rotting charm’s Reviews > Ghostroots: Stories > Status Update

"“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“What, baby?”
“If I die, or if I go away. What’s the difference?”
She pushed until I made space for her to lie beside me.
“You’ll be alive,” she said. “It’ll be different for you.”
I remained quiet. I couldn’t hope, but I could let her."

"“I think a bath would make you feel better. You’re getting bad acne.”
“What would make me feel better is you leaving me alone. I have a headache.” Her voice was muffled by the sheets.
I blinked. If a mother takes one step forward, how many steps back does it take to rebreak her daughter’s heart?
(...)
She lifted her head. “I don’t deserve a bath, okay? Leave me alone, please.”"

"Why did she always expect the worst from me? It was the same way she cut my hair before my first day of secondary school because she was sure I would “become vain and, therefore, loose,” the way she bought me packets of that fake slimming tea when I was off to university (...). She was always one step ahead, reprimanding me for a crime that had not been committed, correcting a mistake I had not yet even conceived."

"(...) if she had siblings, maybe a little sister who came home to realize the dress she had asked for and been denied was now free for the taking. But I did not want to know. I shoved the card into my back pocket."

"The card was curved at the corners. I ran my fingers around those corners, rubbing along the edge, waiting to be cut. But the edges were too blunt.
What was not on the card was who she was: lazy, smart, loved, student, smoker, nurse, self-aware, seamstress? Or if her mother, too, was refusing to wash herself, even two weeks later; (...)"

"A house is a pot, a house is a bag, a house is a prison, a house is a supplication, a house is a justification, a house is a child on your back, weighing you down. A house is a house, and you can erase it, wreck it, tear it to the ground. A house is a house, and no, you can never forget, but you can walk away."

"What happens in a house stays in it, he told her, his fingers circling her left wrist—her drawing hand. What happens in the dark must never see the light. His voice had dropped the jokey register, cloaking her protests. His hairy hands traced further, drawing patterns on her skin she would never forget. Architecture is about negotiating borders, he whispered.
She was fourteen."

"There is a scar on Timi’s chin, a small diagonal line hidden mostly by his beard, and I like to rub my thumb against the slight elevation. He says he doesn’t know how it got there. But what would the scar say if it could speak? If the body could tell what it doesn’t forget, doesn’t process? I reach out to touch it now.
“I’m saying I am angry that it was so easy,” I tell him. “I needed to say that to you.”"

"When the doctor tells me that Fikayo has a gastroesophageal reflux, an allergic reaction to the formula, that breastmilk would be ideal at this point, I feel a sharp pain in my breasts. Can guilt be felt physically, like a blade on a finger, like a cramp in the calf, like biting your own tongue?"