Naomi Benaron, award-winning author of Running the Rift, described by Barbara Kingsolver as “truly fearless…ambitious, beautiful,[and] unapologetically passionate”, returns to Munyori Journal with a new fiction offering, “The Weight of Grace”. While its action occurs in Tucson, Arizona, the story recalls fragments of a Rwandese past set in the backdrop of the 1994 genocide. Benaron renders this story with compassion and grace, extending the style we saw in Running the Rift.

The story begins as follows:

Jimmy does the math. It took him roughly fifteen minutes to get from the 7-Eleven to Yvette’s front door, running as fast as he could and then faster. Four minutes now, plus or minus, he’s been standing in the dark, hands on knees, trying to recover, to breathe, waiting for her to open. He left behind two guns and two bodies: Rich and the clerk. A third gun smolders in his jacket pocket.

The Tucson night squats heavy and hot on Jimmy’s back. Mesquite branches droop, and even the leaves on the cottonwood that always have something to say in the slightest shudder hang mute over the carport. In the desert’s fevered sigh he hears his sister Chantale’s last breath, carried from the camp in Zaire, back in 1994. He looks up at a dizziness of stars. They tip and whorl, zigzag toward a single point, one of those black holes where gravity gets all messed up.  READ MORE