What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

by Lesley Nneka Arimah

Twelve days that put the contents of her bank account in stark relief; twelve days that she sits in the flat that’s in his name, drives the car also in his name, and wonders what is so precious about this name he won’t give to her. And when he finally returns to see her packing and grabs her hair, pulling, screaming that even this is his, she is struck . . . by his fist, yes, but also by the realization that maybe her mother was right.

And so Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Godwin, who grew up under his father’s corrosive indulgence. Godwin, so unused to hearing no it hits him like a wave of acid, dissolving the superficial decency of a person who always gets his way.

Ezinma—who looks so much like her sister from behind—fumbling the unfamiliar keys against the lock of Bibi’s apartment so she doesn’t see who comes behind her: Godwin, with a gun he fires into her back.

“Wait till your father hears this thing,” her cry of last resort. At such moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem to solve.

She just shook her head at me, wearing a helpless half sneer that asked whose daughter was this. It was a look I had seen many times.

“Did you like my surprise?” “I’m wearing one of your surprises right now. I look like a whore.” “Chineke, Ada, don’t make me choke on my food.” She was laughing.

I hadn’t realized how angry I’d been with her until suddenly I wasn’t. I wanted to tell her about Auntie Ugo and Chinyere, how it seemed they would come to blows any minute, and how even at our most contentious we had never been like that.

Things just aren’t done like that here. I’m sure your mother finds America more comfortable.” She delivered the lines like she’d been waiting for this moment, like she’d rehearsed what she’d say to my mother if they met again. That I was not her made no difference. This was the closest she would get to drawing my mother’s blood.

They survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, where she proved to be as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.

And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.

there is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warmth and context and history and each finds that they’re arguing with a stranger.

He does not yet wonder where she gets this, this streak of fire. He only knows that it keeps the wolves of the world at bay and he must never let it die out.

“I’m sorry.” “You’re sorry, you’re sorry. Always sorry. No.” She cut my response off at the knees. “What you are is disappointing. You are so disappointing. You are disappointing.” The last iteration was said not with calcifying anger but an abrupt sadness that underscored the truth of it. In that timbre resonated my every fuckup. Every tantrum I’d pulled, every item I’d stolen, every time she must have cringed at having to introduce me as her daughter.

Some people find it easy to be good when the going is good but lack the fortitude for hardship. Your mother is among them.

You’ve changed names and addresses so many times that you’ve written “Amara” on dusty cars across the country and in coffee grounds spilled on motel breakfast counters, you whisper it as you fall asleep, so you don’t forget which name is real.

When age leeches tautness from face and body, take note as men’s eyes follow the child’s ripening form. For a brief span of years, she will be perfect: old enough to capture men’s lust, young enough to rouse women’s sympathy. Make use of this.

One woman, short and round like a grapefruit, adjusted a girl’s ponytail. The girl bobbed her head as she spoke and the ponytail came out lopsided and loose; the woman would have to redo it soon. It was a simple, effortless act but you realized that you’d never felt your mother’s hands in your hair in quite that way.

You lost the baby. The nurse informed you as soon as you woke. She was brisk and added, “You’re young yet.” It was a girl, and you thought about the pink bib you’d passed up two towns ago. You wavered in and out of consciousness as your body shut down to repair itself. You weren’t allowed any visitors for several hours. The first was your mother, unsurprisingly.

“Five hundred thousand dollars, baby. That’s my girl.” You pulled your head out from under her hand. She smoothed the sheets across your shoulders and to anyone looking at that moment she must have resembled a concerned caretaker. Maybe if you continue looking at her from that angle, you’ll begin to believe that too.

OOOF. This one hurts.

When the formula for flight had been revealed short months before, the ceremony had started unimpressively enough, with a man levitating like a monk for fifteen boring minutes before shooting into the air. The scientific community was agog. What did it mean that the human body could now defy things humanity had never thought to question, like gravity? It had seemed like the start of a new era.

She was one of the fifty-seven registered Mathematicians who specialized in calculating grief, down from the fifty-nine of last year.

Nneoma could feel the sadness rolling off him and she knew if she focused she’d be able to see his grief, clear as a splinter. She would see the source of it, its architecture, and the way it anchored to him. And she would be able to remove it.

“Well, my dad says what you people do is wrong, that you shouldn’t be stopping a person from feeling natural hardships. That’s what it means to be human.”

“Your father and those people protesting outside have no concept of what real pain is. As far as I’m concerned, their feelings on this matter are invalid. I would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt.”

The day she’d tried to work on him, to eat her father’s grief, she finally understood why it was forbidden to work on close family members. Their grief was your own and you could never get out of your head long enough to calculate it.

No one had ever really been able to explain what happened then, why one person could take another person’s grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives and negatives, a type of cellular math. An equation all their own. A theologian might have called it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God’s own mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patients who gave up their sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden and then she did not.

Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn’t. Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so vast. Too vast. The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now.

But back to Glorybetogod, whom everyone called Glory except for her grandfather, who called her “that girl” the first time he saw her. “That girl has something rotten in her, her chi is not well.”

She moved the message to a folder she’d long ago titled “EVIDENCE”—documents gathered to make her case if she chose never to speak to her father again.

And while Bereaver wanders, River and her women lie catatonic with heartache, dreaming of their children. And when, in the place she is hidden, the surviving god-child cries, their bodies hear her, and their breasts weep, and that, since you asked, is a volcano.

most of the time it was Mayowa, strutting on her way to school or the market or just down the road to the pharmacy. She walked as though the earth spun to match her gait.

Girls with fire in their bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die out.