“Why don’t you show me what you can do?” the boy asked the girl.
“Yes,” the girl replied. Keloid scars stared from her torso like smashed eyes, like old forgotten blood. “Yes, let me show you what I can do.”
“Show me,” the boy said.
Time passed. Through the window of the dingy ivory-colored box of a room, the orange sun forgot to blaze.
“Show me,” the boy said again.
“Can’t you see?” asked the girl. “I’m romping and reveling and bending over backwards for you.”
The boy saw now, and he liked the romping and the reveling, but he did not like that she was bending over backwards for him. He wanted the gift of the romping and the reveling, but he did not want the receipt of a new keloid scar in his name. He knew that if she bent over backwards for him, she’d give up all of herself to him, and if she gave up all of herself to him, she’d be like all the other girls who’d given up all of themselves to him. He knew that if she bent over backwards for him, she would lose herself to him, and already, he was sitting on a heap of keloid receipts, all those innumerable scars.
“No, no, do not bend over backwards for me,” he said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.” He saw now that he no longer wanted the girl. He wanted, instead, a girl who would not lose herself to him.
Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A Colgate University Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Fiction as well as a recipient of the University of Iowa's Provost's Postgraduate Fellowship in Fiction, Okparanta was nominated for a US Artists Fellowship in 2012. She has been awarded additional fellowships, faculty appointments, and visiting professorships at Columbia University, Purdue University, Middlebury College (Bread Loaf's John Gardner Fellow in Fiction), Howard University (Hurston/Wright Foundation Summer Writing Workshop Fiction Faculty), City College of New York, and the University of Houston (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Fiction). She has been awarded residencies by the Jentel Foundation, the Hermitage Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation (Marfa), as well as Hedgebrook. She was Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing (Fiction) at Bucknell University, where she was also C. Graydon & Mary E. Rogers Faculty Research Fellow as well as Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professor in Poetry & Creative Writing until 2021. She is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.
