DEATH OF THE ROSES- By Akpoveta Valentine 't

Death of the Roses is a sequel to the first.Intriguing story, suspense filled. For your Sunday relaxation and reading pleasure, I present to you from the stables of touched by a pen, DEATH OF THE ROSES.
After the cut, the story continues.............

It was 9:15 am.

Chioma was still in bed. It was a Saturday. But that wasn’t why she was still in bed. Last night was bad. No, it was worse than bad. It was a disaster. She was thinking about Zino and what had happened last night. She knew that she loved Zino and she didn’t understand why he didn’t know it too. Why was he being so hard on her? He accused her of seeing someone else. It hurt that he didn’t trust her and they had been going out for over a year. Or was he trying to hide the fact that he was cheating? Add to that the fact that he nearly raped her. Technically, that was rape, wasn’t it? She thought she knew him. but it turned out that she might have been wrong. She didn’t know what to do. She would have shared her concerns with her mom but she knew she wasn’t going to get any objective advice. Mama did not like Zino, to begin with. So she had to deal with this on her own.

Her phone was ringing. She ignored it. It rang and rang and then stopped. But it started ringing again. Again, Chioma ignored it. She didn’t want to speak with anybody just yet. The phone stopped and then began ringing a third time. Chioma, was getting angry. Who was this person that didn’t know when to stop after calling twice? Didn’t some people have any sense at all? Why would anyone call a third time when their first two calls weren’t picked? Didn’t common sense tell the person to send an SMS or simply call later?! Some people don’t just think. By the fourth time the phone was ringing, Chioma was livid. She picked up the phone and looked at the caller identity. It was Bisi calling. What was so urgent that Bisi wanted to tell her?

“Chioma! Chioma! Have you seen the news?!” Bisi said immediately Chioma picked the call. She was nearly shouting and was sounding hysterical.

Chioma was in no mood for discussion. But she forced herself to be polite. “No, I haven’t-”

“Osas is dead! They killed him yesterday-”

Chioma shot up like a bolt, “Which Osas?!” Her heart was beating a frenetic tattoo in her chest.

“Osas! Our Osas- your Osas!”

Chioma screamed in shock, “Jesus! You’re lying!” she cried, wishing it not to be true. It couldn’t be true.

“It’s on the news. It’s on the headlines. I saw it this-”

Chioma didn’t want to hear anymore. Now she knew that Bisi was lying. Bisi was just trying to play a cruel joke on her. She hung the call and went straight to her phone browser. There was nothing like that, she was sure about that.

Immediately, Bisi started calling back, interrupting her browsing. She picked up the call and shrieked at the top of her voice “Are you mad?! I’m trying to browse!” she hung up the call and tried again to connect to the internet.

Her mum rushed into the room calling Chioma, dread written all over her face. From her room, she had heard Chioma scream. “Chioma! What is it?” she asked. She was obviously shaken up too.

Chioma didn’t look up, engrossed as she was in her phone, “Nothing mum. Please I want to be alone…” her voice was quivering badly. Her fingers too. She kept typing the wrong buttons.

Mama knew that this was not nothing, Chioma was shaking all over. It was visible. “Chioma, are you sure-?”

“Mummy!”

Immediately, mama withdrew. Chioma had said the word. She definitely needed to be left alone, “I’m outside…” she shut the door hesitatingly behind her, the concern still deeply etched on her face.

Chioma was finally able to go online and search out the newspapers. She clicked on a link to an online news service. While it was loading, she recalled that she hadn’t taken Osas number the last time they had met in the school reunion party. She was regretting it. She would collect it the next time they met, she would make sure of it.

She looked down the side of her bed. The bag that he had given her was standing by it. On the small chest of drawers by her bed was a framed picture. It was one of the things the bag had contained. It was a gold-plated, exquisitely wrought frame of metal roses and evidently must have cost a lot. She picked it up and looked at it, trying to read the words but they were blurred, she blinked and warm tears splashed on to the glass. She shook her head vigorously. Why was she crying, she upbraided herself. She was just being silly. She would still see him. And she would properly thank him for the gifts the next time she saw him. She hadn’t gotten the chance to. He had left in a hurry. People don’t just die when it was only a week ago you saw them last.

The webpage had loaded on her phone. For sure, one headline jumped right out of the screen at her. FIVE KILLED IN FOILED ARMED-ROBBERY ATTEMPT. But that didn’t mean anything. The Nigerian police carried out extra-judicial killings as a sacred part of their jobs. It didn’t mean Osas was one of them. She saw a picture of five dead persons, their bodies riddled with bullet holes. Placed in front of them were eight guns, several rounds of live ammunition and several mobile phones. She looked closely at the picture if she could identify anybody but the picture was taken from an angle were it was impossible to correctly identify any one person. One of the bodies, though, had a mane framing his face like a lion. That was clearly visible.

Still, she denied. That wasn’t necessarily the same guy she had seen with Osas the last time she saw him. Of course not! Several people kept that kind of hairstyle. She scrolled down to the main article and started reading. She was breathing very fast. She couldn’t tell where her heart had moved to now- her chest, her neck or her ears. All three were throbbing painfully. When she got to the point where some names were written, she suddenly grew dizzy and swooned forward. Osas Ohenhen.

She could not bring herself to read further. He wasn’t the only Osas Ohenhen, she started to say- but even as she said so, she knew that her denial was lame. There was only one thing left for her to do to confirm whether or not it was really Osas. The paper had said he was the son of the editor of one of the national papers. The party she went to yesterday night, was the woman’s name not Ohenhen? She couldn’t recall because her head was in deep confusion now.  She had not seen either Osas or anyone that looked like his brother in the house, or any of the woman’s children for that matter. So she had no reason to connect them.

She had assumed that the woman’s kids might have been schooling abroad and she had not thought to even link Osas or his brother with her. But now… there was only one person she could ask- Zino, who had taken her to the party. Zino must know her since she knew his name. Chioma only hoped he would pick the call after what happened yesterday.

He was on speed dial. She immediately dialled his number.

“Yes did you find it?” a female voice answered.

Chioma started to answer but stopped, puzzled, and looked at her phone. Had she called another person instead of Zino? The caller identity confirmed that she had indeed called Zino. The caller identity read ‘SwtHrt’. That was what she used to save Zino’s number. Just then, a thought connected in her head like a lightning bolt. That voice… she put the phone to her ear again and said tentatively, “Bisi?”

“Yes Chioma, have you seen it?” There was a pause on both ends of the phone and then, “Wait a minute, this is not my phone… Chioma what’s your number doing on my boyfriend’s phone? … Chioma! …”

Chioma fainted.

She didn’t hear Bisi screaming, “Zino! Zino! You lying, cheating bastard!”

The picture frame that Osas had given her was still in her hands.

In the picture were a little boy and girl. They were sitting in an open field, with knees up to their chest and arms around each other, staring into the sunset. The picture contained some words as well. They read:

I have never been good with words
You know that as much as I do
But even if I was
For some things in life
All the words in the world would not suffice
You touched my life
In hidden places only you revealed
So I gave King Midas some roses
To touch for me, for you
When these roses die,
Is the day my gratitude dies.

As there were no roses in the picture, he could only have been referring to the gold-plated roses framing the picture.

At the end of the poem, underneath the printed words, Osas had scrawled in his chicken handwriting- Chioma, the world’s only mother younger than her son.