N’Djamena, 1979

Ahead, a ten-year old boy wields a rifle, its killing weight no strange toy in his arms as he stands next to the charred skeleton of a taxi. He smiles as he slowly chews khat and stares at us. The local people call the storms here, tempête de sable, but there are no words for what has risen from the earth, this savage thing that now roams the capital city seeking prey. Last we heard the other Americans were being hunted near villages in the northern deserts. We can’t know if it is true or not, and that scares us. We drive past a riot of loose dogs and try not to think of how little we actually know. Ahead a body lies in the street, necklaced and aflame, and I tell my wife to turn her head and to close her eyes. She tells me what we both do know, that we will come across many more of the dead.

We had been packing a few of our photographs and her wedding dress when we first heard the grenade fall onto the roof and roll down into the eaves. The sound was like when the deceived thrush flies into a glass window, muffled and surprisingly sudden, the quiet thrum of killing a lasting memory. The grenade sat there, however, and did not fly into us, and instead its fiery breast lay still and smooth as though it were also a toy and not some lobbed bomb of the savage thing that lurked out there in the storm.

I take her hand now and feel the thrum inside, strong and resilient, as we lose ourselves in the empty streets of the capital.

James Stolen has work in Bellevue Literary Review, Shenandoah, Sierra Nevada Review, Outside in Literary & Travel Magazine, and Ghost Town, among others. He is currently living in Oregon and working on a novel and series of short stories.