THE CHAT ROOM : PART 11 – 20
PART 12
By Temi Akintade
“Lie down.” The woman at the pharmacy commanded. She gestured to the wooden table dressed in blue sheets like a caricature hospital bed. There was only one flat pillow without a pillowcase.
She told me that the last lady who had come for an ab©rtion soaked the sheets including the pillowcase with her bIood.
Hence, the reason why there was no pillowcase on the pillow. I shifted my gaze to the ab©rtion tools this time, and my heart lurched with fear.
The tools were large, the kn!ves didn’t look like kitchen kn!fe so were the scissors. They had thin keen edges.
The passage in my throat constricted suddenly becoming too small to push down the fear that gripped me. I marveled when my eyes landed on another piece of equipment.
It was completely insignificant and unnecessary but I wanted to know what it would play in the ab©rtion process.
“What is this?” I pointed towards the pink hanger placed beside the other instruments with nipping edges.
“You ask too many questions.” She pushed her thin hands into latex rubber gloves. The kind, lab technicians use in the laboratory. “That is the hanger that we use to hang clothes.
I will use it to club the head of the baby and drag it out. It makes the ab©rtion process easy and fast.”
I squeezed my eyes tightly, willing myself to imagine how it would be when the hanger is pvshed into my private part. My eyes fluttered open the moment brief flashes of my lifeless body on the blue sheeted table filled my mind.
“I can not do this.” I turned to leave and ignore the pharmacist lady who kept calling my name. I let out a sigh of relief as soon as I stepped out.
The air was hot and the sun was sweltering but It was better to be outside beneath the scorching sun, inhaling the dusty and smoke scented air than to be inside, inhaling nothing but fear and de.ath.
My slim hand traveled to my rounded stomach and that afternoon, behind my campus, I made a vow to protect my unborn child and teach it what my mother never taught me.
That evening, while I was resting in the hostel, Frank called me.
I picked on the first ring. “Don’t worry I didn’t do it.”
He sighed into the phone and exclaimed. “Thank you, Jesus! I have been praying for you.”
A small frown graced my head. “Praying? Why?” I found it rather disconcerting that he was praying for me. “What about?”
“I told God to give you reasons why you shouldn’t take the life of your child.” He breathed into the phone.
I knew God but I didn’t understand Frank’s God because his God heard his prayers. His God seemed nice because my mother’s God didn’t seem nice at all the way my mother use to portray it.
The other time she caught me chatting on the phone one night, she told me that God would be angry with me if I was chatting with a boy that late.
But if Frank’s God heard his prayers, then that means Frank’s God doesn’t mind me talking to Frank even at night. “Frank, please thank your God for me. He gave me a reason indeed.”
“Are you free now?”
“I’m free but I’m resting I want to sleep.” My eyelids were already batting without control.
“Oh, I will see you tomorrow then. Meet me at my office I want to take you to my fellowship.”
I wasn’t sure if it was fellowship I heard or ‘ship’ but I grunted back a reply and floated into my dreamland
THE CHAT ROOM : PART 11 – 20
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