Final Boarding Call by Walter Uchenna Ede
“This is the final boarding call for all passengers going to Lagos!” the voice of the female automaton blared from the loudspeakers of the public address system. I looked grudgingly up from the page of my Vince Flynn novel, dragging my attention from the point where Mitch Rapp had been about to blast yet another Middle Eastern terrorist to hell where there won’t be any fifty virgins waiting to receive him. I glanced round as the line shuffling past the check-in counter trudged on faster than it had been before. That was the final boarding call for my flight and these people are still crawling forward as though they had all the time in the world, I thought with some asperity.
Right in front of me was a young boy, roughly my age, clad in the de rigueur low-slung jeans over his nonexistent buttocks, his boxers peeking out from beneath his slim-fitting T-Shirt. With his Mohawk haircut and earphones strapped over his ears, he completed the image of nearly every youngster in Nigeria – an image I didn’t particularly like. I don’t know why this male fashion sense was so in vogue, but I wasn’t impressed by it at all.
