The Dead Still Live

But he was busy describing how it all happened when I visited my cousin at his business centre. It was 8 am in the morning and people had gone out to read the newspaper at the street junction close by.

He gave his name as 'Jazree', a tall dark man of about 50 years. He wore a white safari cloth decorated with the Yoruba traditional necklaces and rings. Observing him closely, one could found the Yoruba tribal mark drawn in wave forms round his face. He came from nowhere and sat at the entrance of the business centre, hallucinating while he illustrated on a rough paper with a grey crayon pencil.

Raphael could not concentrate on his duties because of this man. 'Could he be a terrorist, a criminal in disguise or even a lunatic ', he reasoned. He opened the entrance door to have a closer conversation with him. 'Good morning Sir' he said. 'Aha! How are you?' He replied. 'Fine Sir, I hope all is well?' he said. 'Yeh just that I lost my properties and I am still investigating on how it happened and where to find them' the man replied.

As they were discussing, I came out to hear more from their conversation. This time three more boys had joined me. At first I thought he was someone so scrooge about his story but latter I discovered it was another hellish story all together. The 'Jazree Man' was busy discussing about how he lost his memory while sitting at the front sit of a luxury bus. He rattled like the famous Squirrel in 'Animal Farm', smiling and the same time angry while he told his story. More people had joined to get the man right.

Jezree's story was a bit obscure because of the complexity of the sketches he drew while illustrating. Again he was shading tears while he made mention of how a car got crashed at the Ebutemata main road. Besides, he told of how people escaped from the crashed vehicle. Lastly he made mention of the world coming to an end which every body listened with agitation.

Jezree silently left the crowd heading towards Ogbomosho Close. Few minuets later, the Newspaper Vendors came with the Sun Newspaper. On the front page story, it was written '6 killed in an auto crash'. As will peruse the inside page story for more details, we saw in picture shows that Aminu Jezree was among the victims of the auto crash. The paper has it that he was a father of twelve; he had gone for a business before the incident occurred. Some youths went searching for the dead man but could found no one on the lonely street.

Fear gripped the neighbourhood because of the story and the local news source came wanting for more stories about the 'dead living Jazree'. This story is one greatest shock in the year 2003 and since then people had remarked this undisclosed close as 'the ghost zone'.