Jianna Jackson, The Wide Fit

The Wide Fit

Jianna Jackson

What was happening to me?

“Miss Nelson are you okay?”

I stopped in mid-stride, the words I was stringing together froze on my tongue, my fingers twitched, first at once. Then violently.

“I—”

Needed to take off my heels. They were 130mm torture devices, I couldn’t see, think, when my feet were being suffocated by their width. My mother told me to purchase the wide-fit pair when we’d gone shopping, she always does. She would say “Donna, your feet aren’t dainty like those white women who they made the shoes for. Size up or buy the bigger ones.”

She’d say that about every article of clothing, that’s true. I’d never listen. But the shoes; they needed to go. I whipped them off my feet and stood bare on the porcelain tiles.

The deed was done. The stupefied eyes of my colleagues, who took a slice of my days insisting to engage in business promenade with me, were trained on me and then on my shoes. What had we been talking about?

“Where was I, Rodney?” Was it performance appraisal or strategic investment?

“Gentlemen, my eyes are up here.” I quipped after a completely

inappropriate minute or so of flabbergast. And then their heads snapped upwards; had they never seen shoes off a woman? I knew my toes weren’t hideous; they were pedicured weekly, painted a perpetual, ultrapure white, soft and wrinkle-free.

“Ehem, uh performance appraisal, Miss Nelson.” Dave chimed as he recovered first.

“Ah yes, the performance recognition management is having problems with the batch of P.E.R. of the subordinate employees in the technical department.” I kept walking, they towered over and around me now, my heels no longer providing me with a height superiority. But the ground was ice-cold under my soles, a nice reprieve from the warmth seeping into every other pore in my skin.

“Efficacy will go up by 37.81% if the reports are moved from the hackable and unprotected interface that we’ve employed and—”, the constriction became unbearable again. The jacket I wore? It was thirty freaking degrees? What was I thinking donning a pants suit this morning?

“Rodney could you hold these shoes for me?” And I shoved them into his hands and began unbuttoning whatever I could. “Essentially, what I’m saying gentlemen, is that more rumination can go into finding a more suitable system to assign...”

The jacket was off, I was left in my camisole and wide-legged pant. Was I wearing a bra today? Why was the office that hot? Who set the bloody thermostats today and how could I get them fired for their incompetence?

“Miss Nelson,” Rodney cleared his throat from a fit of phlegm and all the other gentlemen with him, Dave, Michael and Lewis, cherry-red cheeked

and visibly nervous, cast their gazes to everything else that was not me. I suppose now I knew for sure that I was not wearing a bra.

“Would you like for me to escort you to the nurse’s station? You are not your usual self; something seems amiss.”

His gaze was accusing and physically hot. The pity singed my face and burnt through to the back of my skull. How dare he look at me like that? I ought to slap him. Slap him…clean across the face. Give him a reason to have red cheeks! Take the shoes from him and use the heeled sole to puncture his chest and claw at the rupture! I should attack his groin, debilitate his genitalia and render him infertile, break his back by crushing the heel of my feet into his sacrum!

“I—” What was happening to me?

I felt an onslaught of the need to commit rabid violence, the force of which took back-breaking effort to tamper down. I gripped the chair in front of me and keeled over to shut my eyes and curb the bloodlust. I was aware of the flesh and bone in the room, aware of the softness between breasts and the beating artefact that lied waiting, aware of lifeform rushing through annals built for their transport: its redness, its watery composition, its metallic tang, its rust-like effluvium when it hits the oxygen so mildly above the thin membrane unqualified, unrehearsed and unprepared with the task of separating the two…

I knew I was not myself.

“Get out!” I barked. “All of you, now!” Rodney flinched. Dave, Lewis and Michael couldn’t be relieved of my presence fast enough and hightailed it through the lobby of my office through mumbles of departure and

farewells. But Rodney remained, my shoes in his hands and concern for me in his eyes.

“Miss Nelson, I do think you should see a nurse. I insist it.”

The heat of vehemence clawed at my skin, insulated my arms against the air, blurred my vision and prickled gooseflesh along my back. Pressure welled in my chest, swelled in my lungs and I couldn’t breathe without tasting blood; without needing to taste blood.

“Rodney I’m not going to tell you again to GET OUT!” I scratched at my chest until my camisole was nothing but tatters. My chest was free, cool air was supposed to sate my bosom, soften the pressure, dampen the heat; but I was still tortured.

“Donna!” Rodney dropped my heels in shock, stood stock still for a second and practically ran out of the office. I picked up a shoe and hurled it at his retreating form.

“GET OUT!” I shrieked in a voice that was not my own and then I retched and retched until my nose bled.

The world went black. For an hour I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Only the smell of blood remained. And then, finally, the heat subsided; my vision faded back into focus and I began to reorient myself, the smell of bile rushed in, I heard heavy breathing, was it mine? My fingers were slick, I lifted my hands; expecting blood, but seeing spit. Guilt twisted my gut, and confusion.

What happened to me?

I was in my office. Right where I last remembered myself to be. Right? Did I leave? Did I hurt someone? Myself? I became acutely aware of my virtual nakedness at that moment and the blood on my thighs. Was it mine?

I prayed it was, but there were no perforations in my skin, no heaviness on my pulses. No evidence of life or death, around me. I needed to see a priest. And call my lawyer… in that order. The guilt rose to my throat, the urge to vomit again was cancelled out from the fact that I physically exhausted the capacity to.

I needed to leave.

My coat, strewn across the floor alongside my right shoe, was crumpled, I could hear my mother’s disdain. “Donna don’t even think about wearing an unpressed jacket.”

Like usual I ignored her, an unwelcome intrusion inside my head, and pulled my arms through the sleeves, fitted the eyelets around their respective knobs and smoothed down the material across my chest. I pushed my foot into one heel, trekked across the room for the other and sat to fit that shoe as well.

It would be fine, I would go to the chapel, get some much-needed prayer. Check myself into the hospital, get my lawyer on top of this. Everything would be fine.

Then. The heat began again.

Inspired by Tananarive Due’s short story “Migration”