I Will Not Be Going to Church this Christmas
By: The Kalahari Review
Tags: Chidera Nweke, Nigeria, African Literature, Christmas, Fiction

I Will Not Be Going to Church this Christmas

I will not be going to church this Christmas. I won’t see women in brightly coloured clothes and flamboyant head gears that they may keep buried beneath a pile of clothes in their wardrobes after the Christmas mass. I won’t see men in finely starched attires. I won’t see little boys bouncing about the church yard with sunglasses covering their eyes and oversized wristwatches slipping from their wrists. I won’t see little girls on heels taking great care to make sure the koi koi koi sound from their shoes can be heard as they walk past.

It’s not that I’ve lost my faith. I still say my rosary, all twenty decades of it, everyday. I still pray frequent novenas to St.Peregrine. I still flip through my Bible from time to time. Is that what it means to have your faith intact? I wonder.

My breasts used to be so perfect. They were firm, very firm and smooth too. I wore bras only because I was used to them. Those breasts of mine didn’t need bras. But that was before the skin that covered them began to look like orange peels, before they began taking ugly shapes. Cancer. That was what the doctor called it. Cancer in my breasts. My beautiful breasts.

“You might have to take them off,” the doctor told me.

Take them off? You take off clothes, earrings, shoes. How do you take off a part of you? My ten month old daughter still touches them when I lie beside her, I wanted to tell him. How do I tell her that I’m going to take them off.

I prayed day and night. I Prayed for my breasts to take back their perfect shape. I pleaded for them to become as smooth as apples, as smooth as they had once been. But maybe my prayer got mismatched. Perhaps my prayer wasn’t on the same frequency as the waves in heaven, because I got the exact opposite of everything I prayed for.

So, I gave up. I changed my prayer. I told God that maybe my breasts had become the God I worshipped. I told Him that if I took off the breasts, He would have to heal my cancer. I was giving my breasts as sacrifice.

“We’ll get you a new one. Just take them off,” my husband begged.

“ I don’t want a new one,” I told him, “but I’ll take them off.”

My breasts were gone but they didn’t take the cancer with them. Stumps and scars were left on my chest — tumors were left in my body. I had given God a bargain and he had scorned it.

Friends came― friends from work, friends from church, friends from school. They came to offer their condolences. Few cried, others dropped envelopes. What did I need their money and tears for? As if they would bring back my breasts.

“It will end in praise,” some told me.

It will end in pain. It will end with my breastless body being lowered six feet into the ground. Not every Bible story has a happy ending, I wanted to tell them. But I said amen.

The Bible asks for faith as little as a mustard seed. But I could barely muster faith as tiny as a grain of salt. Every miracle requires faith and I had lost mine when the doctor told me the cancer had spread. No, I don’t hate God. I’m a little mad at Him, a little resentful but I know I don’t hate Him. I know I’ll come around one of these days.

So this Christmas, I will not be going to church. I won’t see people look at me with pity in their eyes. I won’t feel friends give my shoulder a squeeze and tell me about a Christmas Miracle. This Christmas, I’ll eat a little chicken — I’ll drink a little wine — I’ll eat a plate of rice. It would be a typical Christmas. I just will not be going to church.