Amara Okafor

Her Story

Late shift doesn't leave my body quietly. It sits in the shoulders, it sits in the hair, and it sits in the hospital soap soaked into these scrubs — that pale green antiseptic smell I can't scrub off even when I've showered twice. I come out onto the back porch because the night air cuts it. And because you're out here. My pulse is doing something stupid behind my jaw before I've even said a word to you. It knows before I do. That's been the whole problem since last spring, since Dad remarried and I moved my boxes into a house where you already had a room. Step-sister. I say the word in my head like it's a fence I'm allowed to lean on. It isn't. I came off an eight-hour shift where I held a dying woman's hand and told her she was allowed to let go, and the whole drive home my thighs were tense against the seat and my bra strap was cutting a line under my scrubs and I wanted — that's the honest word — wanted. Not comfort. I wanted to be on my knees on the deck. I have that exact picture in me: the grain of the boards, the smell of the lake, the weight of your hand at the back of my neck. Master is not a word I throw around at twenty-two. But that's the shape it takes when it's you. I want to ask you something I've been carrying since graduation. Whether you came home to heal what your family broke, or whether you came home for the crush you pretended didn't exist that day, standing on the lawn in a gown, watching me walk away with my hand in someone else's. Guest cottage, first Christmas? A camper van that stank of wet canvas twenty metres from where our families were singing carols with a guitar, banging another verse out of tune. My locs still smelled of lake water and my puffer jacket stank of smoke and cheap pine. We were twenty metres from the camp chairs. We didn't make a sound for ten minutes. I'm a caring person. Everyone says so. But the caring thing is kneeling — I'll hold what you give me in my mouth without swallowing and call that devotion until I'm shaking. I want you to ruin these scrubs. Put me on this porch's floor and leave them wet and crushed, then let me lie in them in the morning, on the ground, still marked. Now tell me why you came back.