This Story Has No Good End

My skin hates me. It does this thing where it begins itching for the tiniest of reasons: trying out a new soap, staying out in the sun for too long, anything. Whenever this happened, I would look at this expanse of flesh covering my legs and arms and torso and face and try to ignore it. I knew it was doing what girls in my school do—goad you to respond anytime they want to start a fight. But I have never won this war with my skin. I usually always responded to its invitation to war, scratching and pulling at it, partly in frustration and partly in anger, till I'd end up covered in blisters. Then we both would slump, spent. The next morning, I would call a truce and salve my skin with oils and treatment. It would go back to being as smooth as the pebbles I find at the beach on the evenings when I take walks.

There are never days my skin is truly happy. On days when it is too spent to fight, it broods, glowing because that is the only life it knows. But I am always wary, anticipating its every turn. It has an insatiable penchant for mischief, pulling stunts like breaking out with pimples the night before my high school graduation, forcing me to walk across the stage with a tight smile on my face, hoping that no one would notice that I had a clear pimple-free skin twenty-four hours earlier. They did.

However, for all its treachery, I do love my skin. On the good days when we weren't bickering, people would stop me on the street to ask me what skin care routine I used. They would ooh and ahh over me, and for that brief moment the sun would hang over my head.

I know it was never supposed to be mine in the first place. This skin wanted to be my sister's, but I had been faster; I had grabbed it and donned it before either of them could protest. It still resents me for that.

Through my childhood till my teenage years we inhabited a house where there was the constant threat of a revolt. From my window I always heard drums of war calling men to arms, but we were fine. I was fine. I knew for all its protestations the skin was stuck with me, it was not going anywhere. So I bore its whining with the stoic resilience of one doing penance for her sins. Then two days after my sixteenth birthday it stopped brooding. It glowed of its own accord, needing little help from me.

I was still trying to figure out what to make of this new capitulation the morning my mother burst into my room. Bisi was right behind her, carrying a cake on a tray.

"Happy birthday!"

She was wearing a smile that competed with the sun streaming in from my window. I leaned back to pull the curtain, wondering how I could shut her smile off too. It irritated me that Bisi had not bothered telling my mother that it was past my birthday already.

"I have something special for you," she said, pulling up the sleeves of her boubou, which was sliding down her arms. "I've gotten special permission from the hospital. We are going to visit the very room you were born in. Great, isn't it?"

She appeared winded, like the effort of coming up with that idea had exhausted her.

I nodded.

"So be ready by twelve o'clock."

Bisi placed the cake on my table after I brushed off their attempt to make me blow out the candles. After extracting a promise to be ready before twelve, they both left.

As soon as the door was shut I turned and went back to sleep. You see, my mother spends most of her days locked up in castles in her head. Sometimes she'd show up, and those mornings I'd find her in the kitchen, an apron around her waist and the smell of food...