Author: Olubumni Familoni Olubuni

This girl, she just happened, like that. The way bad things happen to good people. No ceremony of falling in love, or rituals of romance. It all started with a blind date. There was neither love nor longing at first sight. The girl being not much to look at – one of those faceless characters in a permanent destinationless drift upstage, lost in the throng of the cast of Life; her soft presence fading out to merge into the blackness of the backdrop. She had entered the room, but was not in it; she kept throwing glances over her shoulders, as…

The blackness in the room was thick, heavy; it sat across your face and killed you, black as behind a dead man’s eyes – you couldn’t even see your nose in it. The room, it was a small one, a box room – tight as a child’s coffin, with this deep dead-of-the-night darkness taking up all the space in it. Yes, the darkness was death-heavy like that, but it was not what was pressing me down on the frail mattress, no; neither was it the blue weight of my daily sadnesses. It was this unfamiliar burden of writer’s block that…