20/05/2025
“Mama, please don’t chase me out it’s already late!” Serena cried, her voice trembling.
She clung to the doorframe, barefoot and shivering. "My friends go straight to the river . Mama, please... let Ngozi follow me. Please, Mama."
Chinaza’s eyes blazed with hatred. She folded her arms and spat,
“No! My lovely daughter will not follow you, you cursed child. Daughter of a harlot... bastard!”
Serena’s heart sank. Her stepmother’s words stung like fire, but they were nothing new.
Serena’s real mother had died just a few days after giving birth to her taken by a sudden fever. Her father, desperate to care for his newborn, had remarried a woman named Chinaza. At first, everyone praised Chinaza’s beauty and grace. But behind closed doors, she was cruel heartless.
She bore two daughters of her own, Ngozi and Amaka, and treated them like royalty while Serena was reduced to a servant in her own home. Beatings, hunger, insults Serena knew them all.
One day, her father, angry at the injustice, confronted Chinaza. “Serena will go to school like the others,” he said. “We’ll talk more when I return from the farm.”
But he never came back.
Some said he was bitten by a snake. Others whispered he was ambushed. But Serena knew the truth:
Chinaza killed him.
After his death, Serena's world shattered completely. Chinaza’s hatred grew stronger, fiercer.
Then came that night.
The moon was high, casting ghostly shadows.
“Mama, please... it’s too late to go to the river,” Serena begged again.
But Chinaza shoved her out the door with a gourd in hand.
“Go, and don’t return until you bring water! Or sleep outside with the spirits!
Tears ran down Serena’s face as she walked the lonely path to the river. The wind howled through the trees, and strange sounds echoed in the darkness.
When she reached the riverbank, she knelt beside the water, sobbing. The water reflected her sorrow like a mirror. Then, she began to sing a haunting lullaby her real mother once hummed.
Suddenly, the river
