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The Rainbow - Bayo Aderoju (Nigeria)

Bola had a fascination for colours. She had an uncanny ability to effortlessly identify different shades of colours. She believed her eyeballs protruded – or bulged like throbbing hearts – in order to pronounce their uniqueness and her pride thereof. She wasn’t an artist and had no common impetus for her obsession. Maybe that’s the reason why she kept it a secret. Although she prided herself as an adept secret keeper, she sometimes wondered whether people could decipher the essence of the rainbow keyring she had been keeping since God knows when. She believed we lived too fast, that her cosmic perceptions were too abstract and the keyring was her totem, although it wasn’t chosen arbitrarily. She chose rainbow because of colours: her mystic fascination, her paraphernalia for taming the sweeping abstractness of life. She also preferred dresses with many strong colours and seldom wondered whether it could be another clue to her secret. But that was before she realised, after discreetly probing a few friends, that everyone only considered her weird. No one had eyes so piercing to see what happened monthly in her small, rotund head.

‘People are too lazy,’ she supposed. ‘How many more traits, clues to interesting secret lives of individuals have been similarly reduced, with shrugs of indolence, to mere weirdness?’

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