Day 2: You Don't Know Me

You bet your butt it’s complicated.

But I got a feeling you already knew that.

This thing called curiosity’s highly overrated,

Cause this aint about how the cat sat on the mat.

This is my story and it aint as simple as it seems.

You don’t know the score about my itinerary.

Cause you don’t know me.

I’m sure you can show me the way to the city;

Maybe, talk the devil into setting himself on fire,

And narrate an accurate account of my glory.

But you’ll ever only manage the plot of a satire.

Cause the real me resides in the heart of the matter.

And since you don’t bother with affairs of the deep,

You don’t really know me.

I know how you think but you don’t know who I am.

You can’t have a handle on the ideals for which I stand.

That’s the same reason you can’t grasp how I was made,

Or wrap your fingers around the battles I have waged.

You may see me

But you can’t possibly know me.

You aint been in what I lived in

Believe me, dude you don’t know me.

Akpan

IntShoWriMo 2014: Day 2

Today’s Prompt: Kristin Pedersen and Russell Ebert meet before he inherits money. One of them is killed.

                                                                                           — Courtesy: creativewritingprompts.com

Word Count: 1,234

My memory of that day is as clear as day. The waiter’s name was Pedersen and I could tell from the way he looked at me, through me my face didn’t juggle his memory. Not that I expected it to. I was only, how do they say it, playing my position. He had the same low haircut. There were a few grays in there but the similarity was good enough for rock and roll. Same chiseled chin, deep-set eyes just like the high school picture I acquired. Don’t ask me how.

He walked briskly past me. I reached out and tugged at the tail of his cheap waiter’s jacket and held on.

            “Don’t you recognize an old friend when you see one?” I said, flashing my winning smile.

He stopped and turned to face me. “Not like I can remember everybody and I’ve met hundreds since I started working here.” He raised his hands, palms facing up, curved his lips and shrugged. “The job.”

I shook my head slowly from side to side. “It’s that. But I’m not talking yesterday not even last week. I’m talking years.”

            “How many years are you willing to wager?”

He was taking the bait. Nibbling at it at the edges, eventually he was going to swallow the line and get stuck.

            “I’d like to think your face got lost in the sea of faces I meet everyday in this room. Hell, I can’t even recollect faces I came across yesterday besides the regulars, that is. And here you are taking down memory lane several years from now.”

            “1992,” I said. “We were part of a team.”

            “Oh?”

            “’92 in high school. Strikes a chord?”

Pedersen ran his fingers through his hair. There wasn’t much left to explore. The dude was going bald.

            “A football team.”

            “I’ll be darned,” he said.

            “Ugh, ugh.”

            “I still can’t place your face or name. Wait… I think it’s coming back. Ernest, wasn’t it?”

            “Damn right it is.” I lied. God help whoever the real Ernest is.

Read more here IntShoWriMo 2014

            

Eneh Akpan

June 2nd, 2014

Day 2: Chance

 

No chance and no guide

Straddling a frying hell for my paradise

Fear has been my instructor

Feeding the inner laceration into a rupture

Still I seek to be complete

And grapple with the conundrum that is my destiny;

To lay pursuit, to prepossess it, to protect it

With every impulse and rhythm of my individuality

I’d gladly have at it once again

If I should stray or find I have failed.

Life has cut me with the edge of a sword

Like the betrayal of a close companion.

But if it takes my breath away

I intend to hunt down that purpose astray

And drag it screaming and kicking, back to its base

Give it the magnificence of the sunrise at dawn.

For I will neither back down nor give up

Until my triumphant destiny wheels thru

Like the connoisseur of a life that stands for all that’s true.

A life that is mine,

Complete and genuinely grounded walking on sunshine.

Akpan

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IntShoWriMo 2013: DAY 2

African Pear Tree with Fruit. Courtesy: gibex.com

Today’s Prompt:

You put your house on the market and, on the first day, an extremely old woman comes knocking on your door. She’s not interested in buying your house, though. Instead, she tells you that this is the house she lived in as a child. The friendly mood suddenly changes when she reveals something terrible that took place in the house years ago.

Courtesy: writersdigest.com

Link for Day 2: DAY 2: Plague House Word Count: 2,721

Wish I could write the prompt says it all. But that would be lazy. I’m supposed to add my own twist to the story, right?

The rains are upon us in Nigeria. And it just so happens to be the season for the African pear. Many people probably never heard of the African pear fruit before. It’s what you got in the image up there. It goes best with roasted or boiled maize corn. Take it with any of the two and it slides down your throat like silk. Oil palm plantations like African pear trees are lush in down south Nigeria. I employed these two items in inventing a story of the paranormal about a house that didn’t much fancy families.

In the words of one of the characters in the story,

“Something here does not have much respect for family maybe, because it was deprived of its loved ones in its own lifetime.” 

Read the full story here, DAY 2: Plague House

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan