What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah

I am enthralled by Ms. Arimah’s writing. A newcomer to the literary scene, I had read her short stories in literary journals and was thrilled when her book was published earlier this year. She brings to the short fiction world a combination of wit and insight and an inimitable gift for simplifying profound issues that her characters are grappling with, in just a few lucid sentences. Here is ‘The Future Looks Good‘ the first story in the collection. The first time I read it, I gasped and then I read it again and had the same reaction. This is priceless short fiction at its very best.

Ezinna fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affection. Her grandmother, overworked to the bone by the women whose houses she dusted, whose laundry she washed, whose children whose asses she scrubbed clean; overworked by the bones of a husband who wanted many sons and the men she entertained to give them to him, sees her son to his thirteenth year with the perfunction of a nurse and dies in her bed with a long, weary sigh.