Reflective paper body and conclusion of Zikora: A Short Story.

In the final pages of the story, the author uses Zikora's descriptions of her family life and parental relationships to further explore the effects of the past on the individual's understanding of self. In the early pages of the piece, Zikora relies on her memories with Kwame for a sense of escape. Her desire to retreat from her pain, and the unbearable delivery room atmosphere, plunges her into a state of prolonged sentimentality. However, in the latter half of the piece, Zikora's conversations with her mother, father, and Aunty Nwanneka, propel the narrative into images and stories from her deeper past. As Zikora watches her mother's reactions to her father and Aunty Nwanneka's phone commentary, she considers the three adults' longtime triangular arrangement. Throughout descriptions of these parental dynamics, Zikora focuses on the differences between each of her parents. Her father is "all good humor and mischief," able to charm everyone no matter the destruction he causes (18). By contrast, her mother's "addiction to dignity" has always infuriated Zikora (22). Once Aunty Nwanneka appears between her mother and father, Zikora notices how differently her father acts with his first wife and his second wife. Indeed, Aunty Nwanneka does seem to embrace frivolity and luxury more readily than her own mother. However, soon Zikora understands how Aunty Nwanneka wields "her niceness like a subtle sharp knife" (19). Though both women are nominally blameless, Zikora struggles throughout her child- and adulthood to understand her father's culpability. His actions pitted the women against one another. Once his choice to move out demoted Zikora's mother, Zikora realizes how she began to change.

Zikora does not experience these revelations as a young woman. Rather, her proximity to her mother, and her prolonged vulnerability in the narrative present, inspire her reflective meditations on the past. Terrified of developing an infection or harming the baby, Zikora needs her mother's help and support. Furthermore, her father's failure to show up as promised begins to parallel Kwame's absence. Indeed, she describes both men as impossibly charming. Upon first meeting one another, they immediately began sharing jokes "in that blustery male way of men who felt unthreatened by each other" (20). Their similarities grow the more Zikora recalls about her father. Instead of understanding what her mother needed, he abandoned her without legitimate explanation, in much the same way Kwame abandoned Zikora.

Once Zikora leaves the hospital, the author uses her apartment setting to amplify Zikora's emotional state. In the private of her own space, Zikora experiences no comfort. Rather, feeling as if everything is going wrong, as if everything has suddenly become terrifying and overwhelming, Zikora wonders if it is "something about being back home" (22). Unlike in the delivery room, in Zikora's apartment, her mother's presence balances the discomfiting space. Seeing her mother give her child remarkable affection and care, Zikora looks to her memories for some evidence of who her mother really is, wondering: "How had I never really seen her?" (22). In these final passages, Zikora's memories produce revelation and reconciliation, rather than longing and despair. Finally, searching her past for answers, Zikora discovers an unexpected version of truth, and a reason for hope.