Big Girl Apartment

A short story by Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey.

My mother lives in the creases of my bedsheets. I can hear her disdain at the light sweat stains in the center of the bed and that I hadn’t switched my sheets. When I walk to my closet to grab a new pair of sheets, I roll my eyes at the thought of her complaining about my obsession with white bedsheets. “You’re not old enough to know how to handle white sheets well enough.” When I throw my pillows and blankets in the corner, I feel her presence about how she hates the way I make my bed. “How are you smart enough to go to college, but you don’t know how to put together a bed like a real lady?” I throw the dirty bedsheet onto a single pile on the floor; she’d probably hiss—complain about how I didn’t take the sheets to the bathroom right away and place it in the laundry hamper. I stand on the edge of my bed and the metal rods of my bed softly creek. “Careful, Bebe,” she’d tease, “if you keep eating like your aunties your going to break your bed”. I’ll walk around, smoothing out the thin cotton fabric to lay as flat against my mattress as possible. There are always a couple creases that refuses to flatten out on the far-left corner. I grab the steamer from my closet to buff out the sheets. I can hear my mother crying at me spending money on “something so wasteful”, even if it would finally get my sheets to look how she would want it. I unplug the steamer and place it back in its box—somewhere in the silence, my mother exhales—the creases weren’t that bad anyway.

Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (She/Her/Hers) is a Chicago-born writer and an MD-PhD Student at UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. She is interested in the intersection between scientific research, medicine and the humanities. Her works have been published or forthcoming in Broken Antler Magazine, JAKE, The B’K Magazine, Abstract Magazine, Okay Donkey and more. More at NaaAshitey.com