Atta Excerpt

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta, who earlier this year was short-listed for the storySouth Million Writers Award has a new story up over at Carve Magazine. An excerpt:

We lived in the two-story house my father designed in Shapati Town, his hometown. Our plot had no street number, the street had no telephone lines. My father had had a brick wall built so high that armed robbers would need pole vaults to catapult themselves into the grounds. He must have envisaged them trying despite the odds. On top of his wall were broken bottle pieces; jewels on the crest of his architectural crown. In our garden was his concession to my mother, now an empty swimming pool, shaded by her favorite jacaranda and flame-of-the-forest trees. The pool was four feet at its deepest. My father, God rest his soul, could not swim. He had nightmares of dying by drowning–not by the bullet. That, he never expected in the fortress that was our home.

–From “The Lawless” by Sefi Atta.