Delayed strike denied smile
Have you had to strike iron, while it was still cool, thermal energy almost zero? Attacking it with a hammer or another heavy metal? Did the iron scream and go ahead to bend with the impact of the contact between your real or improvised hammer and poor it on the Anvil? Please don’t the truth disgrace with a misleading reply. I would rather you answered the question with candour.
Of course, iron would respond to a hammer assault with an unpleasant sound one might tag a protest. Yet no heat-spared iron kept well away from smelting forge betrays an obvious disfigurement, when it is pounced upon with even a Monday hammer or Tuesday’s.”
In clearer pursuit of my motive for raising the subject, every enterprise has its right time and does not fail to signal its pursuer that it has arrived and wished to be seized like pure Gold. Implicitly, I am contending that hours, minutes and seconds fly with wings like birds, sometimes doing so like an escaping eagle a seeker never finds again, except God should remember on his behalf to repeat miracles of the Old Testament…
This is a story about big-dreams-nursing Lenora Adimora, then twenty-five years and sadly battling with all manner of deprivation. Her half-wretched father, Festus Adimora, was also an insensitive one. More correctly, he was a daddy who stuck to his own strict opinions about how contestants for The Beauty Crown should dress for the event. The attire has to be a down-to-the-knee caps’ and its fabric one that makes sure no eyes picks a woman’s secret. To seventy-one-year-old Festus Adimora enough of what constitutes glamour for scoring a pageant by a panel of Beauty Judges can be lifted from her face, neck and other safe-to-watch portions of a woman’s body. Certainly, not her unmasked full-formed breasts, let alone publicized thigh! To Lenora, actively planning to contest for their just announced state-organized Most Beautiful Pageant, her Festus father would produce the entrant fee for it, only if the models would all appear in ankle-down robes a replica of the one’s worn by maidens of king David’s time.
Easily, Lenora began to languish and in spirit to diminish with her founded fears that she would never be able to take a shot at The Beauty Crown. It is now cruelly clear to her that the pageants who walk away with the coveted prizes were ones with supportive parents: a current-trend fancying father, a body make-up releasing mother; certainly, also some admirer outsider willing to shut his mind to all the fine reasons why one should only mind one’s business.
“Yes, some moved person and heart from nowhere wanting to take up my cause, because he’s sure. I’m heading somewhere.”
Fantasizing Lenora had half-hoped that if she lifted her bent brooding head and looked up from her half-creaky chair she would be staring right back at that moved person and heart complete with the servile countenance of genie. Under the circumstance, Lenora could not raise The Beauty Pageant Subject to her father and not regret it forever. Embarrassment-forewarning Angels had, in The Spirit Realm, revealed to her that her Festus father upon being handed the information would hurriedly check all over again her active participation in their church activities beyond Sunday weekly services.
Yes, Festus Adimora would insist on it for its being a knighted father’s honest duty and ultimately for the unlikelihood of any Panel of Beauty judges adopting his own yardstick of final selection of a contestant for The Crown.
“God! Who would have thought that in this Second Millennium and 2017, a father looks to be prepared to nastily deny his only daughter and child her fat chances of emerging their state’s Miss Offran and its crown fitting on her deserving head of curly hairs…”
And hadn’t she grabbed as well from the heavens a nearly roman nose, high cheek bones, an often moist succulent lips, bosomy chest, flat tummy - most likely, the flattest in their state of the models proper and the prospecting – and - Satan knows it - rounded hips too and nice legs far from The Spindly…
Shoulders of wondrous disbelief were shrugged by Lenora, who, without initially intending to do so, glanced at her shoulders and saw that they were just good ones that needed no props nor pad itself. Lenora with eyes spotting mist wondered if there really was any part of her framework that required emergency attention of a modeling young women and almost as soon gave a verdict of “Negative” in capital. Her eyes from which tears had begun to discharge had been all along a sparkling laughing pair! Only stopped laughing but retaining their sparkle after news of the just opened State-Organized Beauty Pageantry got to her and she sensed that she would be up against odds trying to clinch Festus’ blessings to it.
Fatefully, with only six days to his seventy-second birthday, Festus Adimora finally blessed Lenora’s Beauty Queen Dreams with his sudden death in the wee hours of Monday 20th November 2017. A long belligerent hypertension and two malfunctioning kidneys all along threatening to fail combined their forces in the early hours of the said day to quit him from Planet Earth…
A crunching blow to husband-worshipping, sixty-six-year-old, Mrs. Cecilia Adimora and as crunching a blow to God’s Decree Ministry, International, where Festus Adimora, while he still had the breath of life was much like A Crusader Field Marshal prosecuting nearly all her battles against Forces of Darkness under her man’s parochial committee.
Without doubt, it would have made an unprofitable news to Lenora that her Festus father had given up the ghost after the expiration of the period for enrolment by Female Offrans for their state’s Beauty Show. Then, there would have been no need to think it some sort of welcome development while she might have gone ahead to not forgive Festus, even as a breathless lifeless bundle waiting for The Final Hour of Resurrection.Such would have been the degree of her malice from a feeling of betrayal or frustration by Festus’ chosen time of demise that she would have dared to pull a last-minute face at the glazed one of lying-in-state Festus while paying him her last homage in a funerary file; to hopefully take advantage of the moment of lack of focus for complete coverage of the event by the capturing camera man.
Luckily for her pageant dreams, only four weeks gone and two left for any of their State’s Beauty Queen Hopeful to give her self-esteem and the idea a try.
And she, Lenora, is one of them doubly eager to do so -no, a triple times eager to showcase what she had got glamour-wise and, if she can help it, of The Worldly- Wise.
As it turned out, she had been anything but wrong in observing that some guy not by blood linked with a prospective pageant is sure to surface in her world from out of the blue for flying her to victory in the unique event… A Gilbert Armstrong, twenty-seven, turned out to be The Guy and did exactly three days to the end of the allotted time for enrolment for the contest. Event Lover Gilbert was content to pay for Lenora’s a quarter-of-a-million-naira non-refundable entrant fee for the contest and childishly happy to have her make-up kit crammed with beauty soaps, creams, lotions, powders, lipsticks, mascara, eyelashes, shampoo and perfumes.
Gilbert Armstrong had not wanted a painful story to be told in the end, would not want any stone to be left unturned and owned a mindset to turn every goddamned stone soonest for Lenora!
Not a stranger to The Beauty Contest Game, Gilbert found suited moments to politely let Fairly Enlightened, Diploma-in-Marketing-Holding Lenora understand that some pageants eligible for the crown had had to lose same to their causeless neglect of Current Affairs - in short - the Intellectual Side of The Game. Gilbert Armstrong tried to get Lenora Adimora to sound promissory on her preparedness to not offer a long or short silence to any asked questions by their Judging Panel.
“I know a short silence delay after a hurled question will rob me of The Witty Model…”
“While a long one after their question should be plain disgrace,” finished off Gilbert Armstrong in a voice as strong as his more muscular right arm.
Gilbert did not let Lenora keep pondering what then she should do ,if she had no reply to make to posed question and the dreaded long or short silence was inescapable…
“You promptly flash your best toothy smile at the source of the question to first bribe him with it and politely admit Negative Idea…”
All these between Gilbert and Lenora were for the worthy purpose of tightening, without let or hindrance, all the loose nuts that could the latter cost The Crown. Should one say ‘indiscreetly’, Lenora Adimora already knew like the back of her hand what would have made her shed a loser’s tears in the slated event from announcement of the results for The Winner of The Contest and her Runners-Up. A timely move by Neighbor Prisca Linus, soon to be twenty-eight, to join the Offran State’s Beauty Pageant Train for a shot at The Crown. An unimaginably beautiful wench with a perpetually disarming look, smile, physique and grace - Prisca Linus had all her enviable gifts of appearance and disposition grabbed from her mother mulatto, even at fifty, still rousing in men of her age and the much younger adulterous impulse with her rare finesse…
To God be The Glory, Prisca had with scorn greeted proposals that she partake in The Beauty Thing, lampooning the motivations behind women’s donning of skimpy body covers for enduring demonstration of their being Paragons of Beauty. By disposition, Prisca was clearly the natural daughter of the Late Festus Adimora, who had held everything against Nudism for The Beauty Queen’s Crown; just as Mrs. Rhoda Linus, upset by her Prisca’s disinterest in Pageantry, would have been the perfect mother for Lenora…
Lenora Adimora shall forever remember the mid month of December 2017: eternally keep treasuring The Third Saturday of the month which had balanced on Day Sixteen. For four complete years it has been her own Jew’s Holy Sabbath she would not have any Ex-President Clinton or another as-smart public speaker tarnish with a punchy argument from a private motive…
And why would it not - The Saturday? After proving to be a bank-account upgrading one for a woman whose new scintillating name is Miss Offran with a buttressing circular crown of pure carat.
Lenora’s male sponsor, Gilbert, had dropped her an unequivocal truth in the World of Pageantry. Stammered answers and delayed ones to asked questions could bungle the most beautiful contestant’s chances of grabbing the coveted crown. Lenora Adimora was to meet in their battlefield another astonishing beauty in the person of a Bernice Zaram: wondrously uniformly proportioned and brandishing relative youthfulness for being either twenty or twenty one but who had to keep struggling with all the questions asked her as part of the screening and - could you believe it? - knew not the Middle Name of the First Lady of their state. Lenora had in her own questions sailed through and fought to do as well when she was - May God strikes that panelist! -ordered to sing for a minute any Christian or secular song of her choice and fancy…
“God, that man can have observed in advance her slightly cracked voice from devilish sore throat which had mischievously reared up with only forty-eight hours event. But she was to make a fairly grand job of it fired by her special hunger for The Beauty Crown and wisely choosing a song sung in a voice not pitched high. If her imitation of the walks of the big cats in wild forests had not been a good one, it would not have elicited the shrill cries she heard while it lasted besides male cat calls and lecherous whistling.
While widowed Cecilia Adimora had open indignation to offer daughter Lenora for the venture taken up by her while her late father was still in a fridge, her veiled secret delight at having produced a state’s beauty Queen continued to hit the ceiling above her.
Its ten Million Naira cash prize, though in Dollars not a big deal, can comfortably cover the costs of Festus’ interment and much would still be left…
Readers, please, learn to tell people likewise: Wonderful Satan has a wonderful way of getting people to remember an abandoned prospect at a wonderfully wrong time. Sure, you would not guess with accuracy my next remark. It was just last year’s 2021 that ravishingly beautiful Prisca Linus said to toe the line of Lenora and like her collect and wear the crown for a full three hundred and sixty-five days. I am talking of a then thirty-one or thirty two year old model matching her glamour against much younger and as much good-looking co-contestants.
Not distasteful in the outright, Prisca Linus was to emerge. The Runner Up to eight-years-younger Adaeze Emperor; who knows the Handiwork of two, three or four rebelling face wrinkles or body’s that the sometimes computerized eyes of judges would grab!
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