“You must miss having a family.”
“They were not my family,” said the boy, wiping crumbs from his lips. “That’s what they always told me.”
Abba Dabo crossed himself. “Poor thing,” he said. “But you must forgive them in your heart. We must remember the dead with kindness and move forward with life.”
They were sitting in the sunlit courtyard of the orphanage, sharing a midmorning plate of bread that was marbled here and there with spicy red veins of berbere. It had been two months that the boy had been living with Abba Dabo. He no longer waited for permission to eat. His body was free of lice and ringworm spots. He wore a clean white cotton shirt, a smaller version of the one Abba Dabo always wore. They had burned the clothes he arrived in. The boy’s limbs no longer looked like fragile twigs. Now they were sturdy branches.
“You are my family,” said the boy, as he watched his friends Aida and Omar laugh wildly over a game of cards. There was no sound more beautiful than the laughter of other children. “This is my home.”
“This is no one’s home,” said Abba Dabo, patting the boy on the knee and rising to his feet with effort. That was another thing he could do once the funds from the Americans came through: finally see someone about his back.
Four months. That’s all it took. It must have been some kind of world record. That’s what Abba Dabo said when he told the Americans that their application had been expedited.
“The fastest ever,” he lied.
“Really?”
“Really,” said Abba Dabo. He watched their happiness flare brighter with the thrill of overachievement, and squirmed at the sight of them kissing, averting his eyes awkwardly.
After they had thanked Abba Dabo no less than a dozen times — another world record, he thought — the husband cleared his throat. “We were just wondering,” he said, “if maybe now, you know, because of the process, you were right, we shouldn’t get our hopes up, but—”
His wife cut in, curtly: “Can we say hi now?”
“Now that it’s official,” the husband added.
For the past several weeks, Abba Dabo had been dodging their request to speak to the boy. After they had wired the funds, the wife asked repeatedly, and Abba Dabo always told her that it wasn’t wise to meet him and grow attached until after the process was officially complete. They had him trapped. He watched himself squirm in the tiny square at the bottom of the screen. Abba Dabo couldn’t blame it on the process anymore. Now, he was forced to make up something new.
“The boy is very shy,” Abba Dabo lied. And this time, he could tell the wife wasn’t buying it, so he went on: “We are working to bring him out of his shell. He has been through a lot. Sometimes this happens with children.”
“I imagine he’s still dealing with some PTSD,” the husband offered, though even he had a new furrow of suspicion forming on his brow.
“Yes,” said Abba Dabo. “Very PTSD.”
When he ended the call, Abba Dabo found that he had sweated through his dress shirt. Dark stains spread at his underarms. It was a blessing that one could not smell others over the computer.
The problem was simple: the boy did not want to be adopted and did not want to leave the orphanage. For a while, Abba Dabo thought he was just being stubborn, that he could convince the boy over time to embrace the idea of a new life with a new family. But the boy had refused every call with the Americans, even turning down a pair of sneakers Abba Dabo had tried to bribe him with earlier that week.
Abba Dabo’s worry suddenly transformed into rage. He stormed out of his office and found the boy where he had left him on his bed in the main sleeping quarters, staring absently, unblinking, at the ceiling.
“What’s wrong with you!” he shouted. No one had ever heard him this angry. The outburst so startled the other children that everyone in the room immediately filed outside, nervous, distraught. Abba Dabo tried to calm himself. He began pacing at the foot of the boy’s bed.
“Don’t you want a family who will provide for you? Who will love you?”
“I am happy here,” said the boy.
“Anyone would kill to live in America!”
“I don’t want to.”
“You think it matters what you want?” An incredulous smile spread over Abba Dabo’s face. “It’s already finished!”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Abba Dabo was livid. He had never in his life dealt with such arrogance. “Shall I send you back to where you came from to let the animals finish the job?”
Tears instantly poured from the boy’s eyes and his body began to shake with sobs. It was the cruelest thing Abba Dabo had ever said to anyone — man, woman, or child. But he had never encountered such amazing stupidity in the face of such wild generosity. He had already spent a good portion of the Americans’ money fixing the plumbing.
“You will thank me one day,” said Abba Dabo, resting a tender, apologetic hand on the boy’s arm. “When you graduate from university and you get a good job and a big house full of food and nice things and you have the freedom to do whatever you want with no bother from anyone watching over you, then you’ll say to yourself, Thank you, Abba Dabo, for giving me a better life. That is what I do. It’s what I’ve always tried to do for all of you.”
Later that night, Abba Dabo woke to the sound of a small voice singing softly near his bed. The voice threaded through his sleeping thoughts, wove dream into reality, as his eyes parted to take in the surroundings of his darkened quarters. In the corner, he saw the silhouette of the boy, his small body crouched against the closed door.
“There once was a boy from far away,” sang the boy, barely above a whisper, “who all the children called Moritay. They said at night he turned to a beast. And on those who had wronged him, he would feast...”
“Ayzow,” grunted Abba Dabo, well versed in the night terrors of orphans. “Go back to your room. Drink some water.”
But the boy went on in a kind of trance: “A farmer said God had cursed his mother’s womb. Now the farmer lies silent in his tomb. Then the boy met a man made of bread, who gave him clean clothes and a nice warm bed. This man would soon rue the day he tried to sell off poor Moritay...”
“Why are you disturbing me at this hour?” Abba Dabo sat up and switched on the lamp by his bed to better glower at the boy.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the boy replied, then chuckled as though remembering a joke.
“What has happened?”
The boy paced the room in tight, quick circles, and then he started to laugh. It was a strange laugh. Humorless, breathy, high-pitched. It was like laughter in a different language, one that came from an unusual place in the body. The air in the room grew thick with a sour, feral odor, and Abba Dabo’s heart seized with terror as he watched the transformation in utter disbelief. The boy began to mutate, placing his hands on the floor, the little spine drooping backward into the hips. Fur spread like fire wherever there was skin, from his back to his tiny hands, tiny hands which now tightened into knots of bone and claw that clacked against the floorboards.