, opening until we realised that we were all that remained. We sat on the ground and a sweet smell rose to meet us and it came from our bag and when we opened to see, we found we had a type of weed filling our bag, it had a fragrance that filled us and made us smile and giggle and dance and we danced in the empty town, we played, we sang, we wept. We were no longer children.