Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Zikora

Srijita Sarkar 

“It’s funny how pregnancy is like body hair. We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”

Time spent on remembering, time lost on remembering.

I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.

Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

Now I was blaming myself. I was bearing the responsibility of a full-grown man.

How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,

I thought that here in this delivery room we are reduced, briefly and brutishly, to the animals we truly are.

Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable: babies would easily slip out, and mothers would remain unmarked and whole, merely blessed by having bestowed life.

I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.

Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.

It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.

Leon

This story was very heart-breaking and incredibly depressing. Its big themes are human bodies (especially female), pregnancy, birth, and disppointing, humiliating relationships. My heart went out to these women. (Every man in this story is just awful.) The prose is perfectly crafted, powerful and beautiful, the characterizations are pretty subtle and well-done. 
Recommended if you're looking for well-written literary fiction and the perspective of Nigerian-American women.