Between Lectures

 This is a work of fiction inspired by recurring themes in today's news. All characters, names, and events are invented and do not depict real people or organisations.

Chukwuemeka was twenty-three, three courses away from graduating with a degree in accounting, when the council of elders arrived at his hostel to inform him, with a formality that felt almost surreal against the backdrop of a room still cluttered with lecture notes and instant noodle packets, that he was now expected to be crowned as his community's next traditional ruler.

"There has to be a mistake," he told them, only half joking. "I have an exam in eleven days."

There was no mistake. The line of succession had settled on him after a series of deaths and disputes he'd followed only distantly, from the safety of assuming it would never actually reach someone as ordinary as himself, still living four to a room, still borrowing money from his roommate at the end of most months.

His roommate, Ifeanyi, took the news with the specific mixture of awe and disbelief that came from having shared a bathroom queue with someone who was now, apparently, about to be addressed with an entirely different kind of title.

"Are you going to drop out?"

"I don't want to. I've worked too hard to get this far to abandon it now over something I didn't ask for."

The elders, to their credit, were more flexible than either of them expected, agreeing to a compressed coronation schedule that worked around his remaining exam dates, an arrangement that required Chukwuemeka to spend his mornings in ceremonial preparation and his evenings, incongruously, revising taxation law with a study group that had no idea, until a local newspaper ran the story, that they'd been quizzing a soon-to-be monarch on depreciation schedules.

"Does it feel strange," his lecturer asked him privately, not unkindly, "trying to hold both of these at once?"

"Everything feels strange right now. I've had to learn, very quickly, that neither part of my life is going to wait politely for the other to finish."

On the morning of the coronation itself, dressed in garments considerably heavier and more elaborate than anything he'd worn in his life, Chukwuemeka found a strange, brief moment of stillness in the middle of the ceremony's noise, and thought, absurdly, about the accounting exam waiting for him nine days later, wondering if there was a precedent anywhere for a monarch who still had to submit an assignment on time.

Afterwards, back at the hostel that same week, Ifeanyi found him hunched over his laptop as usual, the elaborate robes from days earlier folded carefully in a corner, a used textbook open beside him.

"Feels weird, doesn't it? Seeing you like this again already."

"It's not really two different people," Chukwuemeka said, not looking up from his notes. "It's one person figuring out, in real time, how much of each life he actually gets to keep."

He finished his degree three months later, on schedule, walking across a graduation stage in an ordinary gown, indistinguishable from his classmates for that one afternoon, before returning home to a title and a set of responsibilities that had no exam date, no clear syllabus, and no graceful way to compress the learning curve.

End of fiction. For today's actual headlines, see the link to today's headline post and video