A stinking-rich man gets his reward

A stinking-rich man gets his reward

By Blessing Mhlanga. 09/10/2019. Wednesday.

There I was, sipping the expensive, thinking that it was all there is to life. I had mastered the endless dances of wealth and attained piles of mountanious stinking riches on my yard.

My laughter alone was worth pounds of pure gold, my smile went for a silver price tag and my cry alone would collapse the wells of nations’ economy. Blessed are those who befriended me, they tasted my flavours of milky bling and textures of sweety glitz. Shame to those to despised me because they didn’t benefit from the stench of my wealth.

It’s a pity I wasn’t a god because even the lords of governments knelt before my golden presence just to feel my wealthy ambience. I had children, two boys and a girl. They lived to squander and plunder the endless floods of my wealth, mainly because they didn’t labour for it, neither did they know its source. Day and night, regardless of the weather, the dark clouds descended upon my lavish mansion, which was in itself, a slice of heaven if not a complete one, and literally vomited on ocean-sand of hard cash, in physical dollars. It was only when I had asked the clouds to stop raining the cash that they stopped because, obviously I had no room to contain it. The price was simple: I had to feed the vicious 10 metre anaconda in my secret room with human blood for the magic to happen. I had all I wanted, all I desired, all I craved for except the pleasure of a peaceful nap.

I told my big man, the spiritualist about these series of sleepless nightmares and he told me to feed the anaconda - the source of my wealth, more blood. I obeyed but it didn’t solve anything. Fast forward, five years later, I found myself, sitting under a withered mango tree behind my cousin’s shack with nothing and no one except the bitter tale of ‘I used to have.’

I had inherited the plague of the biblical Job, but except only that I wasn’t innocent or righteous like him. The anaconda became the toxic animal it was created as, turned my children into objects of delectable supper and dinner, days after it had rapped my wife to death in cold blood. Then a stormy gale dismantled my german-machines, my heavenly mansion and the flood of cash vanished into thin air. Slowly, my once overflowing wallet became a dry well with no drop of even a saliva.

The mountains of gold, piles of silver, bulks of diamonds, rivers of dollars, had gone with the wind in a blink of an eye. What had happened? Why did the anaconda turn its poison against me? After all the blood I had fed it? Was it even aware of how I collected that blood and from where? I don’t want to talk about it. One thing I know, I’m lucky to be alive. The wages of sinful wealth is the garment of poverty, a necklace of shame, a crown of death and endless tears of bitterness. I have lost all. I have learnt. I have become a slave to the conseqeunces. I have seen them. I am still seeing them.