The Arts-Muse Fair

                            Three-Legged Sprinting  It isn’t so much that she adores him and wants to move in with him that keep me sleepless at night as the image of them trudging upstairs hand-in-hand in a sort of three-legged sprinting. I only have to shut my eyes and he is holding her by the waist, urging her towards the bed. He has left the door ajar, but I can’t quite see what’s going on, only peeps once in a while: the tattoo on her leg, the sweat on her glistening back. I want to turn away, but the horror of her orgasm throttles in my throat, the shock of her tongue flaunting with his tongue, her mumbling sweet nonsense, her letting out a monstrous moan.  Fraulein of Coy She must think me maverick teasing my rod against  her hands of ejection she giggles perhaps  behind my slack before the next smack  certain in her confidence...

The demons in Musa’s head never let him sleep a full night. They have a church bell installed, and a bellringer stationed, right beneath his medulla oblongata, whose sole duty is to ring the bell at every hour during the course of the night. At the third hour after midnight, they take a tour to his intestines and devour whatever food they find there. Some days, with a stroke of luck, he would turn and go right back to sleep. On such nights as he is not lucky, he would toss and turn, listening to the quiet sound of the night. It was only at such hours he gets to experience the serenity of his room, or shago , which was located just by the roadside attached to his parents’ house. The sound of crickets replacing the persistent baran almajirai, in their pitiful voices begging for just a morsel of food, the swoosh of the wind becomes prominent as the consistent sound of automobiles seize at that hour. The vacant sound of the night was a peaceful replacement of the noise of the First Gate ma...

By Paul Liam  Obinna Udenwe has published several award-winning works of fiction, namely Satans and Shaitans, Colours of Hatred, The Widow That Died With Flowers in Her Mouth, Men Are Fools, and Years of Shame . Many of these works have not only won local and international awards but have also aided in establishing Udenwe as one of Africa’s most prolific and important fiction writers of the current generation of African writers. Udenwe won the first edition of The Chinua Achebe Prize for Lite ature in 2021 with his novel Colours of Hatred, which was also shortlisted for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature. His first novel, Satans and Shaitans, won the ANA Prize for Fiction in 2015. In 2020, his short stories also won a Prairie Schooner—Glenna Luschei Prize. Men Are Fools, a collection of short stories, was a finalist in the Prairie Schooner—Raz Shumaker Book Prize. His short story, “It Has to Do with Emelia,” was adapted into a film by South African film production company Bump ...