His bag is slung across his shoulder, his wrapper only broad enough to cover his loins. It leaves out the untidy hairs that run across his thighs and down to his feet. There are cowries on each loc of dread on his head. Blemishes raid his dark face, and a long tribal scarification line runs from the side of his mouth to his left ear, making him look more like a work of art.
At dusk, he walks into the land of stories, greeting the trees, stones, and pools of percolated water on the path he walks through. He has come from seven hundred and seventy-seven miles away in search of the knowledge wrapped in stories. He has learnt by way of divine magic that there is a land upon which humans last existed over a million years ago, and to make his people understand the ways and demands of their gods, he has to venture into this land, where human life no longer thrives, in search of stories.
He has been armed with an eye to discover the life within non-living things. He will get to know by the end of his journey here that within the rocks lie the stories of warriors, and in anthills lie the stories of kings; and within the flowers lie stories of lovers and beautiful people.
When he gets to the anthill, he begs it for its story. But the anthill refuses to say a word unless the story hunter gives him an egg. The story within it is that of royals, who ate eggs every day they lived as humans. Because he has no egg to offer, he walks away.
Four days of searching pass, and still, he finds no story.
When he encounters the first rock, the sun is arriving to take its place in the sky over this land. It is his fifth day, and he has met the nine anthills, each one representing the nine dynasties that once ruled this land.
He has pleaded with all of them, and all of them have asked for an egg.
He walks to the rock and pours down his magic words at its foot, but it seems like the human whose story is embedded in this rock was a stern human, perhaps one of those strict fathers who took no nonsense and ruled his family with his iron fist. If the rock should yield its story, the hunter expects to hear something about a warrior whose back never touched the ground or a young boy who killed his father to take over all his father’s wives.
The rock asks for something to make it tell its story. Story Hunter reaches into his bag and offers him Nzu. The rock refuses, and he offers Oji. The rock refuses, and he offers it Akiilu. The rock refuses. It wants alcohol. The story hunter does not have alcohol and so walks away. Only a strong thing, like alcohol, can stir a strong story.
He walks six days more, meeting other rocks and asking for their stories, but they all ask for alcohol. He turns to asking trees if they have stories, but the trees are silent.
So he walks on and on, deeper and deeper, until he sees a flower. The flower is open, and its inside is bare to the sun. The story hunter walks to it, and starts his incantations, begging the flower for its story.
At first the flower does not want to talk, but when the Story hunter’s incantation gets to its soul, it says to the hunter, “Man from the land of people, listen and I will tell you a story. A deserving tale of beauty and tragic love will I tell you free of charge. But I ask one thing of you.”
“What, flower, do I have to give for your story?”
Before the flower answers, it first tells its story. Inside this flower is the story of a girl who loved so deeply and so beautiful. The height of her love was that she could refuse to eat or drink or bathe or do anything until she was allowed to be with her lover. The love of her partner had equal force. So when they defied their parents instructions and went to consummate their love at the barn of the girl’s father, in the thick of the night, and got caught, they were locked up in a room for days.
With no food, no water, no freedom, nothing except their love and their reflection in each other’s eyes, they sang in the morning to each other when they woke. They sang to each other at noon when they starved. And they sang to each other in the night when they explored each other’s bodies.
There in the room, where nobody visited to check on them, they died and their bodies rotted. A beautiful decay. Hers decayed into rose,and his decayed into hibiscus.
The flower begs the story hunter to take her with him; back to his own land. She asks if he could please take her lover along too? That hibiscus on the end of the road.
So, the hunter plucks the flower and puts her into his bag. He walks to the Hibiscus, to whom he says, “Your lover asks you to come with us?”
He thinks he sees the flower smile, but as he plucks it and puts it into his bag, he wonders what the two flowers may be doing inside his bag. And he wonders what sort of story he was taking home.
Daniel Echezonachi Maxwell is a student of Literature at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. He grew up in Aba,Abia state. A careful observer of things,he loves writing about human relationships and the complexities of existence.