THE BATH OF DREAMS

By Patrick Koranteng Antwi  

“This stench hurts … and it’s from my armpit.”

“Should I start from my head or wipe the stag-dirt from my feet?

How do I soak my sponge with lather?” 

This stain which I gained and no longer can I sustain is now an ache on my brain. The trend of pain that torments me now manages to consume my sympathetic fortune.

“If graced, I am through with football: which only results big falls.”

I wish my only sister can come and help raise my hand, or share my pain, but she is nowhere to be obtained. OH! How she loves me! Slippery and frippery are the tiles, watery and silly are the piles of unarranged and unsorted shaving sticks, tooth paste and non-graceful items on the louver blade window, among which some mislays : very irritable in view. Carefulness is consciously required if I am to keep sanity and pain at low stray because the blinking concrete walls and floors are rarely cleaned. I fixated my focus on the rusted shower turner which is hyperactive in the wall. Bending up and down to ensure its temporal repair made bathing a nuisance. The hanging clock on the bathroom wall makes me wonder but a beautiful irony: a clock at the bath house!. I made small pants due to the pain, so I stepped back to land on the plant of this place. Grandmother’s stool was located in the far left corner of the bathroom. The stool never forgets to wet, that it feels, is its share of life. It is a brownish tool made of red wood. I remember, I was the very person who accompanied the stool into the bathroom. 

I sat on smoothly and as gently as I could to prevent my legs from any excruciating pain. To my surprise the pain I felt in my leg was worse than I imagined. This is a “two trouble one god” affair, suffering pain in both legs and arms.

“I wish here was not covered! The heat torments and makes my body itchy. How I wish to leave this place to swear the grace”

This heat made the bandage wrapped around my palm, covering my fingers, stretched and tired up to my wrist because of the wrist injury, ache. Scratching my itchy human part with a broom stick is more improvising, it is relieve I never seem to regret. A broom: my reviver.

I thought: “I am the cause of all these”, my hard laden heart and disobedient mind was the cause of all these. Football is even not my game, whatever happened to me? But come to think of it, it was also the brutal tackle of Kobby which resulted in this and it is no wonder that Mensah did nothing about it, “referee bansah”, but rather laughed and said to me, “we are men not girls” and the worst of it all, the accelerator of the pain was the phrase, “this is African football”, as if African football is wrestling. When crying out, “mummy…mummy”, I sounded to them a like kid, but deeply embedded on my brain, was the thought of what she will do to make me regret: I was crying for the future.

 My bandaged arm allowed my hanged arm creaky but I have to bath to prevent the itching.

“Sit on the stool, open shower over body, frown with pain and leave with joy.” As prescribed by thought.

“Yes! This is what I have to do. No manna will fall this time, but I also have to keep the bandages on my arm dry.”

“Acheampong! Acheampong! Are you still at the bath?” Mummy shouted with a piercing voice.