Reader, if you love stories with resolutions—good, bad, and indisputable—you should pack your things and leave right now. Don’t you understand? This story is a jawless, gaping mouth. It is a wound on the leg of a man with high blood sugar. It is drowning in a land full of oxygen—you look around, everything is surviving except you. Maka chukwu, let thunder fire me if I did not cry while I was in the process of converting my thoughts into words into a story. The girl I speak to you about is as tethered to me as my own shadow. Yet faraway, like my reflection in the glass sliding doors of the pharmacy across the street. And her eyes—her eyes are so heavy at times—you might think her irises are planets. In fact, her body is a solar system working towards its apocalypse. God help me. Help her. Help you. Who looks at rot with the eyes of a neglected lover?
Paw-paw
There is something searing in her eyes upon seeing the rotting paw-paw fruit decimating into the soil beneath the coconut tree. The tree in front of which her father is buried. His grave is surrounded by weathered cement bricks clothed in thick brown moss. Two days later, she finds, in a broken car mirror, that the thing is envy. This fruit had mastered the art of staying still—something she craves with the same sweeping madness of pregnancy. To lie still. This girl wants to lie still and let the world move on without her. But like fruit, she is still in the hands of branches, and so long as she remains there, the wind will blow and she will sway. Sway. She cannot stop moving until she falls splat! The fruit, as an advocate of its death, only has two jobs: to ripen and to fall. Rain and sunlight contribute to the ripening of this fruit—to its imminent rot—and to the enamel knives that stab and crush. The same way, the more art she consumes, the more her heartbeat is punctuated by question marks.
In Lolita, the landlady asks the man, “Do you believe in God?” He replies, “The question is, does God believe in me?” This girl with a suicidal solar system for a body can relate so well to this exchange that she can feel her mother’s heart break on her tongue.
Sweet like sugar, yellow like Fanta, everybody likes paw-paw…
She does not. This girl realizes that she likes paw-paw only when it is rotting in her backyard. She fell like fruit—not her body, but the body hidden like ill thoughts inside her body. It is a complicated thing when one part of you dies without the other, and so she is watching herself lie still and rot. Faraway, like she is not herself. Watching like an actress seeing herself on TV. Mm. Perhaps what she envies is not the rot itself, but the completeness of the ruin.
This story is the story of a fallen fruit trying to cling onto a branch again and sway. And sway. And sway to the appassionata of the wind. Or, it is the story of a rotten fruit atop a tree, swaying in all its destruction. Waiting to drop splat, begging to drop splat!
When you forget how to feel, even memory cannot remind you.
Some people think it takes a lot of trauma to fall and rot. Mbanụ. Even a baby knows that it does not need a stick when the mangoes are ripe. They will fall like hailstones. And nobody talks about the unintentional hurt that the people who love you inflict. This girl was taught not to be clingy until touch became an allergy. She was taught to stay alone until she concluded that there was nobody she could not do without. And nobody says how this unintentional hurt is; sometimes, you, prying a knife out of limp hands and stabbing yourself. I can’t really blame this girl, nor can I blame the dead thing in her; children take everything literally, so she hid in tiny spaces, trying to disappear. The things she taught herself were: Lie still. You are alone. Your mother is not yours. Do not stretch your hands to hold. Do not feel too much. Do not pester. I repeat, do not pester. You are alone (echoes).
So, that is when the body inside of her began to decompose. She is sitting in a quadrangle, and a boy lays on her lap. He keeps asking, What happened to you? What happened to you? She smiles and reminisces. The troubles of the rotten fruit began when hands learned how to sow. She thinks back: nothing. Nothing. Just my birth. Days later, she stumbles across E.M. Cioran’s ‘The Trouble With Being Born’—the universe agrees.
Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!—Cioran.
Mm. A voice. Lodged in the quietness of her mind, says, You should watch your literature. Mm. Okay. She reads it anyway.
To grieve, or not to grieve.
What do you do when you turn like soup and there are no remedies for what ails you? Do you throw yourself away? —Ukamaka Olisakwe.
For most of our lives, our present is held captive by the past and the future. In adulthood, we spend time peeling our childhoods open, looking for what has made us the way we are. She confesses that she has not grieved her father while running her hands through the boy’s oily hair. He shakes his head; he does not understand. She forgets that in her tradition, it’s an abomination, arụ, for a child to die before the parent—she grieves the body inside her body. In her head, her father is not dead, but she is. The only problem is that he is the one with a grave. She is the one with a body. She tells the boy that she feels like a mistake. He shakes his head. He does not understand. Days later, he would tell her it’s a rare case of low self-esteem—his diagnosis. She thinks. Mm. Nina Simone’s prayer in Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood has come to nothing. She knows that it is more of a case of self-extinction. She wants to scream it, but she is not even angry. Among other things she has lost, she cannot remember the color of anger.
The day after, Nigeria won against South Africa. She knows how to rejoice, so she does; her lips have recovered laughter. A victory. She goes to bed and cries briefly for herself again. The tears dry on her cheeks. If anybody asks her what she grieves, she will whisper, My birth. When she thinks of her father, she thinks of the color brown. Something around him is still and quiet. Brown grief. Grief like death itself. Grief that cannot recognize itself. Grief like a stillborn on a giant iceberg. Toothless Grief. Weep-not Grief. Grief buried in an unfeeling body buried in a feeling body. Grief that expires but has no end. Blind grief. When she talks of her father, the silence in her body that has existed since the day she saw his body lying in state eats her mouth. When the boy says he would lose a parent for her, she shakes her head and says, “This is not what broke me.” Then what? He asks, His hair is now on her neck. What? Why are you so cold? “I hid my heart in installments, and now I don’t know where to find the rest of it.” She trails off. He sniggers and says, Do you even have a heart? They both laugh. The best thing she has recovered yet is laughter, the shield against memory—you remember something, and then you laugh and laugh until you forget again.
A solar system. Suicide. This girl. She is so close to me that all the memories she has pushed back, I remember. I remember. Right now, there’s a war. A war without noise or gunfire. This war is about rot. About the grieving. About the body inside her body. About how she so easily dissociates herself from the past. Is she going to get to the final stages of grief and finally accept this half-death? This absence of a complete self. What do you do when your egusi has spoiled to the extent that your neighbors are pinching their noses? When you know everything you are meant to feel but you are just watching like nothing is yours, not even the body you adore every morning in the mirror? Omo. I don’t really know. My own is to watch and say exactly what I see. Oga dịkwa mma?
Music as kaleidoscope.
There are so many sides to a song. The perfect song is a master key, made to open every compartment of the soul. Nigeria loses to Cote d’Ivoire. Two to one. The match still feels like a ruse, and she feels like she should be angry at everything, at Iwobi, Chukwueze, Aina, and Saidu, at the fact that she lost hours of sleep or some other productive activity just to be doused in the lackluster, disappointing football match. She acts angry and frustrated, but the body inside of her is disturbingly calm. This acting is to remain tethered to the physical—to prevent another death or severance.
Sorry…There are so many sides to a song. So many colors spiral with the rhythm. If she thinks about it, this girl is able to assign a color to everything, including sound. It’s funny how a song can possess different colors at different moments of your life. Linkin’s Park Leave Out All The Rest, was once the color of satisfaction—the best memory she has of her brother is laying on her mother’s bed and singing this song at the top of her voice. She would jumble up the lyrics, and he would laugh, and because she loved to make him laugh, she would jumble it up more—bubblegum pink. From the time she began to respect the lyrics, she created scenes and acted them out in her head. begging illusions: Don’t resent me when you’re feeling empty; leave me in your memory—a feeble red. Illusory bleeding. And now, her perception of this song is tethered to memories. Ummm. She thinks back. It’s funny how the universe works. Could the illusion she expended her breath begging for have been the future that is now her present? I’ve never been perfect, but never have you. Begging like she could foresee all the photos sitting in the trash, the ash in the hearth. Forgetting all the hurt inside, you’ve learned to hide so well. Pretending someone else can come and save me from myself. I can’t be who you are. Dead thing—gray.
There are so many sides to a song. Inugo? Even the happiest of songs can snap your spine. The same song can add a sweet swagger to your gait as you head for lectures in the morning. You cannot tell a song what to do. It crashes into your heart like a football through a window. It can send your ocean heart rippling. It can also send you to sleep when the chaos in your heart is crackling like bedsheets in the Harmattan wind. The girl is alone at home, and she is cleaning with music when The Cavemen’s Me You I begins to play. You don’t have to cry, baby; you should know it’s alright. Don’t let this love fade away. Let your love be magical; let’s make it cavy-cal. She breaks down in the living room and begins to cry, crying for her entire existence. Burnt orange. Mm.
*
A fly perches on her phone. It is morning. Valentine’s morning; Ash Wednesday morning, and she wakes with a semblance of rage in her stomach. She closes her eyes and waits until it whittles away.
You’ve just been quiet. I don’t know what to do with all that silence. A text from a boy last night. She does not know what to do with the silence either; she says so. She practices German on Duolingo. Müde. Sehr Müde. Another from a different boy:
Hi Chinaza!
I just read your work on Arts Lounge.
You must have been getting this, but I dare repeat it: You're an exceptional writer! Always feels like you've meshed (in reality)....meshed…reality. Reality. Your work. Chinaza. Reality. Reality. Meshed. With your narrators and everything that lies in their viewpoint, Meshed. Reality. Viewpoint. Reality.
Everything she has written is her. She has been found out. In Chuma Nwokolo’s Diaries of a Dead African, Abel Meme Jumai lights a fire in his backyard and burns his life’s work. And although he has written mostly folktales, he calls the act self-immolation. He grieves for himself. She relates quite well because she knows what it is like to die without dying and to break your body into pieces to spread evenly across your work. At least she has art. She has fiction. She has music over her, like her body is a canvas in the hands of an artist in a fit of gestural abstraction.
I pass by the pharmacy’s glass sliding doors. From the corner of my left eye, I see her looking at me from the corner of her right eye. Sometimes, all you have to do is tell the neighbors to mind their own pot of soup. Hehe, you are laughing? What about you that is still here when I asked you to leave? You wanted to know the contents of the soured pot of soup, but it did you no good, did it? You thought you would read about chest-grasping grief? Hehe. Here’s your dose of 2000+ words and sacks of silence. Ka ọ dị. I have no time for this, and neither does she.
About the Author:
James-Ibe Chinaza is a writer and a human, among a plethora of other things she is unaware of. She is an inebriated fan of sunsets, music, and photography. Poetry is her way of saving herself; prose is her way of becoming. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Arts Lounge and The Shallowtales Review, as well as in the Kalahari Review, Agbowo, Fiery Scribe, Cons-cio, and Brittlepaper. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Sehvage Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and emerged as second runner-up in the 2023 Ikenga Short Story contest. She currently serves as the prose editor II of The Muse Journal No. 51. She goes by James-Ibe Chinaza on Facebook and X, and yellowin_teeth on Instagram.
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