Most mornings, when I wake up, the rays of the risen sun have passed through the six-inch crack up in the wall to rest where they should be…at the very edge of my sleeping mat. If the sharp, tiny rods of illumination were there, I’d trace the gleams of energy through the fissure to reach the rounded star in its most benign form. The one-room house I shared with my parents, Anne and Joachim, served as an observation lighthouse. Sometimes, when the sun was late in rising, I would lie there, docile almost, waiting till it showed up.
Until those errant beams of light touched the mat of sheep wool that stood between the cold, hard floor and me, my day would not begin. With some mornings, it was my mother’s hands and not the rays of sunshine nudging me to rise. Her hands would be under my armpits as she pulled me up. Mother would hold me steady until I could stand on my own. She would always cut a smile loose as if that would chase away the loose fabrics of slumber still lingering about me. That smile of hers always warmed me up. It was her good morning, my child, even as she knew I wasn’t always too happy with her nudging. But if it were the morning, I was destined to remain passive while waiting for a stroke of the sun’s ray to filter through, my eyes would be searching both ends too, to see which of my parents had risen with the first cockcrow. With most of those mornings, my mother would sit up against the wall in quiet supplication, while my father would have left the room altogether. Her petitions were usually done in an unbroken whisper. As much as I tried to listen in on her conversation with the Father in Heaven, hoping that our eyes wouldn’t meet, she would seem to know, even with her eyes shut, that I was fully awake and was eavesdropping on the meditations that were meant only for the Ears of God. Thereafter, the erstwhile ambient whispering, the one she had inadvertently turned into a musical prattle, would cease promptly…to die a sudden death. But her petition continued nonetheless.
On my twelfth birthday, I woke up with unusual excitement. A surge of energy filled me and caused me to sit up. In that instant, my eyes caught the gaping fissure in the wall as if it were the first time I had noticed it. The six-inch-long gash could have broken wider overnight. Through it, the fully formed sun…solidly blood-red, and without the hairline fractures, one would normally see waxed effusively. Both of my parents had awakened and had left the room. I heard my mother humming and singing through the last verse of an Aramaic song while she tended to the flock of roosters and other birdies she was breeding. I should be hurrying outside to help my mother with her chores. But not this morning! Not when I was trapped. Not when I was overwhelmed, mystified by this singular manifestation unfolding before me. Why did my mother not prompt me from my sleep? This was a first! Even as I suspected she could have decided to let me sleep on because it was my birthday, it appeared other measures of mystery could have pressured her to let me be. And right then, I could be staring at it.
I sat bolt upright to watch the rod of sunlight in its approach, her deliberate, pointed approach as it neared the opening in the wall. It was moving slowly and looked like a limb growing out of a tree in a time-delayed fashion as it drifted away from the sun. The hewad of it was changing from one subtle proportion to another. Each transformation was leisurely and unhurried in their scheming…and just as forceful with each bearing… like the hurried pageantry of rising seawater coming ashore. I sat unmoving, pondering the sleek branding in its magnificence, and being afraid of it at the same time. The room I was in had a splendid glow, while the wildly poignant red steel of light nearing the wide crack suddenly turned light blue. The nearer it got, the bluer it got, and the wider the crack in the wall appeared. I traced the stem of it directly to the sun. My jaw dropped. And then, the moment came; The blue steel of solid ray passed through the gash and then stopped as if to gauge her intrusion before it would continue with its prowling. Of course, it was clearly on the prowl. It had a life of its own. I was seated off tangent…at a forty-five-degree angle, way off course from its trajectory. But then, the ray, the entity it had become, stopped in midair, wafting in colorful poetry of incomprehensible motion. The room was filled with equally unknowable music. My head swelled one moment…and I could have stopped breathing altogether to stare at this puzzling cryptic light I knew was coming for me.
Like the Predator that knows it had cornered you, the plump, midnight blue, searing brume, touched down, right at the room’s epicenter. The room itself was riding a wave, wafting the color blue, but my whole body appeared orange-red. I couldn’t figure that one. The same music that prefigured its entry had risen to a pointed crescendo without damaging my ears. The sublime harmony, the composition of varied implausible notes, I suspected, was the second unit in the room. The proportions of it were vibrant, palpable as was the steel blue shaft of light I believe I could have reached out for and touched. I couldn’t rise from my mat, because the shifting of other newer sounds was evident, and had begun to make their entry in largely appealing manifestations. Fusion hurriedly happened in that instant like a ballon bursting. The grinding noise of parallel universes coming together comes to mind. Stars, each the size of a grain of sand, oozed and radiated unceasingly, filling the tiny room. A metropolis of wondrous traits was born before me, in the form of a tangible, Transcendent Actuality. The air in the room thinned and dusted off any visible boundaries and marks that once saturated the space…and then floating numerous other inexpressible characters in a consuming radiant exhibition. The moment existed as an enigma, as it was wholly Beatific. The scheming peculiarities existed independent of the other. But then, in a weird kind of way, they were compounded in their collective chatter, even as they remained holistic in their delivery. What emerged from the Trinity was the Singularity ofd Voices in one wholesome roll of Holiness. The symphony turned significantly expressive, turning my senses of hearing, sight, taste, and smell into bearers of acuteness. Sweetness abounded. Clarity set in. The purity of it was undeniable and of severe acuity. The scheming in the room was unique in its structure. I was at peace; indescribably I harmony with the Presence that had come to visit. It could be that I was getting my twelfth birthday gift from a trove of of otherworldly, invisible Choral Liners while I was still asleep. But I knew I was wide-awake.
My eyes passed through the fissure in the wall to see what the sun was up to, since she was the one orchestrating this. At that very moment, a burst of energy exploded; a solid shower of blue specks burst from the sun as if a Quasar had detonated. It traveled a short distance before it passed through the crack in the next instant. The entire room changed colors. I looked down on that edge of the mat where the rays of the sun always rested and saw a scheme of fashionable rainbow billowing mildly and expanding slowly toward me. I waited till the array found me, before I ran outside, looking for my mother. I knew my father would be a mile down the road, going to, or coming from the stream. My mother must see this.
♦ Don Okolo, Professor and filmmaker, is on the Editorial Board of the West African Pilot News. He is the author of many books.
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4 comments
Don Okolo
April 6, 2025 at 7:55 am
Stanley Achilonu, ndewooo! Your take is endearing, and those gifts of prose you put together to herald my morning are the best. Daalu rinne.
Chinedu S. Acholonu , Film Director / Writer
April 5, 2025 at 11:10 pm
The narration was ineluctably rustic as it incarnates some kind of primordial squalid existence in that multi purpose studio room. I like the effusive and salubrious way the “ sun rays” was adapted to this beautiful story .
The anaclitic relationship between mother & son is very puissant and endearing. Another observation was how Prof Don infuse the primary colors of the spectrum in advancing the structure of this vignette.
It’s a scintillating and endearing piece. This is a good read , written in an easy to read parlance like most of the author’s great works.
Victor
April 4, 2025 at 8:20 pm
Lovely
Don Okolo
April 6, 2025 at 7:56 am
Victor…as your spirit is, sir. Thank you, my brother