It’s beans they asked you to pick. You frown and feign anger yet you obey. You do not hate beans, you would casually slay a charged bull for it, you are a sucker for its charm . At the mention of the word beans the strings of your olfactory glands buzz. Your eyes become fluorescent tubes, they light up to illuminate your soul.
People get high on drugs but beans is your afrodiasc, it awakens buried passion in you and expels the demons that restrain your muse.
Beans turns you to Terry G, it gingers your swagger but you don’t like doing the dirty job. Selecting the stones from the beans like separating the wheat from the tares weakens the erection of your appetite. It’s an ice bucket challenge for you, without the donation. It leaves you shivering in red hot cold. The sudden sweat it elicits are hot, it can cause the beans to boil.
But today you pick beans. You do not complain. The words only play hide and seek in your head, they refused to be seen so you can spill them out.
They say it’s ‘Moimoi’ they want to prepare. You wearily despise Moimoi, it takes forever to prepare. The immersion of the beans in water, like cane soaked in kerosene. The way they strip the beans naked of it’s skin, like strippers shedding their clothes. The squashy swashy squelch your beloved beans make when the pestle elbow them in the mortar. The thud as the Pestle strike her mother, both dancing eccentrically in unison. Up down, up down like the piston in the cylinder of an internal combustion engine. Each stroke making the beans yelp into a paste. Falling apart, breaking the things that binds them together.
You hate the mixing process, the litany of spices that get in the mix. Each with their own distinct taste, stray crayfish, abandoned shrimps, eager eggs it is the collection of all these which makes beautiful Moimoi, beautiful Moimoi that melts in your mouth like hot whisper on a sunny day.
You are not a fan of the pool of boiling water in the giant pot they always use. You despise the greed of the pot, how it swallows all the tiny cups filled with the murdered beans in a single gulp. It is pleasing despise you feel, the pot has become you hero on Moimoi days. Your knight in shining armour, bailing the beautiful damsel of hunger scratching the linings of your stomach in distress.
The firewood often used on such occassion, another terrible lover of yours. It spits fire without care and piss on the pot to blacken it. But you don’t care, the job of caressing the soot out of it is not your task. The only reason you sit and watch the show is not because you enjoy it. Watching the pot takes a beating drags the curtain close faster. It makes the time you say grace looms lower like the sword of damocles over your head.
Photocredits @Unknown
The impending doom it brings gives you pleasure, the doom’s day is not an end to your being. It’s the extinction of your beloved Moimoi, together with a bowl of Pap and slimy juicy bread, soft like the word you get when the ‘d’ in bread is exhumed and replaced with the letters ‘s’ and ‘t’.
The joys of the fiesta ahead keeps your working this ordeal. You heave heavily, sniff the dense air. Oxygen rush into you lungs as the hot pap would soon do and you feel them not ; as the hot pap would disappear down the dark alley of your throat to the morbid walls of your stomach. Where the street urchins of worms will work on them. Churning them into another paste you do not desire to see nor taste. And then the pilgrimage down the helix of your intestine, scattering like neon lights to different places. Leaving the cast aways to eternal damnation. A place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Accompanied by rumbling gases as out your system they come using the hole that is the opposite of which they entered.
You should stop the sweet torment but if you don’t torment yourself with these garish thoughts. The ordeal of beans picking will be a task beyond your dealings.
PS: The Burning fever of excitment you felt stepping into the year, have reality cured you of it?
4unansweredprayers 