The Trolley

Description

Bolu is twenty-four years old and graduated with a first-class honours degree in law from a university in the United Kingdom. However, he sees, hears, or believes things that are not real. The Trolley is a short story that portrays his first psychotic breakdown while on a trip to Lagos to visit his domineering mother—Mama Swiss. She forces him to accompany her to church one fateful Sunday morning, where Bolu has a psychotic episode. First, he sees flashing lights and then hears his name loudly echoing in the vast auditorium. No one else sees or hears it. Suddenly, he marches to the podium and shockingly assaults the Prophet, horrifying the church members. Bolu has an undiagnosed mental health condition called paranoid schizophrenia. But the church responds to his strange behaviour by binding him in chains for three days, whipping him many times to drive the demons out of him. Even so, between Bolu’s zealotic mother, who utterly refuses to accept that her only son has a mental health condition, and Kasia, his Polish girlfriend, who notices the slow change in him but does not speak up on time, they unwittingly unleash events that send Bolu over the edge and possibly to his death.