In the cool N’Djamena mornings, the sun finding its way down in between the papaya leaves, you find your first hedgehogs sniveling the ground with their barely perceptible grunts and ever-twitching noses. You find that if you spend hours petting their spikes, they grow used to you, their spikes laying down like soft fur as they unravel, expose their belly, and look at you with something mirroring caution and love. Your father decides to build a hedgehog home for you and your brother, a two-storied, screened-in cage with ample room for each hedgehog you’d catch. You watch them for hours, or hold them in your hand, walk up the steps to the roof of your house, Moussa teaching you your first words of Arabic—aboungounfout yakhoul ful. You laugh at the way the words catch in your tongue, and you laugh later at the way the words form into a sentence you hardly have need for—The hedgehog eats peanuts.
You let the hedgehogs climb up and down the steps, you hold them as you watch the city traffic bustle blocks down on the paved road.
Your hedgehogs grow, but they cannot be contained. It is then that Moussa shares with you the myths. If you find a hedgehog in a street, place a bucket over it then remove it—the hedgehog will have disappeared. You begin to find the cage empty in the mornings, no sign of escape, but somehow they had found a way out. Othertimes, you find the extent to which they had tried to leave, a hedgehog clinging to the chicken wire, almost free but bloodied and dead from an alley cat’s clawmarks. So you and your brother decide to begin naming them the names of Great Escape characters, that old 1963 movie you had just watched for the first time about trapped POWs attempting escape from a Nazi concentration camp. There was Hilts, the suave, curious hedgehog, whose spikes couldn’t be tamed. There was Ives, the baby, who curled up into the size of a quarter when you first got him. He started to grow too, and he was your favorite, the way his spikes never extended, and even then, had not grown into a sharp hardness, still almost like fur. Wanting to play with him one morning, you come to the cage and find him drowned in the water bowl.
It is then that you and your brother stop catching the aboungounfout, but would let them run free in the bushes. It is then you realize that some animals are not meant to be caught.
When after the first year you and your family move to the small dust-covered town you would call home, Ati; when your capital of millions became a town of ten thousand, you find a hedgehog on the first night there, too, out on the street at twilight, you sitting there and it coming on by. You clutch the familiar heart-beating orb in your hands once again, work on softening its spikes with steady caresses. Moussa sitting next to you, having moved his family out with yours to continue his employment, to continue his uncle-like role over you, to shepherd this hedgehog imagination within you.
And when a man comes by, the half-drunk man who works on the construction crew that had come to fix up your family’s house, when he comes by and asks what it is you are holding, you lift up the hedgehog and smile. But then he does something you do not expect. He sneers at you, grabs the hedgehog from your hands, chucks it twenty yards into the twilight air. You watch the spiky orb rise up into the dusk air, rise and curl, and fall until it thuds into the ground in a cloud.
You find the hedgehog lying down the street, its body seizing and silent and seizing and the tears streaming down your face. You bring it into your flashlight lit room and set the animal down in a newly made box. You stay up that night, trying to feed it the peanuts you were told that it liked. You speak to it, too, hoping your words would console the animal while your own body shakes. You cannot explain why your body shakes.
When you bury the hedgehog in the morning, you are sure you’ll never love a creature that much again. In the months that follow, you watch a seed from the overhanging hajlij tree fall and sprout in the place where you buried your friend. How quickly do you forget—as the small sprout grows branches you’ll try and pluck but can never get rid of—that this is the place where you buried your last hedgehog?
–
Aaron Brown is the author of the poetry collection Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press). He has been published in World Literature Today, Tupelo Quarterly, Waxwing, Cimarron Review, and Transition, among others. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Kansas, where he is a professor of writing at Sterling College. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland.