New Fiction by Obinna Udenwe (Nigeria)

Obinna Udenwe (3)Obinna Udenwe is the author of the award-winning Satans & Shaitans – a conspiracy crime fiction on terrorism, politics and love.He is one of the few African writers fearless enough to delve into controversial issues. In 2015, he eroticised the Nigerian church in fiction in a series titled Holy Sex, published to wide readership and criticism and which won the Nigerian Writers Awards in January 2016.

 

 

 


Nnamdi was one of those men that lived for every minute. He had no care for the future. Once, he told his friends that to think too much about the future was like concentrating so much on the kind of food a wife was preparing at home, while you were out with your friends drinking ngwo – to think like that could give a man headache and early heart attack, for when you wanted egusi soup, she could decide to prepare achara, which was your worst meal. That was how Nnamdi thought, in fact, he once gave all his month’s earning to a woman he picked by the roadside, who had just told him that she was abandoned by her man and she had a baby at her breasts. Tell me, what kind of man would do that these days? Knowing that women were created to come to the world and tell lies to men to get by?

Nnamdi lived in a two room apartment, sparsely furnished, and ate out mostly. In fact, he owned no stove, or cooker or pots or cutleries. What was the use? He would ask you if you visited him. His apartment had four plastic chairs, the very cheap ones, the kind that a child would decline sitting on, there was a glass centre table in his sitting room, and a mattress on the floor. Just a mattress and a huge bag that contained his cloths, all of them, there was no hanger, none of such. He didn’t own anything his mates had in their homes, if where he lived was to be called a home, for home was a place where one returned to for rest and leisure and peace of mind. In  his house there was no peace of mind, in the evenings, his father’s ghost would visit him, whether the ghost came to haunt him or to be with him, no one could tell, but what all his friends knew was that a certain ghost, whom he claimed was his father’s lived in his house. Read the full story here