Here is a short story from soon to be publish collection of short stories 'The Diary of a Bloody Retard' by Nwilo Bura-Bari Vincent. Nwilo was Bozza Applications’ Man of the Day in early 2012, for his contribution to poetry and fiction writing. Nwilo has been published in print by The Guardian newspaper, 234next etc. He works part-time with his independent film company, IW Films. Nwilo is the founder of Port Harcourt Literary Society, an organisation based in Nigeria. He currently manages and edits at TheMetropolitanReview.com amongst other things. Enjoy!
ONIONS MAKE ME CRY
I like female nurses. I like all of them. I like
the tall and the endowed whose skins are dark and creamy. I like the chubby and
the fair in complexion, on whose skin during rainy days you would wish you were
crested. And definitely, the pretty faced nurses with nice dentition and
perfect dimples. It makes you want to keep smiling like a man whose miracle
arrived in trucks. And O goodness! their gracious onions, plump and beautiful
in both size and sight, make me cry. I like the way they walk in their
uniforms, shaking all danceable parts of their bodies, making you want to fall
sick and remain bound in their care, forever. God bless nurses.
“But what would a sick man do
without female nurses, son?” my adopted father, Richie, would ask me. “Stay in
bed and allow some muscular men feel the pains on your stomach with their
hands?” I would reply. “No!” He would exclaim. “Learn faster, son. You should
know better.” I now know better. And I’m sure his spirit would be smiling down
on me, ticking in his notepad how a trustworthy son I have become. “These
female nurses make you wish you were ill, especially in their working mood.” He
has said this the night we met before he never came back. “If I were to make a
choice, I would prefer a hospital where the nurses are eighteen years of age to
thirty”. O, what a hospital that would be. And I love Richie for his
imaginations. He was not older than I was but smarter, with the women, while I
learned. “We would have late night parties. All the patients on bed would be
rolled into a hall. The music would be mild and the nurses would mimic those
ladies in Mo Hit’s music video, Booty Call.” That’s some crazy arse video. Retards!
I always tell him.
I think employers of labour
in the healthcare sector are like those of the banks; they are brilliant and
business minded. I rarely find a nurse whose physical features would make
you want to reject the hospital bed without an option. There might be a lot of
them around. But I wish not to see them. Richie would forbid me from any of
such. He knows better than that. It would be a pain – some un-royal pain in the
arse. The process of recruiting these nurses could be visualized. A lot of
wannabe nurses are lined up. An intelligent womanizer, like Richie, is assigned
to find out which of the nurses can make a married man sick. He would push up
his glasses, walk around the ladies, asking them to turn around. He would look
behind them to see the raised flesh, and the most flexible waist thereof. Then
he would look up and see if the succulent onions are threatening. Some are,
really. Some could be given amnesty. They scream fear into you and take your
confidence hostage when they stare at you. Ugly nurses could seek for jobs as
cleaners. They may never get anything more decent. Pathetic!
The Honda car we had driven
in to the hospital packed up in the middle of the road. The three people in it alighted. We all had
straight faces. One of us was sick. He had ulcer. And he had struggled with it
for the past week. The sign on the wall of the hospital said “HALTEN.” We
walked in, sat and watched the confused nurses attend to their wandering minds
instead of the bent man who already sat between Tycoon and me. The raised
volume of the television distracted my thoughts. The nurse at the front desk,
screaming above the television sound, asked if we had a card. Oludare nodded.
He had one. He had come the previous day to get a card. The nurse ran through
the files confusingly and pointed us to an office. The door of the office was
slightly open. She walked ahead of us, presented the file to a man who strolled
out of his office as if he had been roused from sleep. The man stared at the
file like it spoke a language foreign to his understanding. He wore dirty
slippers. They called him the resident doctor. I guess he looked like a
resident lazy kid in a flapping shirt that could make him two if trimmed. He
noted a few prescriptions and gave the file to the nurse at the reception.
I’ve grown to love several
places, courtesy of Richie. Some are familiar while others are not. Some defy
rules, others don’t. But I like me for my imperfections. I like the way I fall
into troubles and rise immediately declaring myself a victor. I spent two
nights in the hospital. I wasn’t sick, Oludare was. He had ulcer. And it became
complicated. I thought he was joking when he lowered his frame and whispered
into my ears. He asked for my help. He is 5ft seven inches tall. And I am
somewhere below his chest. Bloody short me! “My help could be short,” I once
thought aloud when the demand was serious. But seriously, we found ourselves in
the hospital. He was a mess. He had so much pain. And every delay from the
nurses ate into him like a worm. He once asked if he would survive the process.
And I nodded. I guess he needed my faith to make his come alive. The nurses
were ridiculously sloppy. And they wanted money; they could not allow you
breathe the hospital air freely.
We climbed the stairs to a
room. There was none on the ground floor. The nurse who had led the way spread
an old wide bed sheet on the spring bed, as if she wanted both of us on the
bed. Oludare stretched on it. I turned on the television. Plugging my computer,
another nurse who had followed us, noiselessly, placed a big transparent bag of
water against a pole that stood erected by the side of the bed. She connected a
wire to Oludare. It looked like some communication gadget, but I knew better.
It was not. It was all medical. I guess I suck at medical terms.
In minutes Oludare whispered
that he was hungry. I knew he was. I saw it in his eyes. I saw his intestine
with a plate, begging me for food. He opened his wallet and brought out One
Thousand Naira note. “Could you get me a plate of rice, please?” I nodded. I
collected the money from him. I ran around the streets like a mad man looking
for rice and stew at about eight-thirty in the night. I later found a
restaurant where I bought him rice and soup – pepper soup. Crazy me! He ate the
food and shelved the pepper, literary. Lucky me!
In the middle of the night I
saw blood in the bag of water that hung above Oludare’s head. He noticed it
too. I ran to call the nurses. It was late in the night and the hospital was so
quiet. All of the nurses had closed for the day. There was just one around.
Dark and sexy, I had seen her when I was taking notes of the facilities in the
hospital. And she was truly a nurse. I met her, panting. She however was on the
phone, giggling to someone. She was talking with a man. I spent about ten
minutes, which seemed like a year, trying to get her off the phone. I could not
get madder as she continued the call like I was not important.
She gestured a “Wait, can’t
you see I’m on the bloody phone.” I could see me eating her eyes, her mouth and
sending her to an early grave – but I was not a vampire. I was just a gentleman
who would not get so mad at a woman just because she is beautiful and she has
body features that makes the senses die at a glimpse. I think I almost died.
I looked at her with grave
anger. She smiled to the caller. I touched her again and again. I guess she saw
how desperate I was and what was running through my mind. I left her after
several try. She opened the door when I had left out of frustration and
attended to Oludare. Her attitude killed her beauty. And even when I wished to
talk some love to her, I had to shelve it. Some folks are just beautiful from
afar.
