What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

by Lesley Nneka Arimah

  They backed and forthed for five human centuries, and if anyone asked River what she thought of Ant, she responded with an affectionate laugh peppered with annoyance. Such a small man with small concerns, but a fun diversion for such a woman as she. No one asked Ant what he thought of River, but someone should have known that you do not take small things from small men. Ant loathed River. He hated the condescending laugh she gave when his name was mentioned. He hated that she seemed to take pleasure in finding the tiny colonies he’d squirreled by a lake or stream. One day, he came upon the washed-out remains of one such colony, the queen mired in mud, undignified, laid bare for anyone to see. So mighty was River, so respected and loved and worshipped. What were ants to her? He decided to show River what it felt like to lose.

  The mightiest river, from which all rivers flowed, was the source of River’s power. Ant sent one ant with one stone into the stillest, deepest part. Then he sent another. And another. At first, the stones just added a nice pebbled finish to the bed of the river. But over a thousand years, the stones began to amass.

  River’s new twins distracted her or she would have noticed the change in current sooner. But for now, they were delightful girls whose eyes followed her and her alone. So rare was the birth of god-twins that they drew a steady stream of visitors bearing tribute and admiration. Two firstborn, how marvelous. They would become the most powerful river goddesses the world had ever seen. When the flow of guests finally abated, River noticed the waning of her power, too much to be the result of the birth, from which she had long since recovered. Leaving her daughters in the care of her sister, she walked the bank. When she got to the site of Ant’s not-quite-finished dam, she pushed a wave at it, not knowing its cause or the resentment that cemented it. The stone wall repelled the wave, so powerfully that it knocked her over. Ant, who had been in the process of adding more stones, laughed and laughed, but silently, so he did not give away his hiding place. See River, knocked to the ground by the forces she controlled!

  The problem with those who don’t know real power is that they do not know real power. River pushed again with all her rage, and this time the wall gave, the force of the water so great that it burst over the dam and flooded half the world. And in this half of the world was the largest ant colony you can imagine, a maze created over generations, a honeycomb of earth piled into a mountain so high that even the god of mountains was forced to respect it. But River’s fury washed it away.

  Seeing this, Ant lost all reason. He ran to River’s house and, while her sister slept, slipped through an open window and snatched the children. He hid one girl in a colony of army ants, ordering them to guard the child from anyone who would take her, and the other he hid in a location where River would never think to look.

  Unaware that her daughters had been taken, River dealt instead with the other gods and goddesses whose dwelling places were flooded. The god of birds had lost a quarter of his flock when they tired with no place to land. She begged forgiveness and they gave it easily, because was this not our River, so known to us, and had she not just birthed the next generation of gods?

  The wail alerted her. So much anguish in that wail. River rushed back to her house, hoping the familiar voice or its anguish was simply a trick in her ear. But there was her sister, ripping her hair out by the roots, and there was the empty crib, barely cooled of the warmth of her girls. River released a tsunami of sound, and every god that could walk or fly, every spirit that haunted every place, came to her. Who, she wanted to know, and where? No one could think of anyone who would wish River such harm. Even Death shrugged his innocence, he who had taken something from everyone present. River’s sister hadn’t seen or heard anything, lost as she had been in the sweetest of sleeps. No one said it, but they all thought, This is what you get for asking a godling to do the work of a god. None of them, not even Love, kept in contact with their half-divine siblings, lest they discover that by putting the most powerful of their bloodline to rest, they might graduate to godhood themselves. Poor River, so indulgent, so generous, and look how she had been repaid.

  The other gods prepared to smite her sister, and River was scared by the emptiness inside her where loyalty should lie. Then a field spirit stepped forward, terrified but determined, and held up a fragment of the dam for everyone to see. Ants. It was ants that held the wall together, and resentment that gave them the power.

  River didn’t want to believe it. Ant was responsible? The little god with whom she’d traded pranks for millennia? Rage replaced disbelief, and River went hunting.

  If Ant had stuck around when he’d dropped the first girl with the army ants, he could have prevented the scene to which he returned. If he’d stuck around, he would have noticed that the loss of the ancestral ant colony lessened his ant-controlling powers. He would have seen the ants swarm the child the moment he turned away, so eager for the taste of god-flesh. What many don’t know, a secret god-mothers have kept for eternity, is that god-children are just that, children. And just as a human child must learn to talk and to walk and to join the world of their parents, so must a god-child learn to become a deity. But unlike human children, god-children must even learn to grow, guided by their mothers from one stage to the next until they attain godhood. River’s child was too young to know she was divine and could not be eaten, and so she was. Ant returned to shards of bone, picked clean of marrow. He heard his name being screamed across the world and he knew River could never, ever know. She would drown the universe.

  Ant ground the girl’s bones to dust and compacted it with panic and regret into a small blue stone. Into the stone he whispered the location of the dead girl’s sister, then deleted it from his memory. Such knowledge was too dangerous to have in these times. Then he went into hiding among the humans, trying to live as one of them. He married human women who bore children he suffocated as they slept, lest they leave a divine trail that led to his end. When the women grew suspicious, he abandoned them, and they would go mad or move on with their lives, slowly forgetting him as one does a god who answers no prayers.

  River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they’d done, but they did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When, after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River, one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred years. But River’s grief was so deep it consumed them, and her grief became their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they’d promised to return to; 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? These godlings of land and air and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River’s sorrow drowned them. Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough stream, fractured beyond recognition.

  They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every region. One godling who had come from the house of flames set an entire city on fire trying to find River’s girls. It was a dark century for humankind and godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch whispers of men who didn’t seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden in
side.

  But after seven hundred fruitless years and countless human believers in her service, it dawned on River that she might never see her twins again. She collapsed where she stood, and every emissary lay down as well. Dust settled on them, then grime and so much debris that they became part of the earth, hills of hips and buttocks and woe.

  All but one. The only one who felt the rage of River, multiplied by that most powerful feeling that won’t let a person rest: guilt. River’s sister, not quite goddess. The guilt turned in her belly like a ship in a storm. She’d slept while her sister’s children were taken. Blame, so like a god itself, shadowed her, occupied her bed like a lover, whispered to her like a dearest friend. Her name was eventually forgotten. Soon all called her She Who Betrayed River, a name that over the years degenerated to Betrayed River, then Bereaver, which stuck, and eventually even Bereaver forgot she had ever been anyone else. Guilt crushed every milestone in her life to dust so that she knew only Before and After. And Before seemed like the unfathomable dream of a foolish woman.

  Long after River and her women collapsed, Bereaver searched alone, turning every crust of earth to find Ant and her nieces. Whenever a kind wind caught a whisper and blew Ant’s name into her ear, she would follow it to the city, town, village to which he had run and pluck the man, woman, child who had seen him last. She pulled every secret from them, things they didn’t even know they knew, and afterward she’d pull out their eyes, tongue, heart, so they’d never know a thing again. Sometimes she just missed him. Other times, the trail was so stale it crumbled to nothing when she walked it, the people who had known the human Ant long dead.

  Ant tried to live quiet lives, but eventually someone would sense something about him, be it his wickedness or his divinity, and he would be run out of town—or become so highly acclaimed he feared catching the attention of a god who would recognize him. Much as it galled him, he knew he would have to set his godhood aside if he wanted to keep his life. He would also have to separate himself from the stone that held his secrets.

  So into the stone Ant whispered everything he’d ever been and sealed it with the human name he’d taken for this earth. He kept only his immortality, so that he could one day live to be restored, no longer hunted. He tried to bury the stone, but animals circled the spot and began to dig. He gave it to a boy, but the boy ran to show his friends, so Ant snatched it back and buried the boy instead. In his despair, he carved a cave into a hill and thought to hide there for eternity. He pulled in a large rock and made it his bed, as penance. But a hundred years went by and he became bored with piety and regret. Poking his head out of the cave, he saw a girl hauling a pail of water. The water wasn’t hers, he was sure, and yet she bore it on her head with grace and little complaint. He watched her for days, carrying water back and forth, back and forth, but for whom? To do what? Boys sometimes danced around her, trying to distract her from her task, but on she went, day after day. It dawned on Ant then that one could ask almost anything of a girl. He stepped out of the cave to block her path and, holding out the pretty blue stone, said, Can you keep a secret?

  The girl took the stone, so accepting that it sank into her palm, lodging itself at the base of her fingers. She was filled with a terrifying knowledge—a child bled to bones, a mother who thought it alive and well—and certainty that she must never, ever tell.

  So Bereaver still wanders, not knowing that Ant is lost to her. The girl will carry his secret, and when she is no longer a girl, she will give it to another girl, and this sorrow stone will be stolen away in uniform pockets and hidden under the pillows of marriage beds, secreted in diaries, guarded closely by the type of girls who, above all else, obey.

  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.

  REDEMPTION

  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.

  Mayowa was thirteen going on whatever age it is that women find themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Ajayi took her on to replace Abigail, who had worked for them as long as we’d lived next door. My mother said it was about time, a woman that old should be the madam of her own house, not cleaning up someone else’s.

  “They need an energetic young thing, but not one of those ambitious ones. They never last long.” Mother recited the virtues of young workers nonstop—malleable, easily intimidated, unlikely to seduce the man of the house or turn up pregnant. Then she met the young worker in question. The Ajayis had brought Mayowa over to get us used to seeing her. Prodded by Mrs. Ajayi, she curtsied stiffly to my mother, as though her knees rebelled. My mother noticed.

  “And this is the young madam,” Mrs. Ajayi teased at me, and Mayowa’s curtsy was even more reluctant. Understandable, as we were the same age, but my mother wasn’t having it.

  “See this one. Nancy, you are going to have trouble with her,” my mother said, adding, “You are too kind,” when Mrs. Ajayi explained that Mayowa was the child of a third cousin who couldn’t afford to send her to school. As though to confirm my mother’s predictions, Mayowa raised her bowed head and met my mother’s eyes straight on.

  “So bold. And look at that.” She waved a hand to indicate Mayowa’s backside. Mayowa was small for her age, with a compact muscular frame that promised to blossom into something interesting.

  “This one will be bringing boys around soon, if she hasn’t started already,” my mother said, calling Mayowa’s virtue into question. The answer arrived the next day, wrapped in the contested results of last week’s election.

  Grace, our house girl, who had to clean up the mess, took to sneering whenever she saw Mayowa or heard her name. Grace was nineteen, far older than what my mother considered prime house girl age, and prettier than my mother would have liked, but my father was long gone, so she kept her. When anyone asked where my father was, my mother would say he was traveling, which was true if traveling meant “I prefer my mistress’s cooking, so I’m going to live with her now.”

  —

  I began to spend most of my time outside, knocking lemons out of the tree, swirling the dirt on my mother’s car, shading with the lizards. When the Ajayis’ gate creaked, I’d run to our gate and peek through a crack in the metal. Sometimes it was the husband or wife leaving, sometimes it was the man who cared for their dogs, but 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. I liked to think that if she’d known I was there, she’d have turned around and waved.

  Mrs. Ajayi was very old, creeping on that age when life begins to lose all meaning, fifty, I think. I would go and sit with her because everyone knows how old people enjoy the company of young people. They suck at us like vampires, or wilting flowers that require the sunshine of our youth. Whenever Mrs. Ajayi saw me she sighed, and it wasn’t till I was much older that I realized it wasn’t a sigh of relief.

  She fed me Fanta and chinchin and listened to me talk and talk and talk. Sometimes, greased by loneliness, her secrets would slip out and she would mention things she shouldn’t have, like how her oldest son couldn’t find a job and how Mr. Ajayi was getting tired of lending him money. I was her young confidante, the daughter she never had, except for the two daughters she did have, who came by every few Sundays with their young children.

  I wasn’t worried about Mayowa replacing me. She wasn’t the sort of girl who could sit and listen to old women and their problems. In fact, she seemed like the sort of girl who would hide an old woman’s medication
and watch the trembling in the woman’s hands increase till she was too incapacitated to stop Mayowa from cleaning out her purse. I liked her a lot.

  And so I stepped up my visits to Mrs. Ajayi, my sometimes biweekly calls multiplying to weekly, then near daily, as I found any reason to stop by.

  “Mrs. Ajayi, my mother needs the pot she borrowed you six months ago.”

  “Mrs. Ajayi, can I have the ripe guava from your tree?”

  “Mrs. Ajayi, there is a string hanging from my dress, can you fix it?”

  And when she called Mayowa to fetch the pot or the scissors or the old mop handle to knock the tallest fruits, I stared, trying to figure out what aspect of this girl made her brave enough to throw shit at my mother. Her hair was cropped short, barely enough left to cover her scalp, and did nothing to enhance the squat ordinariness of her face. That’s all she is, I told myself, an ordinary girl. And yet.

  My visits to Mrs. Ajayi steadied at twice a week, once when Mayowa was there—I’d ask for something that needed fetching so I could watch her, study the boldness of her movements—and once when she wasn’t, so Mrs. Ajayi could talk freely.

  Mrs. Ajayi would ask after my mother and sometimes, tentatively, my father, in between the recitation of her week so far and its most exciting aspects. This usually meant hearing about something Mayowa had done.

  I picked these stories out of the trash of Mrs. Ajayi’s boring day, her lazy son, Mr. Ajayi’s intestinal distress. There was the time Mayowa held down one of the students at her school, pinned the girl’s head between her knees, and scraped off half her cornrows with a razor blade before an adult intervened. And the day she taunted the dogs so much, leaving their bowls just out of reach, that they growled and bit their caretaker for the first time since they were untrained pups. Or how she served Mr. Ajayi far more meat than his old gut could handle, so she could feast on his leftovers. When I came across these morsels of Mayowa, I shelved them in my memory, where I could reimagine them over and over till I’d convinced myself I was there. I liked to think she would have wanted me to be.