White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,1

the cardboard shack while Isaac sat on the ground with the white dog. Long ago before he’d gone to school, he remembered his mother telling him that there were oceans on Earth. She said that the water was so big, you could not see to the land on the other side. She’d heard that the water threads connected to the moon, so when the moon grew larger, the waters also grew larger, like an older brother sharing food with a younger brother. But she didn’t know where the big water came from and went back to. Maybe to the center of the Earth, she told him, where it can’t be seen, flowing underneath. His head felt like that water, with the moon pulling on it, the waters going back and forth.

The woman came back out of her house, with a tin mug. She brought a small stool for him to sit on. He stretched out his hand respectfully, right one reaching, left touching the right elbow. He bowed his head in thanks.

She sat on a rock near him and studied his face. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Ee, mma.”

She rose again and came back with a bowl of sorghum porridge. She poured reconstituted powdered milk on it and gave him a spoon. “Who hurt you?” she asked.

“No one.”

“Why are you not telling the truth?”

“The journey hurt me. No one person. I traveled out of South Africa in a compartment under a casket.”

“Surely not. But I did see a large car travel up that track. I saw the men pull you out and throw you on the ground. When you spoke to me, I thought if I do not speak, if I pretend I don’t see it, that thing will return to the dead.”

He smiled.

“You did not have money for the train?”

“The train was not possible.” His friend Kopano passed in front of his eyes. Two men, wearing the uniform of the South African Defense Force, walking toward a van, no hurry. The train disgorging steam beside the platform. The conductor: Get your dirty kaffir hands off.

It did not matter whether she believed him or not. Now, the problem was not the journey that brought him here, but where to sleep tonight and the night after. In the darkness, it is said that you must hold on to one another by the robe. But where was the robe? He would need to leave here. He would thank this woman and be gone.

“What is this place called?” he asked the woman. Makeshift dwellings stretched as far as you could see.

“Naledi.”

From what can you not make a house? Oil drums, grass, mud, sheets of torn plastic, tires, wooden vegetable crates, banged-up doors ripped from cars and trucks. Each place was called home by someone, maybe ten people, sleeping side by side on the floor, crawling out in daylight, when the sun is drying the blades of short grass that the goats have not yet eaten, drying the leaves of the acacia trees with its heat. For a few moments only, this Naledi would be wreathed in morning mist. Would he be here tomorrow to see it? He put his hand out without thinking and touched the fur of the dog.

“When did you come here?” he asked the woman.

“It doesn’t matter when I came. The government says they are going to knock down all the houses.”

“What will you do then?”

“Ga ke itse.” She shrugged. I don’t know. “They’ll bring the bulldozers and knock the houses down, and then the people will come back and build the houses again.” She looked as though he should know these things. He watched her as she disappeared around the other side of the house.

Outside Pretoria, where he’d lived, the police came after the sun had set. You could hear people crying that they were coming. In the darkness they ran. They jumped over fences and disappeared into the night. There were no maps for where they went. They rose from their beds and climbed out their windows, and each moment was a place they didn’t know and had never been. With the sound of the police vans, thousands departed under the rags of darkness. His mother didn’t have legal papers. She barricaded the door and hid under the bed and told the children to be as still as stones. But the baby cried and the police knocked the door down and they put his mother in prison for seventeen days. When she was gone, there was