Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian Canadian writer and software engineer. His stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and Passages North. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Fiction Award. Perfect Little Angels is his debut story collection.
“Fake Hydrangea”: Behind The Scenes
Adanma is 13 years old. Her mother is dead. She died holding Adanma while they slept, grew cold and still in the thick of night. Just hours earlier, Adanma’s older sister Helen had run away from home. No good Helen, always running off, always coming back, always breaking Mama’s heart. Inspiring her belt. Raising her blood pressure. Adanma’s mother is dead, and it is, at least in part, Helen’s fault.
This sets up “Fake Hydrangea,” one of the quieter stories in my debut collection Perfect Little Angels. Two sisters move into their aunt’s home following their mother’s passing. While there are clues to their mother’s actual cause of death, our understanding unfolds through Adanma’s blurring viewpoint. “Fake Hydrangea,” as with all writing, emerged from a cornucopia of inspirations and choices, a small handful of which I discuss here.
Genesis
Two strands powered the seed for “Fake Hydrangea.” Firstly, the somewhat surreal experience of upending old homes for new ones: I moved alone to boarding school at age 10, left Nigeria for undergrad in the United States six years later, and relocated to Canada post-graduation. Secondly, the jarring epiphany of how dramatically sibling perceptions—of memory, family, place—can diverge. I began to envision two sisters whose mother represented this split. How the same woman could be perceived as gentle, loving, nurturing, the whole wide world. And also cold, explosive, violent, the devil.
Stark Oppositions
Portraying the distinct emotional islands of both sisters involved several approaches. One of them was simply highlighting their contrasting assimilation styles. Unlike Mama, their aunt—a successful novelist and a deeply considerate guardian—lives in a lavish house. Their many needs are attended to by a maid named Ukamaka. This idyllic setting provokes Helen’s joy and lays bare the depths of Adanma’s turbulence. Even in paradise, she is sleepless through the night, picking at stray threads on the edge of her mattress. Aunt Nkiru, who Helen offers all her free time, is hard to like. She is too different from Mama. Physically, yes. But also with matters of discernment. Critically, she can’t see that Helen—suddenly a model child—is deceptive. Manipulative. For instance, to curry favour, class-skipping Helen claims to have read Aunt Nkiru’s novel. To have loved it, even. And Aunt Nkiru reveals her gullibility by expressing delight instead of probing for elaboration. Adanma avoids them as much as possible, sequestered in her room with Mama’s ghost.
Rose-coloured Lenses
I also wanted to capture the ways grief tinges one’s viewpoint with red. Adanma is quiet and passive for most of the story, at least until the climax, but her thoughts brim with a motivated intensity. In a biology class, as the bald teacher drones on about the formation of gametes, she pictures his “egg-shaped” skull “cracking open, a great vulture unfurling from his bloody scalp.” It’s a tiny window into a wounded psyche, and I looked for organic opportunities for such windows to emerge continuously.
Minor Notes
“Sonder” is such a beautiful word: the understanding that everyone, even those briefly encountered walking down the street, have lives as wondrous and complex as our own. To my mind, sonder and empathy are sides of a coin, and the stories of Perfect Little Angels toss that coin often. For “Fake Hydrangea,” it included making sure that Ukamaka, despite being scarcely more than a background presence, got a natural moment that granted her colour and specificity, made her her own person.
The Cost of Empathy
The tense, unsettled relationship between Adanma and Helen is a given, so naturally, I looked for moments that potentially challenged their norm. There’s a scene where Adanma snoops through Helen’s room and, to her surprise, finds Helen’s copy of Aunt Nkiru’s novel with the pages annotated and phrases underlined. She also finds a sketched image that indicates Helen is actively grieving Mama, too. Adanma’s discovery forces her to face potential biases in her internal conception of Helen. Divorcing long-held assumptions, even a tiny bit, is unnerving and quite often impossible. For Adanma, this also treads into the territory of actively painful because the more grace her mind affords Helen, however unconsciously, the less grace it affords her memory of Mama’s intense beatings of Helen—beatings always heard one room over, in thumps and conjoined screams, but never seen. Beatings that she’d considered well-deserved. How else to tame a heartbreaker? But if they weren’t deserved, even just one time in a hundred, well, what would that newly say about Mama? Loving Mama, who fed Adanma saltine biscuits before bed and wiped the crumbs off the corner of her mouth with a sweaty palm. Called her sweet baby. The moment in Helen’s room is not nearly enough to change Adanma’s entrenched perception of family or her new life, but it does represent a step of sorts. And sometimes, isn’t that enough?
Brockton Writers Series 