Why You Should Stop Smoking

He has been thinking of ways to avoid staying at home since the time he knew that MUSLIMS all over the world would celebrate Eid-El-Kabir today. Actually, he doesn’t have anything to sacrifice like Prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice everything to God. This is why he had to nod to his children with hasty affirmation, yesterday, when they evinced to him that they wanted a live chicken on the yuletide day. Where he would get it, he didn’t know. And so, early in the morning, he left his family, secretly. Before he would get to the garage to collect the token for the motorcycles’ association, he took time to smoke under a large tree.

But wait, his name, yes – Milton. The name was given to him by a fellow smoker who studied Linguistics at Ogun State College. Lange is a graduate who many of them perceived his natural inventiveness as a complete waste among them, though he doesn’t cease to be himself and he likes to quote in proper diction the lines of the greatest writers like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka who were blessed by God to enthuse the audience. But especial is that he is merely bluffing whenever he talks without mentioning Soyinka.

Perhaps that was the reason. Sometimes ago, the four of them were at the far end of the garage taking the usual dosage of marijuana and Lange noticed that Milton’s pronunciation of the sound “r’ sounded like “w”. They were carefree when he said that he would become the purported envious copyist in Wole Soyinka’s childhood memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood. Basically, Soyinka evolved Essay, a pen name to his late father and Lange evolved Milton because the Classical English poet, Milton, found it hard to pronounce “r”.

Milton met only a driver at the garage, calling in passengers. Having exchanged pleasantries, he went to a niche behind the car and sat on the chair. In no time, a sleeping argument developed into a war over a token as the driver was ready to move. Milton who blinked his eyes continuously increased in anger that because it was a festive day, his money should be ₦200 and not ₦100.

‘Okay, but let me come back from this journey. I go con give you the remaining. Àbí no be one hundred naira be your money? Mr man, no disturb me this morning.’

‘Dey no born my mother well if I collect this money. Give me my two hundred naira this man before one person between us die.’

The old man gave a comedic laughter punctuated by many clement cranky tones. He was about to enter his estate car to fire up the engine when Milton went to the front view of the car and took a nap on the bonnet. The old man ignited the car, swerved it forward then to the right and Milton fell on the road. Everyone in the car was surprised at all that was happening. It was like when two devils met in Hell, no winner, no loser would be declared!

‘You want to die, right? You will surely die today. I know dem go release me tomorrow after I have kill you. Today when many are in their houses enjoying and praying to God is the day you want to die? Don’t worry, I will show you that death today.’

‘Driver what kind of thing is this? Please stop this car and let me give him ₦200.’

He clutched the car’s door and climbed the roof of the car, holding gruesomely the roof of the side mirrors. The man put down his foot, accelerated the car, changed up the gear on the freeway as Milton continued to fling to both sides. Every one-one minute he would hit the roof so hard and stretched himself back to the position of Jesus Christ in the Cross. These unending bangs on his car roof made him to become blue in the face and intentionally, this devilish driver speed up the car’s velocity, looked through the rear-view mirror, his back, saw that no car was coming but from his front he could see a tanker, then he hit his brake. The car stopped!

Where

Is

Milton?

Milton landed on the expressway and as miraculously as everybody watched, the innocent tanker’s flanked tire crushed four toes of his right leg. He was grievously pained and moved to the other side of the road. This time, the driver took ₦200 and threw it on the expressway for him. And when the highway was free of cars again, Milton went ahead to take the money saying, 'You never see anything! Our fight has just started.’