Nmeso, my younger brother, woke up this morning and told a story of how he ate in his dream the previous night...and Mama made him skip breakfast.
"You cannot eat two times in a single morning," Mama had retorted.
There is a church at the end of our street. Papa preaches there every morning.
Sometimes he talks of wealth and prosperity, even on an empty stomach. He wears our neighbour's shirt and uses my school tie to hide the torn buttons.
Mama knows how to smile from the congregation and run to the altar, when the highest amount is mentioned, during seed sowing. She would whisper into Papa's ears the list of his debtors' names and Papa would raise the seed higher by a thousand or so.
In the end, nobody comes out. It's just me, Mother and Nmeso - hoping the congregation would just come out and stand on the altar, and count yellow buses zooming past the church's decrepit wall...like we had all come out to do, and had been doing while standing there.
Tomorrow, the church at the end of our street will dance to the cemetery, dressed in black. And a rich pastor from the headquarter will come and give an eulogy of how Papa was a decent man who never begged for food.
The congregation will yell 'Amen!' and every one will go back to their castles.
Somewhere in-between Heaven and Hell, Papa would sit in a pensive mood, wondering why he preached, in the first place. He should have just been a drug smuggler, like Kelechi's uncle. He would have been rich. Very rich.
Sometimes, it feels better to close your eyes and walk the other way, and pretend you never loved your dreams so much that you built a tender path just to get to it. Sometimes, I'm sure, Papa would wish he never was a preacher who wanted to be happy.
Tomorrow, a little boy will wake up and say he didn't eat in his dreams tonight, and his Mama will send him back to bed...with a wish he finally finds refreshment in his dream this time. He'll sleep and never wake up - afraid of poverty and scarcity - till he is dead.
Years later, his pastor-brother will stand on their father's altar, and preach about a family that died from having dreams...and their mentally deranged mother will sit on the last pew, singing about her dead husband.
They'll clap. These people will clap. And they'll come forward and stand on the altar, with nothing in their pockets, except a dream, and a wish to find out which of the yellow buses is going to heaven.
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