FLASH FICTION
Would you mind a threesome?
A Halloween story
Before Tobi left Lagos, he had heard about Halloween. It was one of the holidays he looked forward to while he prepared for his trip to New York, courtesy of his university exchange program.
Tobi had always wondered why people were fascinated with carved pumpkins, candies, costumes, and horror stories.
As a Nigerian for whom holidays or celebrations meant food, loud music at street parties, and family visits, he found this culture strange. It is as weird as finding solid ice in a blazing furnace.
But that wasn't all; part of it was because he was a human, a species always drawn to the things labeled horrific.
Because of the latter, he told himself that he would confirm if Halloween were as gruesome as he had heard and watched in the movies or if it was just an over-hyped holiday.
To ensure he remembered, he added it to his List of things to do before he returned to Nigeria.
If he had told anyone, they would have warned him, knowing the kind of person he was.
Years earlier, his father had been alerted by a neighbor who had caught Tobi as he snuck back home during the Oro festival- one of the festivals performed by the Yoruba people where women and children were banned from moving at night.
Days later, while still tending to the wounds he got from the thrashing from his father,
Tobi bragged to his friends about how he had demystified the Oro mystery. There was no vindictive woman–eating spirit prowling the streets like they had been told, he told them, his lips stretched into his best smile, his bushy eyelashes up into his hairline as he bounced on the balls of his foot.
There was just a group of half-naked men dressed in white loin clothes waving a pole in the air, making that dreadful 'Oro' noise. He added.
He was pleased with himself despite the horrified look on his friend's faces or the fearful one on his sibling's faces.
Because, unlike him, his friends and siblings were typical Nigerians. And a Nigerian doesn't look for trouble in a place labeled trouble.
There is even a Joke in the country that says that you will hardly find a black person killed in horror movies because black people save their inquisitiveness for other things, unlike their white counterparts.
In this, Tobi was the exact opposite; he was the human version of the curious cat.
Halloween is another over-hyped festival; he argued with Claire after watching the 1996 horror blockbuster Scream—a movie set during Halloween. You people have a way of making a fuss about these holidays. He added.
We Nigerians are the happiest people in the world; we don't have holidays like that.
For that, he was right.
In his part of the world, the only festivals people fussed about were Christmas, New Year's Day, and the Islamic holidays. Ileya or Big Sallah, as the Islamic holidays were called.
The Sallah was his favorite for apparent reasons- fried meat and platters of spicy food. Each time he ate this food, he considered it a payback to his parents. Which is why he always ate with gusto whenever he remembered the platters of food they emptied into the garbage can.
He couldn't remember which he hated most, the wasted food or the fact that the delicacies were pronounced food dedicated to idols.
He had always wanted to tell his catholic parents that their rosary, shrines, and portrait of the Virgin Mary also qualified as Idols if the bible translation of Idol could be taken literally. But he either forgot or forgave them.
So it was that a month after he arrived in New York, Claire, his colleague, invited him for a Halloween-themed party at a seedy club named The Crypt located in Hell'sKitchen. A place that shared a fence with a cemetery, he accepted. He was ready to party and test his theory.
"Can we go somewhere quiet?" Rose, the buxom blonde dressed in a vampire outfit with a plunging neckline, whispered into his ear. She had stuck to his side like some leech after they had kissed during the Truth and Scare game. One of the many games they had played that night.
On another day and in another place, a catholic priest and a voluptuous vampire walking hand in hand would have earned several stares, but as Tobi had observed, most of the people in the room, which pulsed with teeth-clattering-ear- deafening rock music and blinding strobe lights, were either looking for who to fuck or where to fuck.
"Sure," he replied, pressing his heart-shaped lips against her sweaty ear, pressing his throbbing groin against her leather derriere. The party had been going well so far; his only wish was to get the D.J. to play his favorite Afrobeat tracks instead of the musical contraption he had been playing. He would have achieved this goal had Rose's giggle not distracted him.
Tobi had always loved girls who knew what they wanted and were bold enough to ask for it. He had heard that white girls were like that, that they lacked the coyness and pretentiousness of the girls he knew back home.
For Rose, he told himself, he would go to the cemetery with her to reward her courage. He would try something freaky if she were into such.
If he had taken fewer tequila shots or turned down the brownies passed around in a tray, perhaps he would have noticed the eerie chill on her skin. Maybe he would have perceived the smell of decay that wafted from her blonde wig. But like every man, the body part beneath his belt worked faster than his brain at that moment.
You might blame it on the blood rushing to his groin. Whatever the case, he wasn't thinking.
His brain cells were focused on one task: getting to the quiet place as fast as possible. Someone with a clearer head would have noticed that the number of people in the room had reduced or that the screams that drifted into the room periodically weren't from the raucous rock music.
If he weren't engrossed in kissing her neck and struggling to free her breast from the corset with the zeal of a freedom fighter, he would have noticed that the slippery liquid underfoot was blood, and the thing he tripped on in the barely-lit doorway was a human body.
Maybe he would have also noticed that the six-foot-tall man with hair tied in a ponytail and cheekbones that looked like diamond cutters were too pale for someone with blood in their veins.
Maybe he would have noticed that his teeth were fangs, not clip-on extensions like the bishop's collar on Tobis's neck.
Maybe Tobi would have noticed that the man was levitating and not walking funny, as he mentioned to Rose.
Perhaps he would have seen the other beings drifting through the concrete wall like they were walking through smoke. He would have noticed that their grotesque forms were not costumes.
His mind, quick enough to decode complex arithmetic calculations that earned him the spot in the exchange program, was slowed by a trifecta of drugs, desire, and disbelief.
Or maybe he convinced himself that the happenings around him were part of the party, A VIP section for freaks. The human mind under pleasure is known to make such assumptions.
The last thing he saw as he freed the 36DD from the bra was pinpoints in place of Rose's black pupils and her canine teeth sliding out like a cat's claws.
And the last words he heard were those of the pony-tailed man who had unexpectedly arrived beside them in the toilet stall.
"Would you mind a threesome?"
Glossary
- Oro festival -The Oro festival is a secretive and exclusive Yoruba cultural event in Nigeria, primarily for men. It involves invoking ancestral spirits for community protection and well-being. It's a crucial aspect of Yoruba heritage, marked by masquerades and strict adherence to tradition.
Here we go, Jordan W.
