MAN VERSUS BUG. Would not have been the least thought in my head. It wasn't something you were told on your first day. Nobody spoke about it—the bugs, as though they thought it a plague that shouldn't be mentioned. And for some time, my ignorance was the veil that covered my eyes to the 'evile' of this creature. You see, it didn't quite move like the ants, and It was ten times its size at maturity. The first time I'd seen one, I wouldn't have given it much thought as I squashed it to oblivion. But it lived you see. Because for every two I killed there was double that number waiting in ambush. Ambush what you say? You, me, Man!
These 'Creepy Crawlies' would crawl across your skin with the stealth of a fox, and at just the right spot insert their...I never figured out the name. But it came with the sharp sting of the mosquito and drew blood twice it's size so much so that it inflated its entire body. A living, walking, tank of blood. They 'bugged' our entire room, listening in on our conversations. "Guy this thing de every were o" they heard that too, it made their game, HUMANS, even more fascinating, and it must have humored them how we feared them, infinitesimal specks, barely the size of a rice grain. And for that very reason, it meant war. It was them against us and by that I mean twenty of them to one of us. Exactly where did we battle to the death? (A drop of our blood for their life) On the terrains of our bug-infested beds.
And for the very reason, we were 'bugged' by bugs, they knew our weakness, THE NIGHT. The time when we fell to our beds like dead logs. Like a wounded lion who wouldn't bite. And so they plagued our nights with itching and tossing, but they feared the light, and the very flick of a torch in their direction would send them running for cover. These infinitesimal specs multiplied like they read the part in the Bible that said, "Go and fill the earth," and they would sneak up behind the collars on our shirts; our trousers and skirts (the girls sure had their tales). It was hellish, how they followed us around. In the weeks that followed we became complacent, and as I would tell any 'fresh Kuffa' who just joined our family: "If you don't find them you won't see them, if somehow you convince yourself they don't exist, then they don't" and with that philosophy, I could close my eyes when I smelt them from afar.
"We'll get a snipper," one of us said one day, weeks passed and we never did. And so, their tyranny and anarchy continued till we could take it no more, we mixed a pot of bug-killing concoction and opened fire, this pungent smell was one of victory.
You never kill an enemy with one bullet, how then do you kill an army in one raid?
One day at work, I looked over my shoulders, there, I couldn't miss it, almost invisible yet visible it was. my sixth sense (third eye) could spot it scurring on six legs, at that instance it moved a little faster, trailing down my arm, I reached out instinctively and with the flick of my finger I had it on it's back on the floor. In its last attempt to flee, I squashed it beneath the weight of my brown boots. This one died, but you see, the enemy lived on, somewhere where the sun couldn't reach.
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Diary Of A Deltan Kuffa
Non-FictionN.Y.S.C. is a milky way of adventure for young Nigerian graduates. The trill, the suspense, the drama of life as a Deltan Kuffa is unpredictable.
