HOLE IN MY SKIN

I did not know that men called breasts oranges until the day Chizoba tried to touch my chest. He had done the same with Nkiru and Angela before. I slapped his hand as one would swat a mosquito, the blade in my hand grazing him. He laughed and threw his head back while rubbing the spot with his other palm.
“Ogadimma, it is the oranges on your chest which I want, not the ones in your tray.”
I hissed, put the half-peeled orange back into my tray and walked away.

It was not the way his hand stretched to touch my breasts or the way his laughter sounded like a vulcanizing machine. It was that he called my breasts oranges at all. Some thing to be consumed. I imagined him sucking them the way the children on my street sucked oranges; their cheeks sinking in, drawing the juice as if their lives depended on it, turning the oranges inside-out to tear the pulp into their mouths and sometimes leaving a hole in the skin.

The second time my breasts bore that name was the night my Aunty’s husband came home smelling of alcohol. My aunty had gone to the big church on the next street for their monthly prayer vigil.
“Ogadimma, you have very beautiful oranges.” He said, the smell of alcohol on his breath. I tried to wriggle out of his grip but his hands were too firm.
That night, I felt like an orange. Sucked dry. With a hole left in my skin. The next day, my aunty came back. I did not tell her. I did not look at her husband’s face when he walked past me on his way to work.

That afternoon, as I sat with Nkiru and Angela by the big church on the next street, two men walked up to us. They said they wanted to take photos of us with our wares on our heads. The one with the camera hanging around his neck was tall. He had too much hair on his face. The other one called him Jidenna. He looked at us, from one person to the other the way some customers looked at my oranges to decide which ones to buy. I heard him tell the other one that he wanted to take a portrait of one of us. His eyes rested on my face too long. I looked away. He came towards me. He smelled of grass and something else.
“Your eyes tell a story”, he said. He looked into my face searchingly. I looked down at my feet, afraid he would see everything.

But when he asked me to look into the camera, I looked. Hoping he would see the pain in my heart and the scars under my clothes through the lens.
“Don’t smile”, he said. And I wanted to tell him that even if I wanted to, I could not. That I did not know how to spread lips and open teeth anymore.

u do have a nice story going here, what made u stopped? I guess no one commented on it? But u gave up so fast. On urself

I totally agree, i want to read the story

me too,pls continue