This Thursday (February 22nd), Dead Ink Books are due to publish a new short story collection by Navajo author Bojan Louis: Sinking Bell. The collection won a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and was selected by NPR as one of their Best Books of 2022. To celebrate the book’s UK release, and to give readers a taste of the collection, the publisher has allowed CR to share the story “Make No Sound to Wake”. Before we get to the story, though, here’s the collection’s synopsis:
An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a White woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions.
Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writers and musicians, construction workers, people passing through with the hope of something better somewhere else. His characters strain to temper predatory or self-destructive impulses; they raise families, choose families, and abandon families; they endeavor to end cycles of abuse and remake themselves anew.
And now, on to “Make No Sound to Wake”…
*
MAKE NO SOUND TO WAKE
Evening gusts moved shadows and air the dogs couldn’t smell.
This late into Niłch’ih Tsoh, with the ground buried beneath three days’ snow, two mutts curled for warmth inside a scrap-wood shelter built against the northeast side of a hogan. Travel this night was unlikely though not impossible, if someone were forced to venture across the darkness and cold.
Many generations ago this land had belonged to Hastiin Łí˛í˛’dóó ł’izhé, a pious if not saintly man, quick to judge those of us living in imbalance, out of tune with the harmonious songs of the earth and constellations. Who had come to own the property I had no way of knowing.
Inside, the hogan was furnished meagerly, several bedrolls with a blanket each, two wooden chests, a loom, a metal wood-burning stove in the center, and a washbasin with shelves for food and dish storage. A couple of saddles were piled near the eastward-facing door, though I had seen no corral anywhere near on my approach.
In the dim light of two lanterns, a scrawny-shouldered boy played a game of mimicking an older girl. He wore a shirt a few years too big for him, the darkened skin from being winter-fed circling his eyes. The girl crouched with her skirt flared around her, dirt caking the cracks of her rough-skinned hands.
“Your face is dirty,” she said. “Wipe it off.”
“No,” said the boy, “you wipe yours off. I don’t like it looking at me. It’s ugly.”
“You’re the ugly one, an ugly dirt boy.”
The girl sprang forward, lumbered toddler-like on her knees, and tackled the boy. Their skinny bodies fell flat against each other in the fashion of a man and a woman bedding together. Any sort of play like this between kids in my day was taboo. It was disrespectful, overly sexual, and unbecoming of children who would become adults.
A woman, face chiseled and hair grayed, busied herself at the washbasin, her back turned toward the children. Near the bedrolls an old wind-beaten woman hunched over a blanket folded on her lap. She yelled, “Yaa’dilah,” and paused her game of seven cards set in a row, stacked according to number, color, and suit. A game I didn’t recognize, but then so much was unfamiliar to me in those days.
“Doo beehaz’áa da. You kids don’t act that way. Nia, get off your cousin.”
The kids continued to wrestle despite the old woman’s urging. Punishment would have been my next impulse, had these delinquents been mine. Especially for the boy—it’s boys who grow into irresponsible men with hungry hands, groping eyes, and temporary hearts.
The old woman’s cards scattered as she rose. Grabbing the girl by her ponytail, she yanked her off the boy, who scampered backward to the south wall.
“You’re hurting me, shimá sání,” the girl whined.
She was slapped, let go. The girl sat still only a moment before fake-stepping toward the boy, who flinched. She was slapped again, shoved to the floor. Angered, the girl glared at the boy from her defeated position.
“Flincher diigis,” she said.
“You’re stupid,” whispered the boy, huddled against the wall.
The grandma retrieved her blanket and cards, rearranged them, and resumed her game. Ignored or forgotten, the children, like alert prairie dogs sniffing an unfamiliar wind, stood and chased each other around the stove at the hogan’s center. The girl galloped ahead of the boy, taunted him with whinnies as his failed grasps caught the empty space between them. He dove for her and missed, tumbled toward a corner table and into the legs of the younger woman, slicing onions for the mutton stew simmering on the stovetop. She cut her thumb and cursed. Blood seeped into the fine crevices of the halved onion so it looked like a bloodshot eye. She loomed over the boy, knife in hand, slammed it flat against the cutting board, the blade twanging and falling silent.
It was obvious this was the boy’s mother. Her patience for disciplining him was measured—she directed his attention to the physical pain he caused her, allowed him to know it wasn’t the flow of her blood that hurt her, but his continual refusal to stay seated quietly, to listen.
“Nia,” she said, not looking away from her son, “clean your cousin’s face. It’s dirty.”
“But . . . ,” protested the girl.
“I told you. Clean his dirty face.”
Nia took the boy’s hand silently, led him to a washbasin half-filled with filmy water, wet a rag, and began gently, or reluctantly, to wipe his face. The mother shouted that Nia was only smearing the dirt and so she scrubbed harder, until the boy’s face reddened from her effort. She smoothed his thin black hair, dabbing his face with the cloth.
“It’ll be okay, Grayson,” she said. “It was an accident. You didn’t mean to hurt your mom.”
“Don’t you call him Grayson,” said the mother. “He’s no man’s son. Just a boy. A gray boy.”
The girl, turned defiant against the mother’s dismissiveness of the boy, uttered under her breath that he’d always be Grayson to her. The mother glared at the girl, the crowfeet at the edges of her eyes deepened, and her mouth opened like a cow’s. Before she could yell at the children, the grandmother told her not to waste her time and youth chastising them, she would only wrinkle faster, turn her hair white.
“You just finish making dinner. I’ll settle the kids down.”
Returning to her chopping, the mother said, “That’s what you were supposed to be doing.”
The grandmother waved off the comment, motioned for the glum children to sit at her feet.
This was how winter was spent: stories told to teach, kids playing the moccasin or stick game, not running about wildly—though in my day all this had begun to change too.
A somber quiet settled within the hogan, and the old woman began a story. She had been a girl when she heard it, hardly older than the boy, though better fed. The story was about a woman driven mad who had killed her children by locking them inside their hogan during winter, where they starved to death and froze together as a solid, misshapen hunk of ice. When spring arrived, their hardened bodies thawed, and the woman cooked and ate them. Some years later, after the woman had died from the grief of devouring her children, she began to haunt the frozen nights in search of misbehaving children, whom she would freeze and then consume during warmer weather.
The boy sat horrified. The girl seemed to feign indifference and doubt, but I could see the small wavering of her eyes. The boy turned ashen. His fear pushing him down into the thin veil of his shirt.
The timing of the grandma’s story wasn’t right, however. There was no way the old woman was a girl when I’d been alive. It wasn’t even possible for her mother to have been alive. Perhaps the old woman’s grandmother was a girl then? It’s difficult to say. The only things true about the story were that I had existed and then had ceased to.
My memories occur in no particular order but all at once, happening continually, in imbalance and disharmony.
My parents and I had lived in Łeejin Haagééd, which was half a day’s walk from the cliffs overlooking Hałchíítah—the color of dusk skies in summer and beyond, on the western horizon, the blue peaks of Dook’o’oosłííd.
We had been forced from this place by the Bilagáana and their Bi’éé Łichíí’í. We were allowed to return, after years in exile, to a barren landscape and a dilapidated hogan, looted but fortunately not burned. My father was surprised to find the two windows intact. Our home had been used, probably, as a safe haven for vagrants or those journeying to some better place. My parents had returned to die in their home and not in exile, though I’d returned to live.
I was one of the few adolescents to survive the many days’ march to Hwéeldi, where we were given rations of bland white dust, pungent brown grounds, and dirty water. Aside from enduring the deplorable conditions, we were forced to live with an enemy band of Naashgalí dine’é. We stole from one another and often fought, until we learned that our real enemies were the Bi’éé Łichíí’í guarding us, as well as the Nóóda’í, who were allowed to raid our prison while the soldiers stood by whooping, laughing. It was during these years that I was raped, first by a Nóóda’í, and then by a lanky Bilagáana soldier, who kept his cowardly blue eyes shut and called me by some other name. I wanted the pale soldier to look at me, to see me, starved and weak, a bony girl without breasts or hips. I wanted him to know that his strength over me was pathetic.
Before we were marched at gunpoint to Hwéeldi, the Bi’éé Łichíí’í slaughtered our livestock, left the carcasses to rot in the sun, and set our crops ablaze, the dark smoke invading the clear expanse of sky. This was the fate of every family across Diné Bikéyah. Some families fought and were killed, their bodies stripped and burned. Others fled and were captured. If not bound, beaten, and marched, they were murdered. The girls and women were raped multiple times before their energy and lives left them. Those able to escape hid in the maze of canyons at Tséyi’, did their best to preserve what little of their livestock remained—eating only the old and weak, breeding the young—and foraged pi.ons, wild onions, and corn from abandoned gardens.
My father died young, not too long after we were released and had returned home. I was a young woman by then, pregnant with another child of violence. Before he died, my father praised our leaders for negotiating a treaty that allowed us to come home, and that offered him a small amount of peace and solace, though he wasted away during the season of our return. My sister didn’t make it as far as my father. She coughed blood until it killed her. We buried her beneath a tree somewhere between Tóniłts’ílí, our home, and Tsoodził. I don’t remember when, exactly, but certainly it was before we left that prison, before my brothers were taken to schools far in the East, well beyond Sis Najiní and Hwéeldi, even. The Bilagáana thought the absence of men would cause the people to fall into disarray and chaos, to depreciate and succumb to the weakness they saw in the women from their world. They knew nothing beyond their hatred for us. They didn’t know that our women did everything men could. Women held the power the Bilagáana are so obsessed with. I never saw my brothers again, there was no way to learn of their fate.
My mother worked herself to death keeping me alive. During her final years, she began to forget me. She no longer recognized what few possessions we owned or where we lived. Looking across the landscape, barren except for sand, she asked if she was able to go out and play with friends who didn’t live too far off. She’d be home by sunset, she said. What heart-broke me most was waking one morning to find her more lost in her mind, building an invisible fire and stripping naked for a nonexistent ceremony, covering herself in invisible ash.
My grandparents had been lucky. They had escaped into the canyons along with the first wave of people who avoided capture. Of those refugees, many were never heard from again. No one knew if they had perished, hidden in the canyons, or if they had later emerged and disappeared into unfamiliar landscapes. I knew my grandparents wished to die on Diné Bikéyah, where the Diyiin wanted them to be, where we all, at some point, should be.
What the grandma got right in the retelling of my story was my lack of a husband and the scrawniness of my two kids, the bulbs of their spines nearly bursting through their skin whenever they bent over. My spirit faded with every thin meal I was able to give them. I was unfamiliar with the work of storing food, herding sheep, and weaving. In truth, I was never taught how to farm, butcher, or make a loom like most women. The old woman’s tale shed no light on the dim corners of my life, the secrets I hid from my kids, or the darkness I made of myself.
Imprisonment, violence, and witnessing my family die taught me to dance men away from their families temporarily. My slender, hardened body didn’t disgust them. All Diné changed in this way, as if nearing death had sucked the skin closer to our bones. We imagined a healthy softness through the desperate need of our knobby bodies closing together. Not a lot of us, it seemed, were looking for forever, though perhaps we should have been.
I also gambled, was good at it. Won jewelry, sometimes livestock, most anything people were willing to surrender—except children, because they can be burdens disguised as gifts. I took this style of life and it took me. The weak men, angered by losing, attacked and beat me at times. One unlucky bastard tried to rape me, but my life had seen enough of that, and I took the deer-antler-handled knife I’d won off him and cut his neck down to the spine, swallowed the blood that poured down on me, to get the strength to get back home to my children. It didn’t sicken me, only intensified the bitter taste of my own blood in my mouth. Weeks and months after this, I was called the murderous-whore-witch, and even now, generations later, I’m thought of in this way. It’s how I’m bound to this earth.
And so the old woman continued her version of the story of how my children and I met our deaths. One abnormally long and snowy winter, I abandoned them yet again to go to a Ye’ii bicheii some unreasonable distance away. My intentions for going I don’t remember exactly, though I could surmise that it was to obtain supplies, seek the false hope of help. A blizzard arrived, the landscape was buried, frozen. The children had hardly any wood, just as little to eat. The trip should have taken three, maybe four days. But I never returned.
“Those kids,” the old woman continued, “didn’t have any wood, any food, so they burned their hair first, then their clothes. They began to eat the walls. The woman, far away and unable to reach her children, begged hand-tremblers and crystal-gazers for help. None would, except for a witch who lived in incest with her only son. Those two lived off the suffering and spirits of others. The witch offered the woman help if she promised to give all she owned, which the woman did. She was stripped, covered in an ash mixed with the crushed bones of bodies stolen from graves. The witch told the woman the mixture would keep the cold off her, she wouldn’t feel a thing. The witch sang on the woman, and the son took the woman’s breath into his body and exhaled it into his mother’s so the woman’s soul would never find its home and would be forever lost.”
My children were discovered frozen, stuck to the empty stove, their hair and fingernails gone. The people who found my kids refused to touch the bodies, feared they’d break apart and release spirits that would haunt them. Spring arrived and my children seeped back into the earth, the earth where I walk the nights, wailing out names I don’t remember.
I embrace the children I find. They succumb to the cold of me.
“The woman, like the witch, seeks souls to sustain her. And so she returned to her children and devoured them.” The silly old woman howled out a few times and cackled, set the children crying and seeking the comfort of her skirt. As if I’d howl in such an obscene way. She hurried away from the kids toward the stove, took a small shovel and scooped some ash out, and smudged an arc on each child’s forehead. This appeared to calm them, though they looked at each other with furrowed, uncertain brows. The girl, eyes widened in realization, removed a small pouch beaded at the edge of its opening, pinched some tá’dídíín, and placed it on her tongue, then the boy’s. They closed their eyes and prayed, possibly, for protection against a force like me.
In the months before my children passed, they stopped praying, didn’t greet the sun with open arms and stare at it for a blink’s time, the fire blue-glowing behind their eyelids afterward. They had given up hope that it’d get better for us, for them, really. I wouldn’t ever get myself together and find a man, or anyone, to help or protect us. I never demanded that they pray. I was already a ghost to them.
The wind picked up, rattled the north window, where the mother stood slowly cleaning bowls, a cutting board, and the knife she had used in preparing the night’s meal. She ignored the children, her thoughts a vast distance away. She stroked the palm and fingers of one hand. I could tell by this motion that she was waiting for someone, had someone in mind. Her face relaxed for a few moments, until the whimper and complaint of one of the children turned it stern, impatient.
“Can’t you kids shut up for half a night? Nothing’s out there. Don’t let Grandma scare you. It’s not good to be afraid, anyway. It lets everyone know you’re weak.”
The children apologized, offered their quietude in exchange for assurances of safety, were placated with a snack of piñons.
Behind me on the white horizon, snow crunched as a heavily bundled figure approached the hogan in long strides.
The wind blew, and the mutts sprang up, barking. The figure, gruff-voiced, yelled at them to hush. He neared the door, affixing white, stringy hair to his face, put on a hat in the shape of a cone with a white ball at its top. His peculiar clothes were completely red, with what looked like white rabbit-fur trim around his pants cuffs and the bottom of his coat. He slung a coarse green sack over one shoulder. Was this stout and burly man the one who the younger woman waited for? I wondered.
The mutts continued barking.
The man knocked hard, slow, three times. Inside, the children froze with fear. The mother faced her child and niece, an expression of feigned surprise creasing her face.
“Who could that be?”
The children pleaded with her to brace the door shut, but the mother pulled it open a crack and peered out.
“Make the sound,” she whispered.
“Just let me in, it’s goddamn cold out here,” said the figure.
“Make it or I’m not letting you in.”
The figure grumbled and bellowed out, “Hoo, hoo, hoo.”
The mother opened the door. Icy wind blew through everyone’s hair as the man hobbled in, making the depressed-owl noises again. The children screamed. The girl dashed away from her grandmother and dove behind a pile of bedding.
The boy shouted, “It’s the lady!” He ran toward his mother, then thought better of it, since she had allowed the thing in. He retreated to his grandmother, crying, trying not to cry.
What an impossible scene, I thought: this oddly dressed man with a green sack, the mother’s affection toward him, though he obviously terrified the children. Perhaps my children had felt a similar terror with each man I brought home, or during the long days I was absent, the wind or some creature thudding against the door, scratching at the window. Perhaps my children were too weak to show their fear. Or was it that they were hardened and tough? Was it with a lack of fear that they perished during that frozen winter?
The old woman was busy trying to coax the kids from their hiding places, telling them the man was harmless. He was a friend bringing gifts because it was a special day. A day the Bilagáana celebrated for children. Meanwhile, the mother readied tea for the figure who leaned against the door, his bored and deep-set eyes watching the reassuring movements of the old woman.
“No, no, no. You kids don’t need to be afraid. This man is Santá. He’s a gift-bringer from a pole in the North. It’s Keeshmish. Keeshmish is a special day.”
“Then what’s the sack for?” asked Nia, peering out from her hiding place. “Is it for us? Are we going into the sack?”
Grayson was pulled by his arm from where he was hiding, behind his grandmother, and forced to face the red figure.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, son,” repeated the old woman.
As the children neared the plump and matted Sant., he extended an arm. A calloused hand gripping what looked to be a red-and-white-spiraled hook, which emerged from the rabbit-fur-cuffed sleeve. Its blunt tip glistened like an icicle. It was meant for the boy and he knew it. He flailed like a panicked animal held by its scruff and, once loose, ran a circle around the stove, only to be confronted by the laughing Sant. bellowing “hoo, hoo, hoo” between breaths. Scurrying in the opposite direction, the boy was confronted again and again, until he collapsed, all snot bubbles and puffy-eyed wetness.
“It’s just candy,” the mother said, taking the hook from the end of the furred arm. “It won’t hurt you. Quit being a baby and look.”
Grayson watched his mother snap the hook, it hung broken in half in her hand. She picked at the straight end, removing the candy’s translucent skin. She stuck it in her mouth crunching off the end, offered it to the reluctant though curious boy.
“Peppermint,” she said, “it’s called peppermint candy. Have some. Sant. brought it for you.”
The boy took the candy from his mother, who smoothed his hair once. He bit a small amount, held it in his mouth, and crunched.
“It’s funny,” he said. “It tastes funny.” He crunched again with his mouth open, licking at the air as if it might add to the strange food’s flavor.
Nia popped up from the bedding, hurried to Grayson, peered at the candy he was inspecting, and asked for her own.
The invader extracted another peppermint hook from the green sack and handed it to the girl. She turned the thing over in her hands, picked at its clear skin, and put it to her tongue. She asked the boy if he liked the thing and he shrugged, still suspicious. Each kid stood with candy in hand, staring from the hook to the red figure, back to the hook again.
“Yaadilah,” said the grandmother, “they don’t get it. We should have said something before. We’re just freaking them out. Larry, take off that stupid beard and give them the presents.”
“Who is Larry?” the girl asked.
The mother rolled her eyes, waved the children off, and poured hot tea into two mugs.
Larry removed the stringy white beard, which had been hooked around his ears, and shoved it into a pocket of his coat. He took the strange hat off, revealing greasy, thin, unkempt hair. He rubbed a hand over his reddened face, dropped the green sack to the ground, and kneeled down to extract a couple of shiny boxes, one of which he tossed toward Nia’s feet and the other toward Grayson, hitting him in the chest. The two stared at the boxes on the ground before them, like disappointed and uncertain pups given scraps.
“You’re supposed to open them,” said the old woman. “Don’t be scared. Come on, now, show me what’s inside.”
While the children bent down to open the boxes, I watched Larry turn his attention to the mother, pull her closer to him by the waist, and put his mouth to her hair. He whispered and she giggled, curled into his embrace. She handed him a mug to warm his hands. But it wasn’t the mug he wanted. I knew this of men. It hadn’t changed.
The boy watched. His fright turned to confusion, perhaps anger. He removed the glittering skin of the box, set it unopened in his lap. Looking away from his mother and the strange man, he joined in Nia’s excitement as she pulled out a doll with wheat-colored hair and pinkish skin. Its blue eyes were vacant, though they seemed to follow everyone in the hogan. I wondered if the Bilgáana had themselves begun to use black magic to steal away and change our people. The leveling of land and livestock, trees resembling the deformed bones of the dead—if this violence and cruelty hadn’t been enough for them.
The girl said, “This doesn’t look like anyone I know. Maybe like the boarding school teachers, only prettier.” She walked the doll along the floor, mimicking the way the Bilgáana spoke. Yada-yada-yada, yada-yada-yada.
The old woman laughed, asked what in the world the doll was saying. The girl repeated the gibberish, to the grandma’s delight.
The boy frowned, determined not to open his box. His mother noticed, but rather than comfort or help him, she turned her attention to the strange man.
“He needs to do it himself,” she said. “He’ll be grown before I know it, then I’ll be alone.”
“The sooner the better,” said the man, kissing the mother’s hand, holding his cup out for more tea.
My body doesn’t recall the touch of affection or want, the ache of hurt or pleasure. It’s transparent, as unnoticeable as unmoving air, the thin light through suspended dust.
The girl leaned against the boy, asked if he wanted help opening the box. He nodded. Before she could guide his hands through the movements, he slammed the box twice against the ground, shook it near his ear. Surprised, the adults in the hogan wondered aloud what he was doing. Wasn’t he happy for the gift? The boy replied that whatever was inside, he wanted to be sure it was dead so it wouldn’t attack him once set free. The mother, exasperated, turned again toward the man and urged Nia to help the boy. The kids set to opening the box, extracting what looked to be an oddly shaped wagon with no hookups for the horses. The boy struggled to hide his delight. He rolled the thing back and forth, creating shallow ruts on the dirt floor that the mother would surely wipe away.
The night passed. The children played make-believe with their new toys, while the old woman made beds—males on the north, females on the south—and the two lovers sat closely on chairs, whispering, laughing.
In my home, my son had slept alone on the male side of the hogan. As I’ve said, I never had a man around more than a night. Even when my boy was scared because some creature howled or hurried past our door, wind shaking our windows, I’d tell him, as he pleaded with me to sleep next to me, that he should quiet, never show weakness or vulnerability, only indifference and strength. In my final absence from my children, I’m certain they didn’t cry. I’m certain. They did the things that would help them survive. Sought the sustenance of the walls that contained them, and when their spirits left their bodies, even then, they didn’t cry. Because of their final silence, I’ll never know their sound, never remember what they looked like.
The group prepared for sleep, Larry sneaking his bedroll closer to the mother. Before the lantern was extinguished, he told Grayson he needed to get used to him coming around and staying. The boy gave no response, remained still, eyes shut against the dim light, the yammering adults, and the cold. Lost to his family in some unknown place in his imagination.
I’ll never be known.
The truth about me, my children, and our deaths will never lead me toward freedom. Forever will I be a nameless fear, the epitome of coldheartedness, neglect, and failure. The ghost of a culture that values women most but never speaks the names of their dead. Not like those we fought who arrived from the south, or the Bilagáana and their Bi’éé Łichíí’í, who stormed in with bullets and fire. These people who carry the names of their dead on their hateful hearts and inflict that suffering on other people. Worship their dead with death.
The bodies surrounding Grayson heaved with sleep, their backs turned against him. The noise of those snoring hid his movements as he got out of bed and put on dungarees and a flannel shirt over his long underwear. Next his socks and boots. Dressed, he crept to where Nia slept, removed the doll she had placed next to her head, and returned to his bedding to retrieve his toy. Next to the door, he hesitated. I saw clearly the fear in his eyes. He tiptoed back to the stove, knelt next to the shovel the grandma had used earlier, and traced his name along the cold metal surface, gathering ash, which he smeared across his forehead. He collected more from the stove and covered his face.
Pulling on his coat, the boy turned the knob and eased the door open, hurried through the doorway quietly. The wind had quit, the air held a stillness, empty as stopped time. Dawn was a thread across the horizon.
The boy skittered atop the frozen snow, his breath acting as clouds for a cloudless sky. The stars were bright in their multitude, their disordered, mischievous origin. Had I had a heart, it might have raced. Raced with the boy running along the path to the outhouse, just over a hill and out of sight of the hogan. Raced against the sun opening the door for the Diyiin to pass momentarily from their world to this one, so that the old woman might pray and make her morning offering. Raced against time now and all time.
I wouldn’t lose this boy. I believed, in some way, he’d felt my presence, was found.
Reaching the outhouse, the boy threw the toys into the pitch of the stinking hole. Stayed a moment to know they were gone, and turned, my boy, my baby, turned to me and I was present to him. He saw me and knew what I was. The cold came up through his coat and into his mouth, into his widened eyes. His breath became invisible, his skin turned the ashen color of his face. And before the mutts could begin barking, and before the old woman could rush to the door screaming his name, I’d taken him home, forever, with me.
*
Bojan Louis’s Sinking Bell is published by Dead Ink Books in the UK, on February 22nd; it is out now in North America, published by Graywolf Press.