The Forgotten Casualties of War

An excerpt from my realistic fiction book, 'The Forgotten Casualty of War: Igbobo-Robert' still in the works.

Chapter 1

Oh, what an awful day it had been from dawn to the final submission of my online assignment of a writing project on MOOC. I was fatigued out, having to stay all through the night, writing a story for this assignment.
Instead of feeling relieved now that it is done and submitted, I felt so awful and drained.
The table was littered with all types of papers and books, pens and all the writing stuff you could imagine, that I had gathered in the course of the work.
I stretched out my arms to the back of my neck to ease the stiffness and pain. I made a mental note to take a little ergonomics at some future date. I think that is what they refer to the exercise of the body.
Well, whosoever fathomed that exercise, sure need some commendation. Otherwise one could work himself dry and totally burnout, that is if nervous breakdown would not first get to him; the result would be that he will slump down from those stiff veins.
I stood up, but as I reached out to shut down the laptop, l heard a soft tapping on the door. I looked up at the metal wall clock on top of my bookshelf; it was 4:30 pm. Who could that be? I am not expecting any visitor coming to my house at this time. I could hear my children shouting in the room.
I pushed back the chair and stood up. The pain shot up sharply through my body and seemed to rest on the back of my head. A brisk walk will release the flow of blood to circulate over my body and I will be as fit as a fiddle.
“Hello, who’s there?” I called out softly, as I moved toward the door.
“Hello, it’s me. I just decided to stop by to have a little chat with you.”
“Oh! Uncle... Just a moment,” I said, turning the key to open the door. I could recognize his voice even in the dark.
His face wore a slight frosty smile as he stood in front of the door, and brightened up when he saw me.
“Uncle, do come in,” I invited him into my room, cleaning my hands on my shorts before reaching out to his outstretched hand.
“I hope this is not an odd time to call on you,” he said, looking at the table littered with paper, as he came in.
”Oh, Uncle, not at all; I have just submitted an assignment on my online class. Please, make yourself comfortable,” I pushed some book and made a room for him on one of the chairs.
“Don’t worry about me,” he looked around the room and moved to the double couch at the far end and dropped down onto it, and continued as if he did not hear what I have just said.
“I just stopped by to have a chat with you as I said earlier. Just relax in doing whatever you are doing.”
“That’s a great honor, uncle, for you to come to my house to chat with me. You should have sent for me to come to your office or your home.”
“That won’t be necessary, my boy. I‘m trying to hide from the very many obstructive activities and visiting people that are besieging my house,” he looked around the room. “We may not have the freedom to express our view on what we will be discussing. But nobody will disturb us here.”
“Uncle, I hope all is well?” I said, as I watched him stretching his legs out in front of him and laid a brown nylon file on the table in front of him, and smiled at me, his eyes shining through his glasses.
“Come on, there is nothing. How’s your wife and the kids, Belema, and ...what's that boy's name is again?” he raised his eyebrows at me, “Yea, Anthony, and Juliet?”
“They are all doing well, Uncle. You can hear them shouting in their room,” I pointed my face toward the sound coming in from the back of my room, as I went on to open the window at the side of my table.
“Let me put on the fan for now. It is an old noisy one and I prefer to work without its grating sound to distract me. We have not had power for two days in this area; no thanks to our broken down transformer. Someone has so graciously contacted the PHCN people to have it fixed today.”
“Ah, you had a good reason for your power outage here. Ours could be called anything, but power,r the best is to say about it is epileptic. The light that can hardly power any of our home appliances in the house; and nobody is giving us any explanation as to what is happening.”
“It is the terrible system we have in this country, with almost nothing seem to be working effectively,” I said as I opened the drawer by the side of my seat and brought out two coffee cups. “You are not taking sugar in your coffee, Uncle?”
“You should know better than even asking about that,” he answered, and started to bring out some document from the file in front of him.
“Well, sometimes we can always change our preference and damned the consequence.”
“Not when our health issues are the reasons for taking the initial measures. Most of the troubles we have today about our health were self-inflicted by failing to rein on in some of the lifestyles we had imbibed when we were young.
“These will come up to haunt us when our immune systems could not cope with the burden of our life’s strain. And intake of sugar is the number one culprit on that list.”
I filled the two cups with a hot coffee from the coffee jug on my table and handed one over to him.
“And, Uncle, I reminded you of the effect of coffee on our health the other day, but we are still taking the stuff,” I said with a wink.
“That’s an exception to the rule, young man. There are exemptions to every rule once in a while, and this sure is one of such moment,” he reached for the steaming cup and took a sip and set it down on the table.