What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

by Lesley Nneka Arimah

He was still for so long I wasn’t sure if he was contemplating his next move or if this was the genesis of one of the thick skins of silence my mother would spend days peeling off.

he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.

This is the first time the girl becomes aware that the world requires something other than what she is.

I can feel it coming upon me, the unfurling of myself until all that will remain is a raw center.

The secret of it settled a cloak of guilt on me I will wear for the rest of my life.

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

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.

She wanted to ask him what he saw in her but was afraid his answer would be qualities she knew to be illusions. A carefree attitude that was simply carelessness. Bluntness mistaken for honesty when she was just mean.

The older she got, the more she felt the truth of it: the deep inhale her life had been so far, in preparation for an explosive exhale that would flatten her.

She held out hope that one day all her missteps would stumble her into accomplishments she could hold up as her own, that the seeming chaos of her life would coalesce into an intricate puzzle whose shape one could see only when it was complete.

they forgot that they’d had a past before this grief removed everything from inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel full to bursting with grief but also hollow?

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