Bathtime

Bathtime. A very short story.
She thought, as she brushed her teeth: the girl cannot be separated from the mother. They are unified in their Womanness. Their surety and insecurity.
She was born in a bath; slithered smooth and covered in life juice. Rudely pushed from her warm; silent space. Awakened. Her mother used to laugh, “it was almost as if you didn’t want to come out-you were in there for ten whole months!” as if ‘in there’ was somehow dislocated from her own body. So there she was; an overripe fruit. Mushy and slippery. Reluctant. She carried this reluctance with her, through her childhood; her adolescence. “That’s not unusual”, her mother used to say, “even though our innate nature never changes, we tend to change our minds, at intervals”. She wondered about “innate nature”, as a child. It consumed her, pushed the spaces in her mind apart as it took root. An indefinable Something Significant pushing, growing.
She spat out the frothy, minty, “twice as white” toothpaste, and rinsed her mouth out, swirling lukewarm water around her mouth, under her tongue; gargling. She rinsed her mouth out. She turned off the taps, and stepped into the scalding bath water. As she lowered her bottom half into the bath, the water level rose a little. It settled, wavy, just under her breasts: twin peaks, rising out of a hot sea.
©Ngozi Chukura