My brother, I’m not sure how you found yourself at this crossroads.
But I can hazard a guess: It followed a good and square meal, a mellow wine, and radioactive weed. After lovemaking, she had murmured, “I’ll help you shave.”
You, descending the clouds gingerly, had answered, “Why not, if not?" (Channeling the sagacity of your inner Chief Eleyinmi.*)
So here we are. No, I will recast that. There you are: halfway between a classic Romantic Situation and a Hostage Situation.
Your eyes are closed. Keep them that way but calm your heart rate for, you see, the palm and fingers of her left hand are spread across the entire section of your lower pharynx. The heart is just below and like the essential parts of a Lie Detector – the cardio-sphygmograph, the pneumograph, and the galvanograph – her palm can detect the tiniest change in heart rate.
On her right hand, she wields a foldable straight razor armed with a Czech-made Tiger blade. So, from your point of view, there are no good slashable options.
The blade rests on a part of your major carotid artery separated only by a cloth of skin, her forward slash takes the blade to the hyoid bone, above the Adam’s apple, which supports the tongue to perform its role in mastication and speech, and helps to keep the head in place; her backward slash takes the blade to any section of the pulsating jugular vein which drains de-oxygenated blood from the brain to the heart.
Like I said all the options you have are poor. But trust me you can come out of this alive, as long as you answer her inevitable question convincingly.
Remember people beat the machine all the time. They say the trick is to speak the true portions of your response and keep your head, heart, and mind on those parts as if your life depended on it, as indeed it does.
Here it comes:
"So, who is Anita?"
“The only Anita I know is Anita Baker, the R&B crooner. My most favorite song from her discography is No One In The World.”
Now start humming and reciting its lyrics like mad.
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The Nigeria Explainer
Chief Eleyinmi* is a colorful character in “Village Headmaster”, a popular TV show in the '70s that depicted our people in a pastoral setting as colonial contact deepened.
