Fictions by Ima.

When she arrives at her house in Ijebu-Ife, she sees her parents still in the same compound, older, poorer, more tired. Her father is still expecting his ‘big’ employment. They have waited for her to return home from her ‘holidays’ for years. They accuse her jokingly, with pride in their voice as the neighbours gather round to welcome their ‘old Lagos friend’, of enjoying herself so much she decided to live there and forget them, not even sending any money at all to support them. Aunty Caro who took her for the holiday and told them that neither Madam nor Lade wanted Lade to leave, drives a Jeep now; she bought it after she returned from Lagos, so Lade must have been living ‘the life’. She must be a big girl now. She must have brought many wonderful things home. Through the fawning and the celebration, she smiles emptily. While her mother screams with joy at the expensive jewellery her Lagos daughter has given her to put all those evil sp...

Fictions blog, wishes all her wonderfully esteemed audience across the globe a very limit-breaking new year!  It is our hope and Ernest prayer that you make astonishing progress in all you do this new year. We hope also to work together to scale new heights. Watch out for brand new series from us and you. Happy new year.

A dog may be man's best friend but our new pet cum chief security Spike, wants more than that. Spike just came to the family five days ago but is already rallying to be a major stakeholder. It doesn't want to be left to sleep alone, it wants to share the room with us. It has already 'colonized' a space on the couch for itself and always wants someone to play with it, like it is the last child of the house. When the puppy (before we named it Spike) arrived the house, it was really quiet and withdrawn. Apparently it was missing its old home where its mother and other siblings were living. Everyone took turns to hold it and play with it and slowly it began to warm up to us. As the days go by, Spike's behavior exposes certain truths that I believe will help us all in 2016. Here they are: 1. To make reasonable progress, you must adapt and be receptive to change and that you must do fast. Spike understood that it is in a different environment and it had to change to fit...

Jake! Jake! Jake! Our poor little friend is all grown now. He has had many adventures and encounters, some of which could not be recorded because of the limitations of oral history and maybe confidentiality. Just one part of his growing that has been really quiet has been love. Oh yes, LOVE! Jake has always had great ladies around him and lil old cupid have on several attempts targeted his heart but ends in a miss. Probably because Jake felt he was not prepared to get into a commitment of such magnitude and doesn't want to waste his time and that of the other person or because of his religious stand on the issue. Anyway Jake consciously locked his heart to all foreign bodies and feminine agents, in a bid to work on himself. And that he was able to achieve to a large extend. Unconsciously and unknowingly to him, while developing himself he met an amazing lady. A description and definition of virtue, cute, intelligent, smart, fun loving with a dab of the sanguine and melancholic tr...

Madam is wondering aloud what she has done to deserve such treatment from Lade, why this stupid girl whom she fed, clothed and sent to school, decided to go outside and bring shame to her name. She shakes her head and beats her breast as Mummy Omolara tries to contain her, and swears that if not for the fact that Lade was in the hospital, she would have sent her packing and killed whichever useless vagabond was responsible for the abomination. “Don’t cry now, Mama Baby,” Mummy Omolara says to Madam, “Think about what Pastor Ibinabo would say – always be positive! Lade is even lucky sef! Edet beat her and that’s a terrible thing I know, but now she is no longer pregnant. So no one has to know! Plus you don’t even need to spend money on abortion, did you think of that?” And on she goes, showing Madam that lovely polished silver lining in her terrible, terrible cloud. Oga sits there, nodding almost automatically and agreeing to everything th...

Madam catches her throwing up one morning and drags her off to Doctor Madubuike. They are silent on the way to his private clinic, silent on the way back. Madam calls Edet as she enters the house and she emerges from her bedroom with the bottle of McDowell whisky she always gives to Edet before these sessions. Lade isn’t shaking; she knew this day would come. She spends a small moment wishing that she had run away and she had her baby and they would have been happy being poor together, but it is now time to go into the room upstairs, the one that isn’t used except for special visitors, the one that Madam prefers to use because it is soundproof and has furniture that cleans easily. Madam really doesn’t like it whenever Oga hears and comes to interrupt these sessions. Madam must have put something in Edet’s drink this night because this is worse, this is so much worse than the night she got her limp, this is death because he isn’t stopping. He is still thro...

This is just a quick reminder to you about our previous series on the blog. Some of them are labelled on the blog. Among them you'll find the following series: Her diary Karla About the drought Olanma The other way round Something sinister etc.

Baby is now four years old and Lade attends the government secondary school close to Baby’s school. Lade is in JS2 and is the oldest in her class. She doesn’t really have many friends because she doesn’t know how to communicate with them. They always laugh at her bad English and her thick Yoruba accent. So she mostly keeps to herself. She really hates it when the teachers pick on her. She understands what they are saying; she just doesn’t know how to tell them the answer. So she is going to repeat JS2 this year and after getting caned in school for her failure, she knows that she still has Edet and Madam to face at home. She gets tempted to run away sometimes, to just steal Madam’s precious jewellery and go back to her mother whom she hasn’t seen since she came to Lagos, but every time she works up the courage to ask Madam if she can go home for a brief period, Madam scolds her for her self–centeredness in putting her needs before her parents...