14/10/2025
The Boy Who Wanted Love
I grew up in a small village in Africa, where children always ran around the compound, playing, laughing, chasing goats.
But one boy, Chike, was different. He never laughed much.
He always stood by the mango tree, watching.
His parents were traders in the city. They came home late, always tired, never looking at him properly.
The boy would run to his father, arms wide, but the man would push him aside, saying,
“Later, Chike, later.”
But later never came.
At first, Chike just became quiet.
Then he started following older boys who smoked under the tree at night.
He wanted someone to see him, someone to call him “brother.”
They laughed at him, used him to run errands, and taught him things a boy shouldn’t know.
One night, I followed him don’t ask me why.
I wish I hadn’t.
I saw him with those older boys near the stream.
They were cutting a chicken, pouring the blood into a broken calabash.
They told him,
“If your parents don’t love you, the spirits will. Just give them something to eat.”
Chike didn’t even cry.
He held the chicken’s neck himself.
After that night, strange things started happening.
Cats would scream in the compound at midnight.
His mother fell sick for weeks with no cure.
And Chike… he changed.
His eyes no longer looked like a child’s eyes.
The scariest part?
One evening, when his father finally shouted at him, saying,
“What do you even want from me, boy?!”
Chike smiled
a smile too wide for his face
and whispered,
“Just love… but since you won’t give me, I found another.”
That same night, the father ran out of the house screaming that something was choking him.
People rushed in, but Chike was just sitting there on the mat, smiling with blood on his lips.
I never went close to him again.
The last time I saw him, he was at the edge of the bush path, smiling with that broken mouth,
whispering,
“Daddy, do you love me now?”
Moral Lesson:
Sometimes, all a child needs is love and attention.
When you starve a child of affection, the world and sometimes darker things will offer a version of it.
Love your children before something else answers their cry.
