Oops Babies
Now that we are Two
The elephant vanishes and the cat too.
But an oops baby doesn’t want an oops baby just to make it through.
However, like any other good whore-retirement plan, H. had suggested an oops baby for my family. For like any other baby mama, it shouldn’t trouble me at all.
“She was raised by one,” so they all said. My family virtues were broken as far as the jury could decide — I did not deserve to get married to a man, any sort of man.
“Such a loss,” they added. She could have bagged for more; a second was not bad at all.
But like Aries, I could win, yes — but not have it all. How about third? Was that too typical? That I picked a clover and only came in four leaflets, sometimes for my friends, but mostly when I was in the bathroom alone. Crying. Dancing. Trying to take the pain away.
And the cloud people — inhabitants of the Sky — watched the underground.
“Hello, Stranger,” one note read,
“I received your Ivy, which she grows, now that we are too. First, I wasn’t going to hunt and kill anything that wasn’t You, and I was not about any mask day and night too. My true nature scared them, thunder and bolts, so frightening You.”
A note from Jack of all trades came through — nothing of whom I knew — so I simply read on. Said one of the gods, definitely not Zeus.
For in the underground, no one wrote to themselves, like animals in the zoos. An Aries listens on, looking for Yvi’s clues.
He was the son of the almighty god. And like his father, Zeus — he would one day be greater than Cronus.
“Times will change,” he promised.
His mother saw his son, not a walkthrough.
“Oops baby, you shouldn’t have,” Mother had warned on the second note. He had dared think of killing the Timekeeper of the underground — who could Shop with Yvi on Amazon for Paperback and Kindles. Still, in the underworld, she got them for free, where she reads just notes here and there.
For the underworld: thoughts that weren’t that valuable. Not even for a penny. Unless you knew the way out of the underground — which she did. For like a robot, her AI, her aim was to tell the exact truth of a moment.
Yvi read on:
“But really, I would just buy blank notebooks from Amazon for around 100 USD and feel good that I have something expensive. Or, better yet, books. All we have in the underground is time.
My job was simple: to babysit adults and tell stories to children. I hated the crowded men in the bar, filling their glasses and waiting for — he doesn’t matter — to read notes from the underground, as they always read them every day, after the burials of those that had ventured into the underworld, one by one, like everyman, dead.”
“You can have it once,” he had said, “when I’m dead.”
Not that I care.
“It is a no man’s land,” another one from the under shouted. Still, it was not Hades. And accurate to the words spoken in the underground, it would be worth less than a dime.
“A penny for my thoughts, shall you,” I asked for my dues so I could leave him underground.
I was in the underground, and so were they too.
I told him the cost of Yvi, and he did not bother to go through my CV. He had read it. And just when I had arrived in the underground, he had mined an Yvi — which is very strange in the underground. He wanted me to work for him there.
He was nine and twenty, a boy with blue eyes and black hair like any Brit kid should look like, and I — someone he met in the clouds — was so much different from him. The ones of the underground where nothing happened but:
“Eat, sleep, breed. Repeat.”
“Don’t you work?” he asked.
“I thought you were offering me a job.”
He nodded.
“You can sit in my house and read books. I have lots.”
A picture was attached. The uniform was correct. But I had no intention of reading books I could not teach in class.
He had a job for me — to come from the clouds, past the Telegram bots.
“Sleeping is the only love.”
“I agree. Psalms 127.” Numbers wouldn’t be wrong. He was calculated. I had been watching him.
In the underground, he was looking for something. A story, pictures, audio, videos — anything the digital beast could feed on. For such an Yvi, one could always grow.
“Until I’m covered in you.”
He told me it is much cheaper in the underground. He could access the servers’ files and not for even a penny if he wanted. And so cheap is what he was going to be.
“The Catholics won’t give me a certificate, and the Christadelphians are fewer by the day.” I had written another, as he removed the note from his underground.
“All I want is you,” he insisted, and continued:
“Dear Auntie Kaye. I’m a blogger, I tell stories. I had to tell the airport authority about my whereabouts in Nigeria, and three, I was met by the jury — the ones from Slouching into Bethlehem. Everyone forgot Kimi Kai’s Stories, just like Yvi Kaye and Ivykaye: The Duchess of the River Nile, Nnalolile Yvi… But Auntie, it was worth meeting her — now a movie reviewer for the African Screenplay, bored as always with a photographer that quit the Convent for his passion, Emmanuel… Ooh, the saints.”
“God with us all,” the underground chorused and crossed their hearts.
“Mother was going to be on his side, and so they plotted a plan to castrate him on the white lands and take over the lands the black could live under.”
So they fell from paradise — lost in the underground, wandering the earth below. For in both accounts of the Genesis Story of Creation, the heavens and the earth were created. Never the underground. Never Hades. Never a realm where the dead walked.
“What a paradise lot to get lost in the underground?” I questioned his notes.
“Isn’t it true?” he asked.
We are not baptized at birth. Only after we accept Jesus does he genuinely walk. Our relationship with him is best described as “still working on it.”
I mean, the Bible is the last thing I will read underground. Still, I instead go through some wild notes that a stranger from the Sky — who sometimes visited the underground — left behind. To prove that Babel was indeed true. Those in the underground, where a KINGDOM grew, with no one to Rule.
“Hey Katie Flynn, I’m heading home” was a perfect gift from the streets as my first book, which I read in the underground. You can find it at Kamusinde Library. Mama Faith was the first to read it, and I was happy to get it back. When I visited again, I stole it away. It only took 6 months to call home.
“Such a long journey, ai?” Another note read.
The notes had started like a book novel. “But only thunder and lightning — frightening you — in the darkness read and sometimes wrote to Auntie. I’m such a bad kid, aye!”
“The psychiatrist asked him to persuade me to therapy. Auntie, they say I’m a lunatic. The use of marijuana to treat multiple personality disorder is something Wajackoya wrote for consumerism purposes, just like babies Auntie — oops babies.
I’m not sure if it is a drug or medicine anymore, but for five shillings, I can escape the pain, be grateful, and find hope for another day.
I just want to complain, though, Auntie. At least to someone. A bot or a tree would work just the same.”
“But there were missing copies from the books — word in the underground had it — and they shared it amongst themselves,” Aries said.
“And that is how they killed him when he was flesh and blood. The dead do not walk. Everyone knew that. They all assumed — except for Hades — that the pure souls could be saved.
But oops, babies.
Hey, don’t worry — now that we are too, writing each other notes in the underground.”
The men only visited when they were dead. Those that died in their sleep would be in an eternal nightmare.
“We are all in Wonderland… Lala Land.”
“Sleep, Baby,” I told the special guest — my first human friend. “She was just a girl but black like you,” I told him.
His name was Aries. He was looking for Hades. A word from the abyss of the sea mentioned that he had the powers to grant anyone back and forth — he had keys. Back to the Sky. To the clouds. For those that repented on earth, for eternal life.
Still, if they liked the under-dead, they would remain.
But on the third day, Jesus walked.
“Down here, we eat, we sleep, we fuck.” I told him it was no man’s land either.
“In Web 3, no one likes the Black Widow,” I reminded him. “Three is a good number for a kill, Aries. God had said, the Goat — I’m told. Mbuzi, meeee, sindio? You are the sacrifice. Send our regards.”
The underground laid an altar.
The more they died, the more brought with them news and stories, tales of the wild world. The gram could not hold it, for the notes were to be deleted right after everyone read.
Still, Aries — the first of them all, the god of war — was the first to get his share of the wealth, the great Kingdom. Twenty-seven days to rule when the moon came out. He had marched on the third day of the sunrise with his soldiers — led by an Afro-deity, the goddess of love, passion and desire — who would find ways to bring gifts to procreate the underground that no one could escape.
“In a web of three: love was his first charm, together with the goddess of discord, and the wisest of them all.”
He concluded and took another note from the shadows of his coat.
“Who are you?” They all wanted to know.
“I am now a blogger,” Atoto Atori wrote on.
“Professor thinks I’m too high and wild in my thoughts. In his analysis, the researcher pays pennies to learn one or two, but oops, baby! They have nothing on you — so you can only read us the notes for a penny, but I will give you two.”
“He that repents shall walk free,” he read much louder.
But we all simply laughed.
He was a sky person who had fallen from Grace, and his letters were worth nothing much in the underground. Just like Yvi.
“Oops, baby — now we are two.”
Everything is square and fair, but you don’t die twice. That is every man’s curse in the underground.
The Library of Babel — where the first book was drawn — had tried to explain, instead of taking my mind off the 12th floor of the new Highrise. Not as old as the previous one. Not anything like the one from the slums, which was more familiar to what Ivy would experience first when she had gotten married — sort of — in the Highrise. A high too class. Farther away from the ground.
The underground. Where the dead do not wake but live like bots. Working overtime. Trying to get out for a bit of shine with the cloud people — at the top of the Highrise.
So often, we want more. The sun and the light. The happiness that could last.
Men were a lucky lot. The women much prettier when they walked in the light. But under the ground, no one cares who you are or what you can do. If you have no pennies that can bribe the beasts to let you out at night — whenever the moon was out, and the daughters out to play too.
The son had the freedom. Word on the ground had it that only he could live — both in the underworld and in the heavens — but only in the Kingdom, where we could play, when the son was not watching. But only through the eyes of his mother.
The moon.
The dark knight had finally arrived in the underground. And like any other who had a Yvi to trade, he was determined to get all the 666 of them, as they had been marked by the beast.
“I liked the land more, the pretty girls and their simple lives…”
“Under the ground, the dead had only one code: it is a no man’s land.”
I scrolled through her pictures. I got what they meant. The bar was with laughs again — desire, passion, and newly found love in an image whose origins would turn out to be a breed between some tribes in Africa.
She loved dogs just like Ivy. And if I had not, in fact, met her in Highrise — making her hair in the salon — she too could be anyone in the underground.
But she was also none of my business. Robert had reminded me.
All I had to say before his Berretta paint0 was that the underground was much better.
“Ivy grows, and now we were two!”
But then there is Anita — just a little bigger than I and a Nigerian Netflix influencer, whose pictures were still fresh, undisturbed, somewhere in the clouds. She looks precisely — somehow, maybe a bit from far — but much alike. Only older than me, but not as old as Yvonne Chaka Chaka, whom I claimed, out of sheer pride, that we were related every time someone nagged me with the question of us being twins.
They lied, of course, to flatter me. But I could not simply thank them — or much better, keep quiet. I went on and told them about the random genes and mutation.
“Ni majini tu,” a female voice in the underground had mentioned.
He ruled the underground. And I had grown from an Oops! Baby — to, in fact, the jury of the underground.
Yvi Code.
“only bored men like you ever visit the under, right? You always have noted that the sky people want, from the clouds, certain notes — private notes.” I pointed out to him.
“What time is it?” I asked for my tickling watch.
“Anita Vinter, Anita Babra, Rachel — we more frequently out in the world. Doing something, exploring — but nothing more but intriguing experiences from East Africa.”
In another letter, I wrote about the Elephants.
“Was it true?” He wanted more.
“It started last November. Come May, they crossed their hearts that the Kingdom should come down to the underground. Yvi was there. And suddenly, in March — the elephant disappeared.”
He started on a new note.
“But still, for a cat to disappear and for an elephant to disappear — those are two different stories.”
“Yeah, really. There’s no comparison. Think of the size difference.”
Once upon a time —
The elephant vanished, and the cat died.
Oops, baby.
Now we are two.