Addis Ababa Noir

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The faint bedroom light spilled across the floor and slumped against the window. I stood with my ear plastered to the wall, my hands shaking. I heard it again. The growls that darkness could not swallow. I knew what it was. I knew what they were. They were back and there was nothing we could do to stop them. When daylight came, I would walk outside, go down the steps of our veranda, and I would see the hole and the blood and the fur and other discarded parts of the dog that was now missing. I knew where the hyenas came from. I’d been warned to stay away from the forest that began just down the road from our house. The mouth of that forest was a wide cluster of trees intersected by bands of light. The dark patches were large enough to swallow a grown man and make him disappear. And this was another lesson I would learn very soon: that people, too, disappeared.

It was 1974 or it might have been 1975. I was too young to pay attention to years, to understand the sweep of time. I measured days by the nights that fell on us and brought in darker things: revolution and soldiers and curfews and gunfire. Somewhere in between this, the hyenas started coming to eat our dogs. They did this one night at a time. Taking the first and leaving the other two alive to witness their methodical hunger. To froth and whine and jump in mindless fear. They returned soon for the next one, sending the sole survivor into maddened, writhing terror while it waited for the inevitable. They were unstoppable. Every night, as shots rang out between revolutionaries and government forces in those early years of the Ethiopian Revolution, the hyenas clawed beneath the fence my grandfather tried in vain to reinforce. They were diligent.

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