30/30: Short Stories On Love, Life And Other Such Nonsense
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About this ebook
A collection of short stories discussing love, life, loneliness, culture, sexism, the human condition, sex and other such interesting topics.
William Ifeanyi Moore
Born and raised in Eastern Nigeria before travelling to Britain to pursue a degree in Pharmacy, William Ifeanyi Moore is a prolific writer and poet with a keen interest in developing society through literature. His works has been published on numerous platforms online and in print (Omenka, Venture Africa, Pulse, BellaNaija, The Naked Convos and NBCC).
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30/30 - William Ifeanyi Moore
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Lady in Waiting: A Tale of Loneliness
With him gone, she was left with the sound of silence only broken by the tick-tock of her big clock. The air reeked of stale cigarette and sex mixed with the bittersweet smell of his perfume. Sweet because it reminded her of him in his absence, bitter because it reminded her that he had to go. She reached for a half empty pack of cigarette and sparked one on her lips. She didn’t necessarily enjoy the head rush, but there was something in the inhalation and exhalation of smoke she found rather therapeutic. Perhaps it was some kind of coping mechanism she had developed, like a form of meditation.
She thought about his wife. She didn’t owe the woman anything. It was hardly her fault she wasn’t woman enough for her husband or that he wasn’t man enough to be content. After all, if it weren’t her fucking him, it would have been someone else. She wondered if this really were the state of things or if the world had made her numb with the pain of her own reality. At the thought of this, she fingered her wedding ring and thought about her own husband…well, if she could still call him that. It must have been at least six months since she last saw him. She imagined how he was keeping abroad. For all she knew he had a mistress there. She smiled at the thought, and that was when she knew she didn’t love him anymore. It was an easy assumption to make that hate was the opposite of love. Far from it. Indifference was the real opposite. Complete apathy.
Her mind came back to the room briefly and then it jumped to the man she had just been with. She imagined him coming home to his wife and children. There was nothing she could do about it. He was never hers to keep in the first place. She warned herself about thinking like this. The last thing she wanted was to love him possessively. Her current state of detachment was much better. She thought about her children and how they would see her if they ever got to know about her affair. They were both young and impressionable, in love with the idea of love, even if they didn’t know what it meant. As far as they could tell, she was married, and it was for the better or worse. Her happiness was a matter of secondary consideration.
She took a strong drag of smoke to fill her lungs.
She was a mother and hence by default expected to be this perfect entity. It didn’t matter that she too had needs. She needed to be loved, touched, heard and understood. Needs that couldn’t be fulfilled by a man that she saw once a year even if he afforded her the finest of luxuries. Perhaps this was the nature of things and wanting otherwise was just wishful thinking. Marriage for all its glory was just a label. It had no inherent promise of love. It was more or less what we made it, and hers wasn’t a lot. Humans were imperfect as was the life they lived. How could someone tell her what was right or wrong when they had no idea of the things she had seen and the feelings she felt?
With another drag of the cigarette, she dabbed it in the ashtray and left the room.
Eric and Helen: No, We Can’t be Friends
Eric was no stranger to the idea that he came off as a bit of an asshole. In his opinion, he was only brutally honest but people just didn’t like to confront the truth. They’d rather have a sugar-coated pill of lies to soothe their insecurities and enable them to maintain some false sense of value. He was sat across the table on an encounter he wasn’t sure could be classified as a date. The dating manual wasn’t clear on where taking out a girl in the hopes of screwing her later fell into. He wondered if she wanted more than just sex from him and it made him somewhat nervous. Perhaps he should try to tone down his charm, the last thing he wanted was for her to start having feelings for him so early. He could tell from their recent chats that her idea of what they could be had started evolving into something he wasn’t willing to participate in.
‘I like you, like I really like you.’ She dropped the line without the slightest of warning.
Eric had to resist back-washing into his bottle of Orijin. This was exactly what he was trying to avoid and now it was too late. It wouldn’t be the first time he was being baited into something more than casual fun when he had not bargained for it. In fact, this was the leading cause of his losing potential lays. For a second, he felt somewhat bad for seeing so many girls as deserving of nothing more than a romp in the sac. But what was he supposed to do? Convince himself that a girl was compatible with his taste in companionship to make her feel better about herself? And this was 2015, women were no more innocent than men when it came with using a person for sex. Almost every girl he knew had a guy somewhere they could have sex with without any strings, so why did they all of a sudden want something more with him? Perhaps a punishment for his sweetness?
‘Helen, don’t get me wrong, I think you’re cool. Like, I like you, but I don’t see us in a relationship type thing.’
It was the most sensitive way he could think of telling her there was nothing more than sex for them. The truth was that he honestly thought she was a decent girl, but everything was not for everybody. For another guy, she might have been Mrs. Right, but not for him. In one of their chats, she had sent a list of requirements for her ideal man. In summary, she wanted a man with the self-control of a Buddhist monk, the body of a Greek god, the brain of Albert Einstein, and the heart of William Shakespeare. As for his financial status, she opted for the more accommodating ‘he must be financially stable’.
Eric contemplated telling her the truth. There was no way such a guy was going to be interested in her as far as dating was concerned. Contrary to the popular belief that opposites attract, similarities actually formed the basis for shared interests and that was really what people wanted from companions. She was unbearably boring, worryingly uncultured, and hopelessly addicted to 21st-century popular media; a most repulsive trait in his book, as would be in the books of most guys remotely similar to her ideal man. He decided to put it down as the modern day attitude of wanting things we refuse to do anything about; a deluded sense of entitlement.
‘Well, I don’t think it would be right to go to yours knowing that I want more. The last thing I want to be is another girl you’ve fucked and I know that is exactly what I would become if we do this.’
He respected her choice. Some girls had this notion that with enough sex they could change a guy’s mind. Even worse, some took to this weird strategy of teasing in hopes that eventually something would give. He remembered a girl that had slept over