‘Mirror’, by Dr. Favour Okechi

You will wake up one morning, like you’ve done on all the mornings before it. You will stretch and attempt one hundred pushups, and stop at seventy-nine, as you do every morning. You will look out your window and stare, unseeing, at the world beneath, as you do every morning. You will then go into the bathroom, as you do every morning. Work waits for no one, after all, and unlike most of us schmucks, you’re paid by the hour, so your time is money.

You don’t usually give in to hysterics, but your scream will wake your partner, who works nights and doesn’t like to greet the sun. You will attempt to explain the fact that there are protrusions of keratin growing out of your head, and your irises have turned the colour of Fanta orange. Your partner will look at you with ill-concealed irritation and warn you to stop disturbing his night rest. Your heart will race, and your palms will get wet. And you will look down to discover your sweat is blue.

You will attempt to go through the day as normal, with a humongous baseball cap, gloves and photochromic lenses. You will ask your coworkers how their weekends went, and receive the same bland, mundane answers that you got the weekend before, and the weekend before it. You will stare unyielding into their faces, examining their eyes for hitherto unseen signs of wariness, of furtiveness, of unwelcome alertness. You will find nothing you’ve not seen before, and your heart will begin doing the Dakar Rally against your lungs and ribcage.

You will eat fufu and okro soup at your favourite roadside bukka, and you will marvel at the fact that your comfort meal still tastes the same. You will look at your tongue in the reflection of the water bowl and find it slim, purple and forked. You will gnaw the fish that comes with the soup and not find any perplexing desire to munch on the bones. You will attempt to walk away from the establishment, and find yourself floating on a canvas of air. You will look down, and see two feet of empty space between your new hooves and the steaming tarmac below.

You will see the eyes of the doorman twinkle and glaze over when you return post lunch. His viscera will stand out clearly to you like a photograph, and you’ll see that the cigarettes have turned his lungs to tar. You will look at your manager in the office, he with the happy family of wife and four children, most now domiciled in the UK for secondary school, and you will see past his creased linen trousers to the black, worn boxers. You will close your eyes, but the walls of your office will close in on you until you reopen them.

You will hear, over the evening breeze, a crow accusing its mate of losing one of their chicks. You will be privy to a sibilant but raucous cacophony of a nest of snakes planning their attacks on a family of rats in the rubbish dump at the end of the street. You will stretch out your hand and the chair in your office will move back by six and a half centimetres, with no one else in the room.

You will end the day in the psych ward of the local hospital, the consultant psychiatrist having convinced you to spend the night and tell him more and more stories, while placing you on drugs with names that you obviously cannot pronounce. You will drift off to sleep, and you will wake, heart pounding, in your own bed, grateful for the end of the kind of nightmare no one bargains for.

Until you get up to wash your face, and you look in the mirror.

Dr. Favour Okechi is a young Nigerian Optometrist, poet, short story writer and published author of a poetry and story collection called Pitakwa Boy. He enjoys reading, and reading, and even more reading.