bringing fears to (not) life

For two years running, I have heard, endured, and been woken from dreamful sleeps by the frantic calls of midnight donkeys. Their unprompted brays pierce Mauritanian nights, threaten to shatter dusty car windows, and stir exhausted children from their thin mats.

I never thought twice to curse those beasts, honking and screaming without a thought to aural peace, until I heard secondhand from a Mauritanian the reason for their vocalized anxiety.

“Ils regardent tout.”

Donkeys see everything, she confessed in a hushed voice. “And when they yell at night,” she explained on a whisper, “it’s because they see the dead.”

Imagine, the afterworld, laid bare, with naught but your beaten, scarred colleagues to corroborate. Donkeys, scattered city-wide, chained to two-wheel carts, muzzled by grain sacks, crying foul that the boundary of life be so cruelly and selectively perforated. Ils regardent tout.

Tonight, I lost my way home. Rosso is still yet big enough that I’ve not scoured its hidden streets and outlying neighborhoods. Vainly, I sought landmarks in the blocks of houses going to rubble, ruinous piles of bricks and foundations blending in with muddy cesspools on the roadside. Not one bit of familiar color punctuated the flat skyline. I wandered the abandoned, dirt-packed roads and peered suspiciously though crumbled windows framed with rebar and hopelessness.

As dusk slipped beneath the horizon, I found myself in the ghastly remains of a fish market. Leaning frames of rotted wood creaked under cloth tarps steeped in the remains of today’s catch. Having marinated in the fierce afternoon sun, gelatinous innards, gutted market stands, even the gray sand beneath seemed saturated with rot and death. A perfect venue for wisps of undead to fester and wait for the next forlorn donkey.

Cautiously, silently, I padded though the frightened fish market, praying I’d not encounter one of these putrid, disgruntled spirits. More than that, I hoped no donkey would verify my irrational fears into existence with an ear-piercing, heart-shuddering bray.