In your first coming, you are a miracle. You are the result of your mother’s third attempt at IVF, and she, teetering on the edge of forty-three, had almost exhausted all her options. And as though you realize how important your arrival is, you come into the world screaming. Your yells are so loud that the doctor’s smile of quiet approval sours into distaste. But your mother cannot be bothered. Your cry is comparable to Mozart’s finest piece, a cantata fit for any royal.

Your father names you Mordecai, but when the pain and the euphoria clear and her senses return, your mother insists she’d only call you Cherechi, Cher for short. Your mother gives you all the love she had been saving up for your unborn siblings. You lack nothing, as long as it has a price, and even the ones whose prices she cannot afford, whose prices she should not afford, she borrows to make sure you want nothing.

You grow into a precocious child. And everyone is busy with the miracle you are to notice that your precociousness comes with something dark. For years, they are enamored by your shiny newness that they refuse to acknowledge how you run into places your mates fear to tread, that you take anything you want, that you have no boundaries and recognize no authority.

By the time they catch up, your precociousness has mutated into belligerence, then petulance, and finally, defiance.

This boy is the devil, everyone says when you strike a girl because she dared have a mark higher than yours in the exam. You will go straight to hell, your father says when your mother’s jewellery is found in your box. But your mother does nothing. She tries to patch you up with love, but whatever it is that is leaking in you finds new outlets; in marijuana, in cultism and the bodies of willing girls.

One day you meet a girl and take her home. In the middle of the night, she says No. Too tired, she says. Ordinarily, you would have called an uber and sent her home. But that night there is no stopping you. It is in the periphery of your consciousness that her cries are as you plunge into her again and again. It is after you come that your heart acts up. You look at her whimpering at the corner and realize you are wrong. So you go home with her. To do what, you are not sure.

When her brothers see you, they take one look at their sister’s whimpering form and start beating you. You are no match for two grown men. A blow too heavy on your head and you slump. They throw you into a canal.

When you appear before Peter, even he is caught unawares by the suddenness of your death. It is as though the evil of your life is cancelled out by the gruesomeness of your death. And so Peter consults the twenty-four elders. They confer and refer the case to Yahweh. Finally, he says to send you back to earth.

In your second coming, you are an inconvenience. Your mother wanted a girl having had four boys. When you show up in as inconspicuous a place as your mother’s kitchen, she barely gives a sigh. She names you Cherechi as though she had had you in haste and was reminding herself why she needed to wait on God. Two years later she has her girl.
You grow up angry. You have no identity. You are always described in relation to your elder brothers. You wear their clothes, castoffs handed down to you each year. Anger propels you through secondary school. You make good grades as though to prove a point but your siblings are equally brilliant, and for every one A you get, your parents have four others to show for it.

So you seek to be unlike your siblings, you begin racing towards danger because you realize that everyone runs away from it. You are propelled by an unseen hand and a burden from the afterlife. After university, you volunteer for the United Nations peacekeeping corps. In Sudan you fight the Ebola, you watch comrades fall by your side, felled by the disease. You watch the rest pack up and leave, yet you stay. When the epidemic ends and you are ready to go, you feel sad. You go back home. You see the relief on the face of your mother. It tastes like honey, but quickly sours when she drags your sister to herself, as though reminding herself of what is left even if you go.

So you leave frequently. Yobe, volunteering in IDP camps. Yemen to act as a translator. Iraq as a missionary. You race towards death, thinking that if you are the first to embrace it, you will be truly unique. But death runs in the opposite direction.

It is in South Africa that you finally meet death. A UN peacekeeping mission. This time you pull children from wreckages, watch bullets fly over your head as you bandage arms and amputated legs and save soldiers.

It is your own firearm that kills you. You had refused to learn how to use it but you carry it around anyway because it is compulsory. One day as you clean it the bullet leaves the barrel and lodges in your chest. You lie in the field and watch your life seep into the grass. You have flashes of another life, a life where you had everything, where you lived fast and loved hard, where your death was quick. It is as you hear the whirrs of the helicopter blades that you close your eyes finally.

When you come before Peter again, he opens his book to check for a reckoning. He shakes his head as he realizes that the balances have still not added up. You are sent on a third journey.

Chizoma Emeka Joshua loves the Lord, his sisters and fried plantains; exactly in that order. On some days, he grudgingly accepts that he could make a great up and coming writer. His works have been published or is forthcoming on Kalahrireview.com, Expound magazine, Prachyareview.com and africanwriter.com. His short story, “A House Called Joy” won the 2018 Kreative Diadem Prize in the Flash fiction category. He was recently longlisted for the 2019 Syncity Anniversary Award. He is a feature columnist for Bellanaija. He currently reads Law at a university in Nigeria