FLASH FICTION BY: Destiny Akinode
ARTIST STATEMENT: Queer parental cannibalism refers to the techniques used by authority figures to promote cohesion, specifically aiming to minimize queer genders and sexualities through repression, abuse, misrepresentation, demonization, or criminalization.
For example, you can be a reflection of your parents’ values, aspirations, successes and failures. You were a part of them. But as you learn more of your difference and contradictions, in a queer-parental sense, difference becomes deviance, contradictions must be controlled.
What better captures that horror than cannibalism, as the parent eats away your deviance?
Queer parental cannibalism is also expansive to a paternalistic government feasting on trans bodies to continue the illusion of cohesion. The weight of these horrors is what prompted me to write “Second Bite.”
Hunger.
While babies are born screaming for the breast, I cannot say I was born with such inclinations. My father was a decorated soldier in Nigeria’s newly-independent armed forces. Upon retirement, he collected two wives. The first could not produce his heir, so after three girls, my mother came into the fold. Alice bore him seven children—six girls, then me.
My sisters tell me I never cried in my youth, but how could I? That I, first son, my father’s true legacy, the best fruit of his loins, should cry would mean the rules of the universe had dissolved. My belly was full before it could ache, my clothes were prepared before the light could catch my nakedness, my table was set before I could speak. The earth would collide with the sun before my school fees were delayed.
It didn’t matter that I had two sisters born before me. In every other way, I was before them.
Perhaps other babies had to cry to be fed, but then again, not everyone could be the favorite son of the favorite wife.
And so why was it then that I ached?
In the outline of my mother’s brassiere, I was constantly confronted by the little blue bible she kept close to her heart. When she wasn’t showering me with praise, Alice would be kicking her feet, laying on her straw mat, bathing in the sun with her callused fingers gently stroking the page before she turned it.
That was when I first felt the grumbling of the belly.
It wasn’t even a complete bible. Her parents could only afford to have the Psalms and Songs of Solomon translated to Yoruba. She had turned through the book so much that each crease threatened to pull apart, leaving a passage obscured.
What had those stories done for her? I secured her future just by being born—no one else would care for a sixteen-year-old with partial blindness. She only had glasses to read because I had been the honey she used to trap her wealthy husband’s affections. What did the book have that I didn’t?
She looked on me with favor, but those pages held her love.
Unfortunately, my hunger became all the more ravenous when my father died. His first wife took me with her to view the body. While she was going back and forth with the mortician concerning the excessive bill, I was alone with the corpse, looking at the body that held the man who held our household. What legacy did he leave behind?
Loving Father
Devoted Husband
Freedom Fighter
Love? Seeing those words scribbled made me clutch my side. I almost screamed as my stomach began consuming itself.
Any reservations I had dissolved. I had to feed.
Hunger filled my nerves, contorted my muscles, and unclenched my jaw. I swallowed the first bite quickly to soothe my anguish.
As for the second bite? When I let my tongue roll around the meat, when my saliva broke down the tough morsel into a tender lump, I had to close my eyes and savor the flavor of my father’s body.
I could taste his … everything. Every tear he never shed, every friend he lost in combat, every drink he poured to dull his fear of failure, every homoerotic roughhouse, every life he dared not to live—in my father’s body laid the secrets of his existence. And perhaps a roadmap for my own.
I could not have a third bite before the door slowly pushed open. We had to leave. Still, I had so much to learn from him. How could they take him away from me so soon?
My appetite had quelled but not quenched. It was only then I truly felt his absence.
…
Damilare, my son, the apple of my wife’s eye, was my biggest project. In him laid the truth of my manhood. If he could not be a man, it would mean I’d failed to piece together the roadmap my father neglected to provide.
Once he turned ten, I knew he was ready for his first true meal. From my inner thigh, I cut the softest meat for him. Desperately chewing through old meat was beyond him. He deserved the best. He was my best fruit, after all. In the pain, I told myself so.
In the plate before him sat the knowledge I had collected from every man I ever ate. While my father was the first, many came after to mentor and guide me.
I pushed the sustenance to Damilare.
And he refused.
Manhood was everything to me and he refused this gift. He refused me.
“The body is revealing yet deceptive,
It is a house, not a home.
My home exists beyond the body,
I was never a boy, father,
So I cannot become a man,
I seek a life beyond.”
All the work I had done came crashing down with Damilare’s words. A world beyond manhood? How could he demand that if he came from me? The rage ignited the most primal of appetites. This was not the hunger for my first meal, or subsequent others. This pain was from the knowledge that this would be my last.
Yet, I could not sit savoring the flavor. I could not know peace until I ripped open my mandible and swallowed the child whole.
He could protest all he wanted to live beyond the body, but as they lowered the empty casket, I was the victor. That little deviant could not reject me or manhood anymore.
Damilare won’t grow, but he will know what it is to live as a man.
In my body, we are one.
