Excerpt from This House Is Not for Sale by E.C. Osondu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cash began to worry when he noticed that items on his shelf were beginning to expire without being sold. Biscuits, tea bags, tins of milk all sat on the shelves until they expired. He stopped moving around with his gramophone in the evenings to people's homes, preferring to stay in his store instead and play the records in the hope that customers would come in to buy. Rotate's store on the other hand was attracting the younger crowd, who had money to spend and spent it quickly, unlike the older people who counted every penny and loved to haggle.

Cash began to introduce new things. He now sold chin-chin and puff-puff and buns in a glass-sided display box glass, but Rotate had beer-beef—chunky pieces of beef spiced up and fried until they were really dry and filled the mouth—when chewed they were said to enhance the taste of beer on the tongue. Rotate sold sausage rolls, which had the advantage of never going bad. Rotate only bought and sold certain items during certain seasons. Schoolbooks and exercise books when school resumed in September, machetes and hoes at the start of the farming season, raincoats and boots at the start of the rainy season, and Robb, Mentholatum, and Vicks inhaler when the harmattan season set in. Whereas Cash used to pile up all the items in his store even when they were out of season and sometimes even sold brown and faded exercise books to pupils at the beginning of the school year, the stuff from Rotate's store always smelled fresh and new.

And then Rotate bought a Yamaha motorcycle, an Electric 125. It was electric blue in color and flew through the dusty village footpaths like a bird. It made Cash's Whitehorse Raleigh bicycle look shabby and prehistoric.

People began to talk about the fall of Cash and the rise of Rotate. Cash had a framed picture in his store that showed two men. In one half of the picture, the man who sold in cash was smiling and looking prosperous in a green jacket and a fine waistcoat with a gold watch dangling from a chain and gold coins all around him. The other man who sold on credit was dressed in rags and looked haggard. All around him were the signs of his poverty; a rat nibbled at a piece of dry cheese in a corner of the store. A wag suggested that Cash should change his name to Mr. Credit.

Someone came and whispered to Cash that the reason his former customers were running away from his store was that Rotate had been spreading terrible rumors about him. He said that Rotate told people that he opened the soft drinks he sold and mixed them with water in order to get more drinks, that he duplicated keys to padlocks before he sold them.

Cash was angry when he heard these stories and decided to confront Rotate. His plan was to tell Rotate that the sky was wide enough for every manner and specie of bird to fly without running into each other or knocking each other down with their wings. His plan was to tell Rotate that they could indeed practice rotation in their business by taking turns to sell certain items so that they didn't create a glut. But Cash's visit was unsuccessful. Rotate rebuffed him, telling Cash—There is no paddy in the jungle, you mind your business, I mind my own. Every man for himself, God for us all.

One day there was an early-morning police raid on Rotate. They knew exactly where to look and they found wraps of marijuana in empty giant tins of cocoa beverage. According to some people, the leader of the team had told Rotate to give out everything in his store because this time he was not coming back.

But Rotate did come back after three weeks and he promptly declared total war on Cash, claiming that Cash had ratted him out. Rotate returned from detention red-eyed. He said he was going to wipe out his enemies once and for all. When you kill a snake, there is no need to leave the head lying around, you must sever the head and bury it in a deep pit, he boasted. He told his customers to buy only from him; even if there was something they needed and he didn't have it, he would buy it for them the next time he went to the market.