“She Speaks” by Zilla Jones

Every morning, I scrape away ashy, shrivelled layers and watch the papery flakes swirl through the spears of early sunlight. My skin is still dying. My mother used to be the one to clean my wounds and spread thick ointment over them, but six months after the incident, she met her new boyfriend, and started spending most of my nights with him. I don’t blame her. Living here in this little room with me is too much. Having to see my crisped, patchy, pink skin is too much. And having to touch it, to peel it away only to make room for the next wave of cells to die, is definitely too much.

The incident. That’s what everyone calls it. That’s the word they use to describe how one year ago, I was thrown from my quiet life into a searing, bright hell. I don’t actually remember that, though. All I can recall is my father showing up for the first time in weeks, yelling and screaming at my mother, calling her a whore, and then waking up in the hospital. I lay for weeks under a sprinkler with cool water misting my raging, roasting skin and screaming pain wrapped around me, holding me tight like a burning blanket. Everyone says I was lucky to be taken to the hospital so quickly, to receive the best care in the country. And my luck continued: an American missionary learned of what happened to me, and raised money to pay for my medical needs and my future education. People across the United States donate money when they hear him speaking on the radio of how brutal and inhuman Africans are to each other. 

I heard my mother’s boyfriend say to her, “He’s making us look bad with that talk. And he calls us ‘Africans’, like he doesn’t know that the continent has many countries. They have bad people in America too, don’t they? You shouldn’t take their poisoned money.” I held my breath. Without the money, I won’t get the surgery that the doctors say will fix my face. Not how it was, not the face that photographers used to beg my mother for permission to put in their magazines, but one with ears and a nose more or less where they should be, instead of melted and smeared into random places like they are now. 

My mother said, “Don’t be silly. Of course I’m taking their money, unless you’re paying,” and I exhaled. The skin on my chest crackled. But I knew that their disagreement would continue to weigh on her, and in the end, my mother would choose a man over me. She always does. 

I don’t care what they say about us: I need the Americans’ money. I still take pain medications, and antibiotics, and anti-depressants. I’ve had eight surgeries so far, and the next one is in a month. I can’t go to school; I’m too vulnerable to infection. I wouldn’t want the other kids to see me anyway. They are more cruel, less filtered than adults, and even though I already know how disgusting I am, it doesn’t mean I want to hear it from them. I exist completely in this room, leaving only for medical appointments. I do my wound care and drink protein shakes through the puckered hole the doctors created. Sounds of life on the street outside seep through my window, and the preacher’s voice booms through my radio. O God, help your children over there in Africa. Grant them deliverance. Show them your love. 

Love. It is something I can no longer expect to have. “No man will want her like that,” my mother’s boyfriend told her. My mother laughed, a thin, high laugh that I knew cost her a lot, but she still laughed. I know she thinks I am devastated that, even after my surgeries, men will still shrink from me, but it’s the one blessing to come out of the incident. Like the American preacher says, God works in mysterious ways.