Stranger ringing my door.

Best I made that period (2)

BY SOSUEME

We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.

Cicero

I saw her for the first time while she was taking a shower. She was an adult, a young woman, and I was still just a child, a boy of eleven. It struck me how fat her lips were, and how fat her breasts. The lights in the shower lighted up her sun tanned skin. Her hair was brown as the eyes of a deer, and her eyes in this light were black as crystals, where they were normally brown as deers eyes.

I could just make out her nipple, as it peeked over the shower curtain. She looked at me, from above, with her fierce dark eyes.

I stood as frozen, and expected her to tell me to move, but she seemed to not mind a child my age, so she continued showering, making herself invisible behind the curtain, and started speaking to me in a relaxed voice.

‘Have you been to school today?’

‘Yes’.

‘How was it?’

‘Hard’.

‘What was hard about it’.

‘It was hard because I like a girl, and she is mean to me’.

I held my breath. The words had come out without thinking.

‘What did she do?’

I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I left the bathroom and went to my mother downstairs.

She was cooking dinner.

‘How was school today honey?’

‘It was okay.’

‘Just okay?’

‘It was fun’.

I sat down and she poured me tea.

‘We’re eating in fifteen minutes honey, so be sure to finish your tea. Is it good? Have you seen Ashley?’

I figured the girl upstairs must have been Ashley.

‘No’.

‘Ashley is the new babysitter’.

I wondered what our new babysitter was doing using our shower. But I couldn’t ask about it, because I had just told her I hadn’t seen her.

We had dinner and I watched cartoons, and that’s how Monday ended. I wasn’t going to see my new babysitter until weekend. By that time the surprising image of her body: the brown, pink and purple under the spotlights of the shower, had been forever ingrained in my body.

(Writings 8, June, 2013)