Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

He cried pathetically afterwards, clinging to the hemline of her skirt as she crawled out on all fours, her face throbbing and swelling, the footsteps of her childhood self, running over some thinly shingled roof, chasing a swing in a storm.

Outside her eyes stung. She walked along the street, the ache in her head worse than a migraine. She passed the petrol station. The man without legs from the sign was balancing on a gin bottle repeatedly rolling into corners. For a moment, she considered stopping at the station, sticking a nozzle in her mouth, filling her insides with petrol before setting herself alight. Instead she walked on. Earlier scenes became part of the edges of the night. She tried to still her trembling body as she stumbled into the fractured face from the mirror.

Two months later, she took a pregnancy test. The line was strong. She cried into it. And the monks from the market throng danced around watery blue lines wearing dog heads, hiding lips smeared in crushed red lipstick.

Dr Krull had a new paperweight on his desk. This time the woman from the reception painting was inside, catching small organs amidst snow. I shook it, watching the snow swirl, smelling pine in the air. His desk was clear except for two files. He was dressed in his usual attire of corduroy pants, on this occasion, nut brown teamed with a blue pinstriped shirt. Casually, he uncrossed his legs. “I’m glad you came today Joy. I know it’s been a tough period for you but it’s important we continue with our sessions.”

I set the paperweight down, still somewhat embarrassed that he had to see me this way, battered and somehow incomplete.

“Why do I have to keep coming here? It’s…” I struggled before finding the right words, “humiliating. I’m not getting better from any of this! All you people do is medicate me and send me home.” My voice raised a couple of octaves, I adjusted in my seat, noticing the photograph on the desk of him and his wife was gone. A part of me was happy at the idea of somebody as together as Dr Krull potentially having marital problems. This was wrong but I didn’t care.

Coolly he said, “I get that you’re angry and that’s okay. You have a lot to be upset about. That’s why we have this space so we can talk about things. Medication alone isn’t enough. We need a combined approach to help get you better.”

“You just want to keep tabs on me!” I spat. “So you can use it against me. Somebody else already watches everything I do.”

He took a sip from a cup of tea on the small table between us before setting it down.

“Tell me who’s watching. Is it a threatening presence, a friendly presence? You can trust me Joy.”

Anon appeared on the arm of his chair, there was a hole in her stomach and the sound of water sliding down a drain. I closed my eyes, blinking the image away, sensing the bulbs of sweat on my skin.

“Why? So you can section me?”

“Nobody’s going to section you. How is your arm?” he asked, adjusting his glasses, the flecks of gold in his eyes seemed more prominent.

“My stump you mean? Sometimes the ache for that arm is so bad, it becomes physical. When it does, I stick my stump in the freezer to numb it.”

He digested my response quietly for several moments. “Joy I’d like to try something and I want you to trust me okay? I want you to close your eyes and relax. Can you do that for me?”

I nodded warily, sinking back into my chair. I shut my eyes, listening to the rhythm of my breathing for several minutes, allowing my limbs to loosen.

Dr Krull’s voice was warm and reassuring. “I want you to take me to your earliest memory of swallowing stones. Take me to the space. Where are you?”

“I’m in a bathroom with a blue floor the colour of the sea.” I murmured.

“Tell me what’s in the room.” His voice, seeming to be coming from some distance was an anchor.

“There’s a purple towel on the rack with mud on it, a jar of pebbles on the floor. The tap’s running.”

“What else? What can you hear?” His tone was gentle yet firm.

“Um… uh, the television downstairs. The bathroom door is open. I can hear a New York accent. It’s… Tom and Jerry I think.”

“Go on,” he urged. “You’re doing well. What else is in that bathroom?”

“The tap is on full blast in the sink. There’s an empty bottle of medication beside the tap, white pills in the sink. I can smell something strong, like… a cleaning product. Bleach! It’s overpowering.”

“Who’s in the room with you?”

“My mother. She’s-…”

“Good. What is she doing?” he asked.

My breaths were coming rapidly. The chair became a vehicle transporting me to the past, a long buried memory. My mouth went dry. “She’s sitting on the toilet seat, crying and watching me in the bath, mumbling something. Sorry, sorry she’s saying. She gets up, walks towards me. There’s a brightly coloured woven bracelet on her left wrist. I’m-…”

“Go on. Keep showing me what’s in the room. Remember, you’re alright. Nothing can happen to you now,” Dr Krull encouraged patiently. “Stay relaxed. Carry on. Now what’s she doing?”

My body began to shake. “I’m singing in the bath. My eyes are closed. I open them. She’s standing over me. She’s pushing my shoulders down. She’s shoving my head under water. Her hands are holding my head down. I can’t breathe! I can feel the water up my nose, my arms flailing. My legs are kicking but she’s strong. Oh God, I can’t breathe. I can’t scream. Everything’s shrinking, becoming tiny, like I’m falling through static. I can’t hear the water anymore. I can’t hear anything. Something, somebody pulls her off me, my body is slack, I try to lift my legs but I fall from the bath. I don’t feel the landing. The pebbles are scattered all over the floor, rolling into my eyes. How could I know they would follow me into the future?”

A choking feeling spreads in my throat. Dr Krull stood up. Sound was coming back slowly.

He took a few paces then said. “Why do you think your mother tried to kill you? Why do you think you buried this memory for so long?”

I opened my eyes. Tears ran down my cheeks. “I don’t know. I don’t know!” I roared, “Maybe she didn’t love me. She was always… melancholy. Maybe that was my fault somehow.”

He sat on the edge of his desk. “No. It wasn’t your fault. It’s never the child’s fault.” His mouth was a grim line. For once, his neutral expressions had vanished.

My body continued to tremble. Something had uprooted from my gut and was making its way towards the centre, causing splinters of pain like nails being hammered to my chest. I stood abruptly, knocking the paperweight. And the woman from the painting lay sideways in the snow, arms outstretched, reaching for something beyond her confinement.

In the days that followed, bits of a memory came back to me, a fog lifting from scenes I’d buried. The night I lost my arm Rangi and I had argued. I’d gone into his car to borrow a torch. The boiler had been playing up; making unhealthy chugging noises and the hot water ran cold. I remembered walking to the car, tucked behind a hearse with the words MH and Sons emblazoned on the side in peeling gold lettering. The cold air made me shiver. My slippers snapped against the pavement and the dewy shoots of grass sprang up randomly. I was rummaging in the glove compartment when I found them, the photographs, hidden behind a folded map of the Andes.

I spread the pictures on the driver’s seat. My eyes stung. Winter chill from my lips became smog in the corners of the pictures. Straight away I knew these women were prostitutes, working girls shot in cars. I could tell from the bleakness in their gazes, secret half smiles lifting the corners of their mouths, a tiny black skirt riding upwards to meet a bought silence. These were women photographed in different cities around the world, a pair of naked pale breasts jutting, bathed in moonlight, long white beads encased in stockings, full buttocks against the wheel, bruises on an elegant neck angled defiantly away from the lens. Windscreen wipers in their mouths punctuated the language of the multi-limbed invisible thing sharing their strides, secret things that exited through the corners of frames, holding streetlight, smoke and other instruments of the night. The women were different races, dark haired, dark-eyed. I searched for the common thread. Their faces blurred, becoming one broken headlight. I carried their tears on my tongue, bits of a ceiling crumbled into their frozen movements.