The Tales of Achelo

The Mystery

Episode 1

My obsession with pessimism had been the driving force of fear within me. It had become my habit to think about it every night. Nothing could thrill me like imagining myself in that place. In fact, each moment my mind skipped to the thought of it, I would shrink with fear. The ambience appeared grey day in day out and it was always covered with mist or something relative. The place was cemented with the most bizarre kind of gravels. The grasses around the place could never grow tall or dries and they always appear summer-like. The look of the place was my greatest fear.

I was seven years and that was a qualification enough for me to get my own room. It was just next to my mother’s room. Someone who looked through my window would see the back of the village. The avocado tree behind my window had extended it branches to meet the window glasses. They would make scratches on my window. Our wall was never plastered; cobwebs netting everywhere. My springy bed was that of early nineteenth century type.

My mother had two children. I was born last. My sister, Edith was allocated the room at the far end of the corridor. Mother had never repaired the roof of our house ever since she told me father had died. The roof had some holes in the iron sheet above my bed. That hole could make me see the moon traipsing through the night sky.

The last time I saw my father was when I was shouting in pain clutching my left eye. I had hit it against a stone. That time I was coming back from school through the route that traversed that place. Edith told me that I had a sudden seizure which finally brought me down. She would tell me that father rushed me to the hospital but the doctor said I would hardly recover my full sight.

When he was living, father would sit there besides the living room cupboard then he would call, “coffee, Janer!” Mother would respond quickly. Mother had been giving him the best tea, no doubt.

Our sitting room wasn’t large like the one we had in town. But I don’t blame father for building somewhere that appeared like an abandoned place. The place where we were our own neighbors. We only noticed other people existed when they would be carrying corps past our compound. Whenever I would sit behind my room outside and watch over to that place, I would see father in my mind, pointing to my direction. I would hear him say, “Son take care of your mother.”