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<p><strong><em>Kamsi</em></strong></p>



<p>A woman’s body, they say, is a temple, housing secrets of old in its curves, dips, and valleys.</p>



<p><em>This is not my body.</em></p>



<p>A woman’s body, they say, should be supple but firm. A beautiful paradox of textures. Succulent mountains suspended on a firm plateau tapering down to a shadowed valley. Sloping shoulders that fall to a beautiful spine and finally rise as two soft, rounded boulders.</p>



<p><em>This is not my body.</em></p>



<p>A woman’s body is custom-made for comfort.</p>



<p>For cuddles.</p>



<p>To be had and to be held. To dissolve serious thoughts in its supple comfort, with outcroppings you can clutch on to as you fall off the ledge of pleasure.</p>



<p><em>This is definitely not my body.</em></p>



<p>My body is a temple without doors or windows, all harsh lines and angles. A temple that holds no secrets. And why would it? Any secret hidden here would be out in the open. With nothing to hide behind, it floats away back into the world. My body is a conglomeration of plateaus and planes, devoid of swells and dips. My body is longing, with holes that never fill despite my best efforts. My body is a fighter, challenging chairs, and hard surfaces to battles that leave me feeling sore. I am not a beautiful paradox of the supple and firm. I am a consistent collection of planar surfaces.</p>



<p>I come from a part of the world that likes its women having an appreciable density, a tantalizing suppleness to their bodies.</p>



<p><em>You’re so skinny,</em> they say, circling my wrist with two fingers. <em>Eat something before you disappear. You are starting to look like a boy.</em></p>



<p>Some believe I have it easy, that I can eat all I want without adding a single ounce. What they do not understand is that sometimes, emptiness longs to be filled. That sometimes I look in the mirror and believe I failed the first test of womanhood.</p>



<p>***</p>



<p><strong><em>Ujunwa</em></strong></p>



<p>Do they not know how hard life is when you have a body filled with mouths? Each demanding to be fed at obscenely short intervals.</p>



<p>Do they not know how hard it is to engage in physical activity when all these mouths protest at the slightest exertion? Do they not know how you cannot be taken seriously because your cheeks wobble when you try to make a point? How many times does your body get cast in a motherly role when all you want to be is the love interest? They do not know how it feels when your body is a bad joke that falls apart in grotesque jiggles and ripples of cellulite.</p>



<p>Kamsi gets it, but then she says I have it better. <em>At least</em>, she says, <em>you have curves, gentle bends that scream your womanhood to the world</em>. But she does not understand that in this world of perfection and moderation, I was too woman, with a body that screamed an octave too loudly. My name even tells a story of fullness.</p>



<p><em>Ujunwa.</em></p>



<p>The child of plenty</p>



<p>A self-fulfilling prophecy of the woman I now am.</p>



<p>Kamsi doesn’t understand that just as mountains are no good when they lack valleys, curves are no good when they grow in the wrong places. Although every girl wants curves, no one wants to have rolling hills where they should have plateaus.</p>



<p>I do not want a body custom-made for comfort because such bodies wear custom-made clothes. I, too, want to be pretty. To wear clothes and underwear that do not come in bland styles and colours. I want to see my feet in the bathroom, to run and jump without hearing my body applaud.</p>



<p>Yesterday, my father caught me passed out in the bathroom. It has been seventy-eight hours since I last ate. I heard his heart break before he even spoke. He says it’s all baby fat, and it’ll be gone before I turn 17. And even if it doesn’t, I will always be perfect in his eyes. Diets, he says, are cures to diseases that don’t exist.</p>



<p>But that is his job as a father, isn’t it? To see me as perfect despite the apparent alarm in his eyes when the car genuflects as I climb in.</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-right has-black-color has-text-color has-background has-medium-font-size" style="background-color:#ade6fe"><em><em><em>MaryAnn Ifeanacho is a Nigerian writer with a deep love for psychology, languages, film, and literature. She is a mom to the two most adorable cats in the world and a firm believer that bread is ambrosia. As she loves to tease apart the ordinary to find the extra within, her works are mostly magical realism. In her free time, she loves binge-watching oldies, working out, writing on her blog </em><a href="http://textamentswithanne.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>http://textamentswithanne.com</em></a><em> and sharing high-octane memes.</em></em></em></p>



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Through Thick And Thin | a CỌ́N-SCÌÒ short story by MaryAnn Ifeanacho
