Poured

All the noises around me were background to the thoughts in my head as I lay down on Sabo street bleeding from my back (at least that was the only part I knew; the only part I could feel)

There were different voices. I could hear the woman who had sat beside me on the bus saying, ‘And I told her to hold the bus. Hold the bus. But she was pressing her phone. The person in the phone can wait. This is Lagos, you don’t seat beside the door in a bus and not hold anything’ 

I heard the voice of another elderly man ‘Don’t mind them. Technology is turning people to zombies.’

I heard a younger man say ‘Please I don’t understand why we are gathering round this girl and saying things that cannot heal her. Abi, do we have medicine in our mouth? Where is the driver and his conductor? Let them carry her to the hospital down the road now’ 

Another elderly woman said, ‘Driver and conductor ke? If we could not hold them immediately she fell from the bus, then they’ve run away o. It’s kuku not their bus. They are probably forming a story they will tell the owner of the bus now. Who like trouble?’ 

A baby was crying and I could hear the buzz of traffic. I know a police man or woman is usually around the bus stop there somewhere but I gathered from my onlookers that she had decided to chase down the driver and conductor. 

‘All these Lagos buses are like suicde mission. There’s no difference between all those boko haram idiots that decide to bomb themselves and anyone who chooses to enter Lagos bus. The driver will know that 4 people cannot contain a seat, yet he’ll still let them sit. Then they will now open the door and  be speeding and swerving. Of course the girl will pour from the bus na’ a young lady said.

Pour. 

That was the word I was thinking in about in the foreground of my mind. 

I thought about how the events of the morning can be a foretelling of how the rest of the day would be. 

Just this morning, I had fallen and scraped my knee on my way to the bathroom and the  bucket of water that I had managed to preserve from the hands of watchful thieves had poured on the floor. 

I remember saying ‘Ooooh God! Where am I going to get water from now? It would have even been okay if it was only me that poured.’ 

All my roommates had laughed.