IMPASSE
He woke up knowing he would die that day. It wasn’t a premoniton or the after-effects of a nightmare and the still dawn didn’t intimate in its normalcy any prophesy of his doom. He just knew with a certainty that today was going to put a stop to the medley of unsung psalms. The knowledge felt axiomatic to him, needing no validation for its justification as truth. He just sat up in bed, feeling his heart’s steady rythm, and preoccupied with his imminient death. He wasn’t frigthened. He just just thought of it as another exercise in Logic. Given the proposition of his death as a premise, what could he deduce from it? Other questions cropped up in his mind; questions of how,when,where, and the big one,why? But he only considered them for the briefest of momements. They were red herrings, distractions he needed to seperate from the particulars of this argument. That death was an end seemed obvious but the end of what? Would it be an extinction of his being, like a candle snuffed out with the darkness engulfing all thoughts of the light that was. Or would it be like a dream that is no more, with memories, however inaccurate, that lingers. Further exposition on this was interrupted by the alarm clock on his beside table. It was time to get ready. He had already made his peace with death a long time ago, he thought as he slung his towel on his neck and headed for the bathroom.

Dressed in a white shirt and black trouser, he was a typical young man. Not even his stern countenance could make him seem older for his eyes gave him away. Their animation revealed the warmth of his soul, a soul still untounched by the cynicism that ageing wroughts. He was almost at the junction of the road, walking towards the expressway he’ld have to cross to get a bus going to Oshodi. Amidst the crowd he walked on, towards his destination and a few paces from the junction he hit his right foot against a stone. For some seconds he stood still, looking at the stone like it was a thing he had never seen before. People just walked past him and the chink in his armour of rationality widened and gaped. Could it be?, he wondered. Was it an omen, a sign proclaiming the sureness of his death? The concreteness of the stone shook the pillars holding the detachment of his thinking. His perception was tinged by the colours of a realism he never considered before. This was about him and not about some other person he was studying. He soon shook off this feeling and he was back in his elements where rationality was the lot of the world and the familiar never induced fear. He had reconciled with the thought of his mortality. Moreover he’d crossed the expressway a thousand times. The three lane expreesway was before him with numerous cars racing on to whatever destination served as an end to their interminable journeys. He waited for a break in the morning traffic that’ll offer a path to the other side. He waited with others like him, despite the flurry of cars, knowing there would always be a break in traffic. Like a herd they would stream across the road, offering safety in their numbers. Soon there was a break in traffic. He took it, running in measured strides, and midway across the three lane dash he realised he was alone. Looking back at the crowd behind him, he fell and tumbled to the last lane. He heard it on the tarmac where he lay, louder than the various swooshes of passing cars. It was the tyre of a car on the lane he was on, travelling to his ear on the ground, singing of the inevitability of motion and collision. Then he heard the horn blaring. It was a truck, not a car and it drowned all thoughts in him, laving only a feeling. He lived, a thousand years in two seconds, in sheer terror which raced through him like electricity. He raise his head and saw death on the grill of the red mack truck, smiling as it moved inevitably to mow him out of existence. Instinctively, he rolled to the side of the road. The whole experience had lasted less than eight seconds as the truck raced pass him with its occupants hurling curses at his prone figure. It brought a clarity to him that left all logic in twists and amplified the irrationality of fear. The irrationality soared as he stood in the middle of the expressway. People, stopping midway between their race across the express, spared him furtive glances before continuing on across life. He just stood, whimpering under the spectre of death, unable to go forwards or backwards.

In the sky, the sun was beginning to nest in its cradle in the west.

The End.