"Nelson" by Ayobami Makinde (‘25)

The god forsaken place of Oblitus Village. I don’t know to this day why my mother and father choose this place as their everlasting place. Well they wanted to be forgotten, that is what Oblitus Village is known for, where those who wanted to be forgotten go. Many mysterious things happen there—well, that is what the people of Oblitus Village called it.

“You know what happened,” the boy says.

“I surely do, do you want to know?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Where do you want me to begin? I am a great storyteller. I used to make up stories when I was a kid to keep me sane in that hellish place.”

“Me too.”

“Should I introduce myself, then move on to that thing that happened?”

“What thing?”

“That thing was evil, evil I tell you.”

It has been 2 years since we moved to the Village. Mother told me it would be a good place to start over again. I don’t know how it could be any better when the problem came with us. Everyone knows about each other in that place but they don’t know about their past. Like how our neighbor Mr. Teller used to eat flesh.

I went to Oblitus high school, where there are only 100 students. That school didn’t feel like a school at all. I used to call it The Silent Hall. No students speak to each other in that school, they simply walk next to each other with deadness in their eyes. Sometimes you might hear screams coming from the end of the halls or right outside of the cafeteria but everyone knows it is just Aiden, the screamer.

I sit in the back of the classroom.

“Why?” the boy asks.

“Shush.”

Because the windows are always behind me in the classroom, jumping seems easy. But mostly because I could see everything in the classroom. I could see the teachers not wanting to teach people, the students who do drugs in the classroom, the students who cut themselves in the classroom, the ones who steal from other students. The students who draw their nightmares on papers and those like me who write stories.

The school was built backwards, instead of the students facing the chalkboard. We were made to face the door, as if they were encouraging someone to jump. The location was in the woods but not too far away from the town—just enough for screams not to be heard. Or for runaways to disappear.

It was a Friday when the thing came to our school. A boy who was pale like a sheet, he looked like he was starved all his life. He came in quietly, not even the hardwood floor creaked under his steps. Mrs. Monitor introduced him to us. When asked for his name, he mumbled it. “What was his name?”

“I don’t remember anymore.”

He sat in the other corner from me. A strange boy, I tell you.

I was usually the observer in the classroom, the one to notice all the weird things around me, but for some reason he was not weird. Nor can he be put into a group. The school uniform was white, so that they could tell when someone was bleeding.  He didn’t wear just all white, he always wore red with it. I was very intrigued by how normal he was. Not wanting to wear the same thing as everyone. I wanted to know; later, I did know more. But then, I made a plan: become his friend, learn about his family, and find out if he’s truly normal.

“I will tell you now, that boy was not a friend to be with.” “Why?” the boy asks.

I tried to be friendly with him. In each approach I made, he never smiled at me, but he would at any other student.  It was almost as if he became a different person—he knew what I was doing.

“He has to have known.”

One day he had a break of character: he was no longer smiling at people or responding to people. I used that as an opportunity to approach him.

“I still remembered what I said.”

I asked him if he was able to kill time. He looked at me weirdly: Kill what? I said: Kill the time. Until the end of the day. I said that I was always killing time, but in this place, someone is always looking.

“You are always looking,” the boy says.

“How do you kill in a place like this?” he asked me.

“He definitely misunderstood. You were so old fashioned, even then,” the boy says.

He started to be friendly around me, he always told me when he was going to kill. I always thought he was going to sleep or doing something after school. But it starts to tick in my head that it was something else. You see each time he said he was going to kill, someone goes missing in the town. It didn’t matter if the person was a student or town folks. Their death was in a particular way: no blood in the blood.

“It was like it was suck up dried.”

“A vampire!” the boy says.

I became very suspicious but no one in the town seemed to care about it, they all forgot. I, on the other hand, became very friendly with the pale boy. He invited me to his house one day and told me he would show me his new technique for killing time. Was I scared? Yes. Did I say no?

Of course not.

“I didn’t want to pass on the opportunity.”

My mother and father at the time had gotten really sick, our house smelled like medicine which I hated, so going to this pale boy’s house was a relief.

Upon arrival. The house was dark… no… it was white.

“I can’t remember.”

“I know what happened,” the boy says.

“You do.”

“Yes,” says the boy, “I was there too.”

Should I tell you the story, Nelson.