DNA Test
Episode One
Olaedo has watched Miracle for at least five years and she has concluded that something about the child was not right.
His behaviour was off and he appears to be the odd item among all her three children. She was not sure if Ikenna, her husband, had noticed the oddity in their son’s behaviour, but a close family friend once mentioned how different the boy was from all her kids.
“Have you noticed how quiet Miracle seems to be? He is so speechless most of the time. Why does he lock himself in his room all the time?” The friend had asked, expressing deep concern.
“All the children cannot have the same behaviour.” Olaedo had said to the friend.
But the fact that she dismissed the concern with the wave of hand didn’t make it go away. That night, she took up the issue with her husband when they were in bed.
“Miracle seems different. He doesn’t behave like you or me.” She said while rubbing her husband’s hairy chest.
“All the children cannot be the same. No law says he must resemble us.” Her husband replied with a kiss planted on her lip as if to shut her up.
The matter was supposed to have died down that night but it didn’t. It stayed in Olaedo’s heart.
When Miracle turned seven, something happened that led Olaedo to search for a deeper understanding of who her first son is and where he came from.
On the day of Miracle’s seventh birthday, he used a sharp kitchen knife to injure his mother because she missed his birthday ceremony.
It wasn’t entirely Olaedo’s fault because she was held up in Lagos traffic. When she returned in the middle of the night, she had gone to her son’s room to apologize, but that proved to be a mistake as the boy produced a knife from under his bed and delivered her a painful cut on the leg. In Nigeria, it is a taboo to fight one’s mum under any guise. That was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
“I’m sure Miracle is not my son. I’m taking him to the hospital tomorrow for a DNA test.” She said as she managed to escape from the boy’s room alive.
Olaedo is a trained nurse, so she treated the knife wound herself, but she could not wait for the night to give way to the next day. She called Chika, who is the head lab scientist at Chatter Med, the hospital where she works and asked for her help in getting the DNA test done early in the morning. Chika agreed to help, but asked her to procure a sample from Miracle. She slept that night trying to figure out how to get the sample from a son who seems highly eager to murder his mother.
© Isreal Usulor
