TIRED LEGS: THE SOLO RELAY

By Sunday Chilufya Chanda

Cherry flexed her hip and brought her right knee toward her chest as she swung her left arm forward. She repeated the workout with the other side of her body psyching herself up for the feat ahead.  The young lady instinctively tightened her grip on the baton as a series of “what –ifs” began to build in her mind.

She skimmed through her 3 teammates lined up ahead at different stages of the 4x 100 meters relay race. “What if I don’t pass the baton and ran all 4 stages myself” she imagined. “I would catch everyone by surprise and should I win, I wouldn't have to share the winner’s podium with anyone one else. The crowd would love me and cheer my name.”

A gentle breeze wafted across the field caressing her body and carrying with it a tinge of the floral fragrance of the competitor in the next lane. It smelt strangely familiar to Cherry and it evoked an unsettling reminder of the mysterious scent she had   picked from Chuma’s clothes after he had returned from an impromptu out of town assignment.  Cherry tried hard to block the disturbing memories of Chuma her erstwhile fiancée, but found it hard to do so. The young athlete had broken  her engagement with her pastor fiancée after she caught her bloke cheating on her with her closest friend- Kasongo. She was disoriented and devastated.

Cherry was so flummoxed that Friday evening to the extent that her teetotal self uncharacteristically ended up  imbibing rather generous volumes of liquor at a club, and by the end of the night, found herself  liberally  yielding her body in a  tit-for-tat steamy one night stand with her ex-fiancée’s cousin “Itchy” Leyma. It was a bitter sweet erotic stint filled with all sorts of irony. Cherry recalled with a wry smile how Itchy in a moment of amatory passion had whispered something in her ear  to the effect that she was the best not only in this world but in the entire galaxy! “My merry Cherry with prize thighs you’re the cherry of the pie” he had hissed as he stroked her lithesome limbs “you are so special you could win the Falanga relay race running solo!”

Her reverie was interrupted by a voice booming through the P.A system calling all teams to take their places. Cherry was on the track competing in the Falanga Invitational Championship (FIC) – a national field and track event.

She blew out her cheeks and adjusted her position at the starting blocks, putting her right foot in the rear pedal and her left foot in front. Her body  was crouched and her hands were spread across with fingers touching the synthetic surface of the track.

The starter’s gun went off and Cherry sprang out of the blocks driving forward down the middle lane. She kicked ahead and gave her team a good head start tearing ahead of the field.

The spectators cheered and rose to their feet as they spurred her on. Cherry distinctly heard her name being chanted and it felt good. She loved the acclaim and it spurred her forward towards her next team mate.

Zelipa Pondani popularly known as “Zed- Pee” eagerly anticipated the switch of the baton in the hand over zone. She “revved” herself up as she prepared to receive the baton from Cherry. To Zed -pees utter shock and horror, her starter team mate whizzed past her without handing over the stick.

There were "oohs" "ahs" and "boos" from the spectators as a manic Cherry similarly ignored and disregarded her two other team mates ACCentia and DECember who were positioned up field in their respective hand over zones.

Disqualification and the rules of the sport now meant nothing to Cherry. She was obsessed with getting over the finish line first and feeling the sensation of the tape’s touch on her body. Cherry continued to run in defiance just as her mind continued to be driven by insolence.

 However, as her anatomy ebbed of its adrenaline rush, her legs became tired and the  haggard  young lady’s sprint decelerated to a laboured jog. The rest of the athletes in the other lanes had long finished the race having gone past her in blurs of speed. She was  the only one on the track and nobody paid attention to her as everyone's focus had shifted to the winning teams’ celebrations.

The lack of spectator attention made Cherry envious and insanely resentful. She literally stopped in her tracks and began  to make crude unladylike like gestures to her teammates Zed Pee, ACCentia and DECember as well as the spectators.

The sport loving spectators would have none of it and the  crowd’s heckling rose to a deafening crescendo.

However In a speck of the multitude, Itchy Leyma and a choir for hire called the “Swivel-Sore-Sigh-Tea” tried to outshout the majority in the terraces. They went round and round in circles swiveling around and drinking tea in their daintycups, feebly raising placards bearing Cherry’s name.

A bleary eyed Cherry now decided to “finish the race” and she walked to where the finished line had once been. She squinted at a barely visible placard with her name emblazoned on it.  “They love me! I have set a record! I have won the Falanga Invitational Championship- just like Itchy Leyma promised” Cherry dementedly muttered to herself as images of Itchy-Leyma flashed through her mind.

Suddenly, the reality of what had just transpired set in.

She looked at the swivelling placard carrying assemblage. Cherry noticed that they intermittently showed her their backsides and then their sides and then their faces at different stages of a subtle commercially induced cycle.

As she recovered from her momentary madness, it occurred to her that her “Swivel-sore-Sigh-Tea” cheer leaders had enthusiastically  misled her into ignoring her team mates. 
This group only seemed to cheer and smile when they expected  and induced some form of gratification from a motley group perched behind a nebulous veneer.

“Swivel-sore-Sigh-Tea” was a puppet choir for hire in a dubious pantomime.

It  further struck Cherry that the puppeteers withheld a fat envelope whenever the group didn't “Swivel" and "Sigh Sorely” enough during Cherry's solo relay. 

“They are not cheering for me -they are cheering to get more dough in the name of “funding for good running”! 
"They are only interested in lining their pockets!"  "No wonder they are a choir for hire!” She exclaimed. “All they do is sorely whine, sigh and swivel in their chairs with a cup of tea in hand”.

It further dawned on her that like Chuma and Itchy, the choir for hire and the swiveling clique only loved her for her legs. They would eventually dump her when they  either ran out of cash to buy themselves more tea or when Cherry's biological clock caught up with her.

 She tilted her head and strained her ears to hear more praises from them but their voices were now drowned by the deafening boom of the majority; a jeering multitude who derided her for breaking a sacred team rule.

The Multitude's  chorus  reverberated:
“Never run a relay solo” …

Ends…/