Big Tits
Hiding in the dark corridor sobbing behind the coats hooks. Threadbear coats with fake fur. Suffocating. Grease, armpits, cats piss and cigarettes.
Burning ache in my chest. Fiery pain, pins and needles across my face. Nipples hard, throbbing, itchy and painful. Absent yesterday. Swelling today. Making itself known, nagging and sensitive. Clasped in my hand.
Smashed against the classroom door. Opening my trembling hand a bruise building. I trace the red outline with my finger… Body betraying me growing and developing. Unexpected. Blossoming turns to foriegn dismay… current searing pain.
Hot playground. Dry dust rising from the pavement. Distant shouting, growing closer and closer, now perceptible. “Big Tits, Big Tits look over here Big Tits….” T shirts ballooned, pinched out to mimic.
Covered with a layer of fat but round with pointy nipples. Throbbing, growing and full. A sign for all to see, my life giving body pushing forward, bursting out of my top.
Sticky porn pictures, found in park bushes. Tits ... sexual and adult. Dusty anatomy books. Tits ... milk for babies. In the playground, clueless and lost. Climbing trees, playing rugby and my former self already distant.
BIG TITS, BIG TITS, BIG TITS. A solo voice grows to lead a chorus. More voices join. A crowd. Sinking inside, I don’t exist. I hide within myself. Alone.
Attention brings teachers, words I barely hear ... “Fancy you? Ignore? Childish?” Never directed at the voices. Blame and shame at my door, for busting free from angrogony, boyhood to the world of woman.
Constant chiding. Head held high in an unrelenting battle. I let them tire, at my expense.
Alien body, belonging to the angry assault of boys.
Time elapses, I am a stranger in my own body. A stranger to my friends and previous pastimes. I do not recognise myself, body transforming daily. In spite of my mind resisting these changes. Ignoring the view in the mirror.
School is a dizzying panic. A quiet calm and periods of blankness, grey, dark and fuzzy. Actions, feelings and emotions lost. Trapped. Body and mind in conflict. Unable to escape the attention.
Millions of dizzying thoughts, fly from my grasp swirling around my head. I am crouched on the playground floor.
“BIG TITS, BIG TITS, BIG TITS…… “
Words swirling up and up, louder and louder. The chant connects with my thoughts, words piercing my mind, sharp as a knife…. Distancing my feelings and thoughts from my already strange new body…. Sticks and Stones. But names will never hurt me….
The shouts continue….
“BIG TITS, BIG TITS”
Echo of voices, speed up spinning around me. Faster and faster and faster.
A bouncing ping pong ball around my brain.
My eyes open and I focus. His face is so close to mine. Sour spittal lands on my cheek from hectic chanting. I feel a rush of energy and release. Fury running down my arms. Pulsing so hard and so fast uncontrolled. Fist lurches out past my ‘big tits’. Cracking and popping sound as it makes contact with his nose. He falls, hits the gravel and blood flows. White t shirt, chin and chest, red is seeping.
Strong sharp focus and hyper colour. Thick blood splatters across white. Skirting the pinched fabric, a reminder of the teasing, mimicking the buds of my own nipples. I laugh. How much they look like my ‘big tits.’
I was in trouble, repercussions. Feeling both elated and sick to my stomach, I walked slowly with purpose to the head teacher's office. “Come in Hayley!” Mrs Simmons’ blunt bob, beak nose and eagle eyes. Watching her domain, the playground. Play becomes sport, the prey and the hunted.
Apology, blurted and stammered, crying and shaking.
“I saw everything - no need to explain” her curt tone, puts me on edge.
“You finally sorted that bully out, Well done!” as a kindly smile spreads across her face. I am shocked, as if I have been punched myself, air rushing out of my lungs.
“Urm am I not in trouble?” I stammer.
“Certainly not, You May go…” Mrs Simmons dismissed me without a glance.
Elated. A new found power and triumph. I step out into the sunshine, gravel crunching under my feet and the warm spring wind on my budding nipples, they get hard. I am invincible. Playground mixed with cheers and fear…. The bloody patch on the gravel partly covered by sawdust, I feel a rush of power.
A small splat of blood near my left nipple. I smile to myself. A new way forward for me and my new body.
Vigilante to my own existence. Innocence quietly slips away.
END
Published in NOW! - An anthology in celebration of Margate's diverse queer scene. Margate Queer Writers.
Big Tits is part of Artists Hayley White’s project Memory Distortion. Series of Short stories and auto writing. Retelling my past as memories appear. Sometimes vague often visceral, full of emotion. Brought into the consciousness through psychoanalytic therapy, subconscious writing and meditation / dreams. These recounted memories, seek to question the reliability of memories and their relation to forming identity.