IF TOMMORROW COMES

Such were his dreams. The reality of his future, the passion of his past, the force behind his ambition. They carry him to places before time, he sees the path before hand and he has decided to tread along the path of his destiny like a traveler. They call him Ware, the tall slender imposing figure with a straight face and large eyes. Ware is the son of his mother’s youth, people said he has fresh blood flowing in his veins; that is the reason for his intelligence. Ware spoke his first word at nine months, and wrote his first alphabet at two years. No doubt, he is going to be great. Although, some said he was possessed, no child ever does that, he should be flogged with an unused broom then, they would believe. Ware has been flogged three times, once after the prolonged illness that killed his father and people began to grumble; he is the son of the sea. Twice, when he predicted that his mother’s friend was going to get pregnant and give birth to a dead child and the third time, when he told his mother he was going to be ill for a week or two, and that was it. He had to be flogged to chase the evil spirit that still lurks around him, he is an evil child. That was the last time, Ware’s mother, Sisi, got tired of the black stripes that had scarred her son’s skin and relocated with him to Lagos.

Ware will never find out, the secrets of his childhood that his mother kept away from him; like an aborted pregnancy, it was gone, flushed out properly and would never return. No one in Oyadiran Estate would find out, Sisi had left her past in Sapele to start a new life for her son in Lagos. She wants Ware to grow normally without the spiritual scare that he was the son of the sea or a spirit child. She protected Ware from family members and friends, her son would be great; wise people had foretold: the sage that lives beside her father’s hut in the village, Atunu the oldest woman in Sapele and the diviner that told her Ware is tomorrow’s son. It is on this enigma that Sisi sits and sets her eyes on the mother of her son….