“Look at your face,” they say. “Look how it holds lifetimes of people who loved each other. Their loving is nestled between the gaps of your teeth and cradled in the rooks of your ears. It swings across the tips of your lashes.”
I look at my face. They say there’s love here?
I claw at my gums and find some black clot lodged in the root of my molar tooth. I peel the flesh from the shade of my ears and pluck every hair from my lids to find no careful caressing or leftover embraces, only remnants of that chalk-faced man’s blow to my grandma’s chest.
* * *
“Look at your face,” he says. “Who could ever love this?”
He claims my body in exchange for his founding footsteps. For what would this unwieldy piece of earth — this fragment of a human — be without him? His lust for his newborn nation is too great to leave in lawless hands. His blow rattles through my ribs.
I see this violent birthright now sitting in the ducts of my daughter’s eyes and on the bow of her lips, lurching at any misplaced hereditary. My granddaughter’s tongue tangles around the shapes of foreign vowels — the sounds stick to the roof of her mouth like an entrapped moth.
* * *
In the mirror, I watch Ma locking my hair into braids that won’t surrender to the night. Her fingers twist tender traces into the kink of every strand until it’s dripping from my scalp. It spills over my forehead, along the curve of my brows and into the creases of my eyes. It trickles down my cheeks and, with my next breath, catches in the hairs of my nose.
“Look at your face,” she says. “A relic of my mother’s doting.”
——–
Read – From Midnight Wails to Morning Smiles – A Flash Fiction by Bilqees Olowu, Nigeria
Kristen Harding is a writer from Cape Town, South Africa. Her flash fiction explores South African Coloured identities through food, language, and heritage. When not working on flash fiction, she’s writing about film, literature, and the arts online. Kristen’s writing also appears in New Contrast Literary Magazine.
