Friend Request

A man rushed to a taxi, carrying a briefcase. There was doctors’ meeting about to take place at St. Martin’s Hospital, the biggest hospital in Machakos County. “Dr. Sammy Musau”, his job badge read. As a treasurer, he had to be there thirty minutes before the meeting commenced. It was already forty minutes, past ten o’clock, yet the meeting was to officially start at eleven o’clock.
His wife, Chloe, was left busy cleaning up the house. She cleaned the utensils, dealt with the laundry, and dusted the furniture. Chloe was determined to maintain her status quo, as long as God wished it to last. Her husband hated seeing her tiring herself all day.
Her choice arose because of her first three house helps. The first two attempted to steal her jewelry, while the last one had a bipolar disorder. She was afraid of getting other dark encounters with house helps.
Besides house cleaning, Chloe had a passion for baking cakes. She sold them to her neighbors, friends, and online customers. Enthusiasm could be read on her face, unlike in the times she worked as a lawyer. She hated defending people who she suspected to be law breakers. So many times she made gangsters and drug dealers to win cases and walk out of the court room free.
Memories of dark pasts made her escape to her Facebook account, to help forget them. It was over a year, since she had logged into her Facebook account. “Tim Muguna,” read a friend request. There was also a message he had sent to her. It read “Tell your husband to return home!”
Something inside Chloe made her call her husband, and tell him to return home. The doctor was still in the traffic, at a quarter past one. A three hours doctors’ meeting would have to wait for another day. He had no choice but to return home.
An hour later, an explosion of a petrol tanker on a highway was reported. Thirty eight lives were lost, and seventy injured. Keenly listening to the news, Dr. Sammy realized that the accident happened at the same location he was, before returning home!
“You saved my life honey!” he told his wife.
“No, it wasn’t me,” his wife replied.
She re-opened her Facebook account, and pointed at Tim’s profile picture.
“It was him!”
Her husband almost fainted with shock when he saw the picture. The man worked as an intern at St. Martin’s hospital. He has been dead for almost a year.
The couple still tries to figure out the mystery of Tim’s Facebook message to this day….