Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | Page 161

Mama Mada Witness by Theo p hilus Kw ek It was mid-morning. The body flipped, came to rest face-down on tarmac. Unaware, the rider went some distance then, noticing something was amiss, stopped, dismounted, ran back to where a gathering clutch of men knelt and stood. She was already gone. And so were we, drawn on by the bus’s trajectory toward our stops, unseeing, unseen except in one last receding frame. Steep death. The mind trips at the shock, chafes at conversation, replays the scene till the point at which all fall unplanned – what then? Imagining gains no ground, is caught in a morning’s too usual arc. Hard pavement receives the pedestrian in step as in flight, accounts to no-one for what forces in our different lives plot with foreign accuracy lines of habit and desire, and bear us away from accidents. Far behind now, this leaving leaves its quiet mark. Men, asked by children about their days, find fewer answers, telling only truths, and passing afterwards, see in the place of yesterday’s routine a rupture in our time, where past and present futures meet, stop short. A living fault. 156