"Pako in his restlessness was kicking a rotten orange and raising dust in the process. There was a certain anti-climax that came with finishing secondary school, I realized. What do we do now? Who do we play tricks on and how do we sell the remaining pages of naked white women from the Playboy magazine I stole from Uncle Yaya, who visited from America? We had only sold thirtyfive pages to fellow students before the exam timetable came out and boys were no longer interested in things of the flesh. We still had an excess of about a hundred pages of gorgeous shameless oyinbo girls showing everything to the whole world. There was also the magical pen I took from Uncle Yaya's jacket — a pen that revealed a naked white woman inside a liquid when you turn it upside down and suddenly shows her fully dressed when turned again. Our math teacher, who sneaked up on our show behind the library, seized the pen. Pako said the azagbon-azenlimin was enjoying the pen in his house because we were never called to the principal's office to explain where we got the naked pen from. We couldn't have had a good explanation to exonerate us or make Uncle Yaya look good in the principal's eyes, so it was a good loss."
Central Hotel by Victor Ehikhamenor.
A coming of age story by one of my favorite story-tellers. This one will take you to many places of the heart, some of them delightfully dark. Many thanks for the memories, Victor. *cycles away slowly*
- Ikhide
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