THE VIRGIN MOTHER

'The Virgin Mother by Oppong Clifford Benjamin ' is a vibrating short story about a small students cult on Tescoland; the campus of Ghana Secondary Technical School (GSTS). Of which, members were even not aware of their membership in this mystical school. The deity therein was a drawing on the wall of the dark room, called the dungeon, in which they rehearsed every night when all were asleep; a half nude woman with wings appended to her back.

The Virgin Mother is summoned by dancing to the rhyme of percussion to exhaustion and only then would she appear. She came in different forms - a ray of light from the heavens to earth, a tiny smoke from earth to heaven, the sound of heavy down pour of rain and so on.

I dare say, the innocent cult was called TERROR SQUAD (TS).

Read excerpt of the thrilling short story:

..................... On the night of a certain day, it was past 1am in the late African winter weather. Tescoland was snoring, the evergreen field laid calmly in its oval shaped campus, the structures stood the heights doing nothing but staring at nothing and enjoying the tranquillity of quiescent atmosphere of the night, and the sea as usual, comported itself beneath the adorning stars in the dark sky which canopied everything including the dungeon, and therein we stood – three boys, students actually - playing the acid* we used in our previous performance at Mfantsiman Girls secondary school at Saltpond, it was of percussion rhythm and our audience couldn’t just stop screaming throughout the drama session, they were scared yet they didn’t want the show to end, they loved it, truth be told.

We wool-gathered and thought, we sought ideas from The Virgin Mother on the wall, from the God behind the skies, from the leaves of the tree which grew behind the dungeon, its branches had pussyfooted into the room through the broken windows, we were sweating, in reality we wanted to do something different for our next performance in St. Johns boys School. We wanted to break tradition.

That was a rivalry school to ours. The stories were told of the boisterous war between the only two boys schools in western Ghana over who was the desirable official gents to the only all-girls school in the region; Archbishop Porter Girls Secondary School.

From the news of the days, GSTS had carved an image of academic excellence over the years and still were fine-tuning this image in modern days, our school almost always was among the top ranks of the A class schools. And as most girls were attracted to guys with high intellectual faculty, so did we won the game when the dice were cast by the girls themselves.

But sincerely speaking, the Saints had the official recognition, as both Porter girls and Johns Boys were catholic schools; they easily found love in the communion of their faiths. Moreover the boys in the green shirts represented everything we were not; they were more fashionable, voguish, and rich and had a spot on entertainment.

It was apparent that the show to which we were preparing for was a big one and as big shows attract big audiences, we were compelled by source of motivation to give off our best. We contemplated on the numerous terror squad dramas performed by our predecessors, they ranged from; the priest and the farmer and the monster story to the poor boy in the jute bag and the zombies– in the composition of the former, an unsuspecting farmer discovered rather to his dismay a corpse which had been indecently interred just beneath the top soil of the native earth of his farm, the unpleasant scene came to sight, after he had rested his back in a recumbing posture against the trunk of a tree, and was decompressing his worn out self from a tired labour. And when he was alleviated, decided to resume his industry, to assist his rising, caught hold of a sprig of acacia which grew just by his right hand side, which, to his surprise, came easily out of the ground. The alarmed farmer being cognitive of the recent disturbance of the immediate earth, examined the soil and saw the remains of his own brother fast decaying by the actions of termites and weevils.

He, therefore, bucketed along to the village in deep lamentation to disclose the afflicting intelligence to the only catholic priest in town, who, he found at the sanctum sanctorum of the cathedral. He hastened to the holiest of holy without cleansing himself. The priest upon seeing him, shouted at him to retire for he was dirty. Nobody entered the Holiest of holy, neither the high priest, nor him, but once in a year, to pray for the propitiation of the sins of the people.

The farmer retiring to the main floor of the church emitted long loud wailing asking the priest to condescend to receive from him the smiting words on his tongue. His cries penetrated the immediate presence and travelled deep inside the heart of the priest.

Upon their return to the farm, they met an apoplectic monster oozing with extortionate anger, ................................

Kindly watch this space for the publication of 'The Virgin Mother'. The book comes with ten additional interesting short stories by the same writer. Thank you for your patience.