What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

I felt jilted, and in that sly way infatuation can flip,
the turning over of a mattress to hide an embarrassing stain, I began to despise her.

seeing
the woman my father left us for. She came every few Sundays, when the weighty sin of fornicating with a married man became too heavy to bear.

The day after we met, she sent a missile of shit wrapped in newspaper like a gift. It exploded on the side of the house, scattering chunks and leaving a streak of brown. My mother, furious, railed about the neighbors (never at them, mind you) and lamented that they just didn’t make house girls like they used to. I, on the other hand, fell in love.

River’s child was too young to know she was divine and could not be eaten, and so she was.

Even Death shrugged his innocence, he who had taken something from everyone present.

Glory stared at her father’s e-mail, meant to comfort but instead bringing to mind the wine and pills and what they could do to a body. 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.

At last they were serious enough for Thomas, and the sex was not mediocre exactly, but just good, not the mind-blowing experience she’d expected it to be. But Thomas was moved and thanked her for trusting him, and she said, “You’re welcome,” in that cutesy, girlish way she knew he would like, even though what she really wanted was for him to stop being such a gentleman and fuck her silly.

He didn’t know that what little money she could scrape together was spent on a plane ticket to Nigeria every thirteen months, or that over the past few years, she had arrived the day after her grandmother’s death, then the day after her great-aunt’s death, and then her uncle’s, so that her grandfather asked her to let him know when she booked her ticket so that he could prepare to die. Thomas still didn’t know she was unlucky.

He prayed over his meals, and before he went to bed, and when he woke up. He prayed for her.

Glory despised him. She hated the sheen of accomplishment he wore, so dulled on her. She hated
his frugal management of money. She hated that when she’d pressed him for sex he’d demurred, saying that they should wait till they were more serious.

Glory couldn’t get enough of him. She loved that he watched Cartoon Network with the glee of a teenager, loved that he could move through a crowd of strangers and emerge on the other side with friends. He didn’t seem to mind her coarseness, or how her bad luck had deepened her bitterness

“This is my internship. I actually work in corporate but thought I should get a better understanding of what happens in the trenches.”

“Wait, you’re here voluntarily? Are you crazy?”

He laughed again. “No, it’s just . . . you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not stupid,” Glory said. “So fuck you.” Then she switched on her headset, ignoring his “Whoa, where did that come from?,” and turned her dial to the busiest queue. The calls came in one after the
other, leaving Thomas little chance to apologize