Happy new month! It's February already , how these months fly, I can't understand. The next thing I know, we might be celebrating Christmas again. Oh well, I hope that the month of January was a good one for you at least. Mine was busy but great; lots of opportunities that I am thankful to God for.
I was initially going to share a different story today, but I decided to share this one. Enjoy and fell free to share with friends.
NO
FIRE ON THE MOUNT
The year had only just begun, at least for Stella,
even though it was already the first day of the second month. She had been
sleep-deprived for days, owing mostly due to her work load, but also partly because
of indiscipline in going to bed early. This habit used to be unusual for her until
recent times, where she found herself walking around in aimlessly in her
apartment or watching random videos on Youtube until the late hours of the
night. She blamed the insomnia on the weather; it was awful! She also blamed it
on her hormones, they were sometimes annoying visitors. So once again, she had failed to
sleep early on the last day of January and before she could help herself, the
clock struck past midnight. She had failed to even realise it was the start of
February, the month of love. However, that did not mean much to her anyway, as
she had never had the chance to really celebrate it. In the past, she had hoped
for a day where she would go out on Valentine’s day for a romantic dinner with
someone special and be showered with lots of gifts, mostly expensive ones as
that was her taste. She had occasionally received gifts, chocolates, and
flowers on valentine’s day but they had never been from lovers. Therefore, that
day was still yet to come for her. But this particular day was not the day for
such thoughts. She really needed to go to bed now because she had a hair
appointment in the morning. Thus, she would need to wash and dry her hair
before the hair dresser came.
As she prepared for the night - her usual face and
mouth wash, and change into her nightwear, she could not help but notice the smell
of cigarette smoking coming into her apartment. Damn that new neighbour again!
He was a weird looking dude who she never spoke to. He must have been smoking
on the corridor or close enough, for the smell to penetrate into her apartment.
In general, she loathed the smell of the smoke, weed, and every other drug. She
wondered if there was a way she could stop this neighbour from smoking – she had
already stopped the other neighbour from smoking on the shared balcony, but this
new guy looked like he would be more difficult to manage. Besides, it was too
late for her to knock on his door so she searched the internet to see if
smoking inside the apartment was illegal. Sadly, there did not seem to be a
clear cut rule and so for she had to let it go. At least the smell was not in
her bedroom, she said to herself, as she cuddled under her blanket and began to
doze off.
Krrrr krrrr krrr…a continuous loud sound startled her
from her dream. It took her a few minutes to realise that it was the fire
alarm. Oh gosh, what could the matter be?! She waited in her bedroom for five
minutes but the alarm continued. She knew she was supposed to leave the
building until it stopped but she felt incredibly tired and only hoped that it
would be a false alarm. Her watch told her that the time was half past 1 am. Ten
minutes later, nothing had changed. She was beginning to hear the sounds of
other neighbours leaving their apartments but she stubbornly stayed back in
hers. Another five minutes passed and then she called the fire department. They
asked her if there was an actual fire in the building, she said she did not think
so but that she thought it came from her neighbour smoking. They said there was
nothing they could do about it and asked her to dial 911. She called 911,
repeated the same story and they transferred her to the fire department. The firemen
were on their way and had asked her to wait for them downstairs, so she grabbed
her coat and started the descent. It was then that she realised that she had
much more neighbours in the building than she had ever thought. A lot of them
were already on the ground floor. Her eyes caught a cute guy and so, she
quickly removed her sleeping cap. The firemen were there in no time and she
beckoned on them to come up to her floor. However, the fighters went to the first
floor. She was persistent, telling them that the smoke came from her neighbour
but they ignored her. She bumped into another neighbour who told her that some
people on the first floor had been smoking weed and that had triggered the
alarm. However, she was convinced that it was her own neighbour and kept trying
to urge the firemen towards her floor. After several back and forth, they
turned off the alarm and declared it a ‘false alarm’.
Stella was livid; it was not “false”, she told the
firemen.
“Were you the one that called us” one of them asked.
She admitted that she was, while she wondered whether
they would fine her. She had read somewhere that people who called for fake
alarms would be fined. But the firemen did not, rather they explained to her
that they were not allowed to go into people’s apartments unless there was an
actual fire, and that the alarm had pointed them elsewhere. Additionally, since
the alarm did not go back on after they turned it off, that meant that the
building was safe.
Stella sighed
and went back upstairs. She was still upset because her sleep had been
interrupted and given that she always involuntarily woke up by 6am, she was
sure to not get enough sleep by morning. This incident made her remember her
time in England during her previous studies; one night when they were evacuated
from her apartment building because an idiot had decided to boil an egg by 2am
and then had fallen asleep. Who would be so hungry to boil an egg by that
ungodly hour, she had asked back then, and who would be so foolish to fall
asleep before the 10 minutes it took to boil an egg? As she reminisced, tossing
and turning on her bed, she fell asleep again.
Thank you for reading my post and please leave a comment and share. I will be updating you along the year. In the meantime, keep visiting my blog and follow my Instagram page @lavivsblog and twitter @vivio_gogo for more updates. My main Instagram page is @ugochiukah
Have a beautiful week ahead. x
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