Androgynous

Description

It is twelve years now, yet Kelechi remains shameless and constantly shunning every perturbing wave from the genderless worries that whacked the family. Instead, they choose to remain one and bonded like some hopeless lovers who loved to brandish their symmetrical features before the only giant mirror in the sitting room.

It shouldn’t have been shocking if this didn’t seem like a curse, which Kelechi gladly accepted as a gift sent by God to an effeminate, who should also be an emasculate.

His pervasive presence hazed over the mirror that faithfully reflected his raddled eyes, a striped white-blue shirt and black denim shorts.

Kelechi tardily plied the buttons off his shirt. She traced his sturdy hands over his broad chest and gently to his feminine neck.

Fondling with her tiny areola, he tried to imagine pikes of pleasures coarsing through his tegument.

He let his shorts drop below the waistline. Gently, he stroked the V-shape of her warm canal. When would he get an opportunity to feel a phallus drive in and out of her?

Kelechi had never been with anyone, not because he didn’t want to, but because he could never find anyone willing to accept his uncanny body flaws.

Childhood was like a colossal morsel he still couldn’t bring himself to swallow. He had a granitic period understanding his bodily processes.

At first, he didn’t seem different until he would see little boys with penises dangling in between their legs or girls with vagina.

He never understood being a boy whelped up with what only a girl should biologically possess.

Mom started buying him butch toys to ease self-sufferance. This feeling was shortlived. The doctors had discovered that his female sex organs were beginning to dominate the male’s. They advised that surgery be done when he was older to remove the recessive male organs.

His world stopped short in its slow tracks. Mother taught him to unlearn all a boy had learnt and learn to be a girl. She prepared him for the big feminine future, teaching him grace and poise, how to flirt unnoticeably and so many annoying coquettish stuff. She even took his boyish toys and replaced them with dolls. Yet, Kelechi resented his dolls.

They babariously pared and twinged reality; reducing it to a caricature. He was condemned to live the feint life of ladies. Indeed, skeptically, the Barbie doll had postiches and affixed lashes; none of it was real – just an assemblage of deception.

The rag dolls reminded him of how stupid he looked when he dressed up as a boy when he was indeed a girl. Ironically a boy who would soon become a woman.

On his menstrual flow days, he felt like leaping into a river. He remembered vividly the day of his first flow; it felt rather awkward wearing pad instead of just pants.

School days were the worst. Sometimes the cramps churned at his sides and sauteed his mood. He would tie a black cardigan over his buttocks for fear of smearing the chair.

He kept away from the boys in the football team. They would jeer at him and talk about how they didn’t understand how a teenager as muscular as him avoided sports. They would call him such names as “‘sissified’, ‘sissy’, or ‘girly town’.

Truth be told, Kelechi never dreaded sports. He could easily dribble even the Captain of the Football Team but he feared sharing the locker room with the boys. How would they feel about him? Being the scuttlebutt of the entire school was the last item on his student schedule.

Mother came home one day with a red parcel for him. He arched his brows; seeking for answer to a question he hadn’t asked..

“What’s this Ma?” Kelechi asked.

“Open it”, Mother simply replied.

He unhurriedly tore the wrappings; after all nothing offered by his mother excited him. He opened the box and brought out a porcelain doll.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever set his eyes on. She was dark-skinned and ebullient. She suddenly reminded him of all that he could be. She was fragile; so was he.

“You like her?”, Mother held his hands.

He didn’t like this! She knew that he hates it when she dotes on him. He flung her hands away.

“Why did you buy me this?” Kelechi turned the porcelain on all sides as he spoke.

“I’ve gathered enough money for your surgery. You’ve been booked for next month. You’ll be a complete woman soon enough”, she said, gently scrunching his arms.

“I’m not going to be a sissy! You hear me?” Kelechi retorted.

“You’re a girl!”, Mother shot back.

“I am NOT!!! If you call me that one more time…..”

Mother cupped his face in her hands, tears cascading down her face as she whispered “You’re a girl, even nature has willed it so”.

Kelechi frantically plucked off her hands.

Smash. Shingling glasses. A Thud. More Smashing.

He stood up to see his Mother on her back; thick red fluid now spreading across the white tiles. The porcelain doll lay in a disarray of broken pieces. He could barely recognize them as he fell to his knees.

A shard of the porcelain was still in his soiled hands, blood dripping from its very edge. He buried his face in between his thighs to wail. Now, it downed on him that what he originally viewed as a gift might soon become a curse. But this was a decision only him would have to make, for only him could choose who and what to become. Not his mother or anyone else.

He lifted eyes to his lifeless mother. “Why me? Why Androgynous!” More tears of mystery gushed down Kelechi’s smooth cheeks.