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Short Story

Cleft Stick

Adebowale Oriku tells a story about a man who finds it difficult to tell a story.

He sat at the side of his little daughter’s bed, and opened a big book of Bible stories which his born-again Christian wife had bought to be read to their daughter, to vary what she believed were mere storybooks which taught the girl nothing, but only made her giggle a bit and then fall asleep. She had felt their daughter needed uplifting stories from the Bible: her mind was pliant now, formative; this was the time to show her the difference between good and bad. And of course he could see that all the stories in the picture book were indeed moral ones: perceptive parables told by Christ; stories about the good man called Lazarus; how Jesus chased gamblers and other bad types from the Temple of the Lord; and occasional Old Testament stories, like the one telling how Moses was found in a bullrush basket floating down a river. The pictures were moral too, like the pictures of children sitting on the lap of Christ, in the passage where he enjoined grown-ups to let children come to him, for Heaven and Paradise belong to the little ones.

Ola had nothing against all this.

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