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October 2 - October 7, 2018
His stepmother regards him as one would a stray dog that comes by often enough that she knows its face, but she’ll be damned if she’ll let him in. They dance around each other, boy waltzing forward with want, woman pirouetting away.
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.
“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.
My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he’d been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.
By exposing Anita and cutting the head off the beast, I’d inherited my very own Girl Army.
At first Anita yelled and pulled her skirt down and chased the offenders, but soon something cracked and though she cried, she no longer tried to stop them. This earned her the reputation of being easy, which would haunt her long past girlhood.
She spanked me, an undertaking she hadn’t performed in years. It was awkward, like running backward.
“Enough” had started with stupid teenage things that, magnified under the halo of Chinyere, my well-behaved cousin, made me a bad, bad girl.
“Enough” was the time my mother, looking to treat a headache, found the Ecstasy I’d thought cleverly hidden in an Excedrin bottle, and I came home to her making carpet angels. I joined her and we laughed and laughed till she’d sobered up and the laughing stopped.
“You know, they told me to beat you.” “Who?” “Everybody. They said since you were being raised without a father and in America of all places, if I didn’t beat you, you would go wild. And I didn’t listen.”
mother was a small woman who carried her weight in her personality.
my mother drove to the airport in a silence so heavy it slid across my skin.
I looked, as always, disappointing.
Along the staircase were pictures of Chinyere as a child, alone, with her parents, with me on the last visit I’d made when I was thirteen. The pictures stopped a couple of years after that, and there were no images of the baby.
The boy was a year old, bug-eyed and cute. My mother had warned me I was to go along with the pretense in public, but I hadn’t expected that even in the privacy of their home we were to act as if the boy wasn’t Chinyere’s son.
She sounded just like my mother, and I knew that if I didn’t interrupt, the lecture would escalate until I wanted to slit my wrists just to give her something to mop so she would. Stop. Talking.
The mirror showed that nice young woman my mother was always hoping for. I looked like a promise fulfilled.
This starts another argument between husband and wife, mild at first, but then it peppers and 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.
You like to believe that the first fall, the one that left you with a permanent brace on your ankle, was real.
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 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.
You were relieved to see a woman behind the desk. This spared your mother the embarrassing last resort of offering a blow job to convince the lawyer to take your case.
the men who darted in and out of her life like a lizard’s tongue.
You think I’m a bad mother or something?” The question came from left field. Was she a bad mother? You were fifteen years old and pregnant because she wanted a price cut on a battered green Toyota. You weren’t sure how to answer, so you didn’t.
Soft children with hard lives go mad or die young.
“Mama, what do you want?” “I want just a bit more of your joy,
everybody knew how risky it was to make a child out of hair, infused with the identity of the person who had shed it. But a child of many hairs? Forbidden.
sensing the shift of power in the room, but it was nothing to her. She was still the head. What matter if one toenail argued with the other?
Precious’s husband was the sort of man people pretended to like because they couldn’t afford not to.
while one hand reached out for help, the other wielded a knife.
“Some Mathematicians remove pain, some of us deal in negative emotions, but we all fix the equation of a person.
entire globe splayed out as it had been seventy years ago and as it was now. Most of what had been North America was covered in water and a sea had replaced Europe. Russia was a soaked grave. The only continents unclaimed in whole or in part by the sea were Australia and the United Countries—what had once been Africa.
She rarely worked with refugees, true refugees, for this reason. The complexity of their suffering always took something from her.
Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore.
the caul of misfortune covering Glory’s face that would affect every decision she made, causing her to err on the side of wrong, time and time again.
She did a lot of things out of spite, the source of which she couldn’t identify—as if she’d been born resenting the world.
reading from a script that was intricate and logical and written by people who had never before spoken on the phone to a human being.
unable to do right no matter how small the choice.
Nobody knew why she made the trips as often as she did, or why she eschewed the bustle of Lagos for her grandfather’s sleepy village. She couldn’t explain that her grandfather knew her, saw her for what she was—a black hole that compressed and eliminated fortune and joy—and still opened his home to her,
No one asked Ant what he thought of River, but someone should have known that you do not take small things from small men.
The problem with those who don’t know real power is that they do not know real power.
No one said it, but they all thought, This is what you get for asking a godling to do the work of a god.
slowly forgetting him as one does a god who answers no prayers.
the girls had learned to keep their distance.
The humiliating stench of a daughter who bore false tales.
Everybody knew what happened to pretty young girls in police stations.
She was just as powerless, another daughter being sent back to her mother in disgrace.
Girls with fire in their bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die out.
