Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

The narrator sits with her grandsons around a fire, waiting for the boys’ parents to return. The following day, the boys will fast in the woods, and she means to prepare them. The narrator was born with “the sight” and helps as many as she can in her family adjust to it. She instructs her grandsons, whom she calls No Filter and String Bean, to cook their steaks on the fire and leave some out beyond the circle where they are sitting. This will keep ghosts and other spirits away from them.

She explains to her grandsons that though the world changes, the agreements their ancestors made with the spiritual world do not. Colonization and residential schools have erased much of their ancestors’ tradition and history, jeopardizing the knowledge they need to be safe. The narrator tells the boys that the human eaters are tall, with baskets on their backs, and chop up and eat those who break their vows. She tells a story of how two boys broke their fasting and ran away. The human eaters caught them and kept one of the boys, warning his people that the human eaters were still there even if some could no longer see them. Just as the boys’ parents’ headlights flash at the narrator and her grandsons, she sees the legs of a human eater at the edge of their circle.

Johnny Junior lives with his father on the South Side of Chicago and helps run their family real estate office on 79th Street. One night, a ‘63 Ford Falcon filled with teenagers drives by, and the teens throw a brick that breaks the window and hits Junior in the face, shattering his orbital bone. Weeks late, as Junior closes up the office, the same car returns, but this time, a large figure covered in fur with mismatched eyes steps out with a bag full of the teenagers’ heads. The creature, Louis, offers them to Junior, but he refuses. Louis tells Junior that he secretly asked for them when he was attacked. Louis followed Junior’s people up to Chicago from the South and appears when people in the community need help.

Louis goes to the bathroom, and Junior hides the heads under the office’s doormat. As he does, the door flies open, and Junior recognizes the intruder as Rudy, a man who frequently (and poorly) robs local businesses. Junior warns Rudy that he will die unless he leaves. Rudy does not believe him, but when Louis walks back into the room, he takes Rudy’s gun and tells Rudy to lift the doormat. When Rudy sees the heads, he complains that they will frame him for murder and pleads with Louis, who shoots him.

Louis and Junior put Rudy in the driver’s seat of the car alongside the heads. Afterward, Junior asks Louis where he goes when he is not helping. Louis tells him that he is unsure of where he goes but that he truly cares about helping the people of the neighborhood. When Junior pushes for a better answer, Louis tells him that there is nothing in between and that only people’s beliefs allow him to exist.

Every summer, a Dakota girl named Amy takes a bus from Chicago to Bismarck, North Dakota, to visit her aunt Phyllis, a school nurse for United Tribes Technical College. Aunt Phyllis is kind and goes along with whatever Amy wants to do. This time, they go to see The Shining, which scares Aunt Phyllis. Though Amy enjoys it, the movie tests her nerves. That night, she wakes up feeling as though someone is watching her. She looks around but only sees Aunt Phyllis’s many owl decorations.

The next morning, Amy asks Aunt Phyllis about whether there are ghosts in the building. Amy knows that the campus was once “Fort Lincoln, an internment camp for ‘enemy aliens’ during World War II” (246). Instead of answering, Aunt Phyllis tells Amy about her first love, Hiro, who was one of the Japanese American citizens imprisoned there while she was a nursing student. They got along, and Hiro frequently made her origami cranes out of scraps of paper. Hiro, who was alone in the camp, eventually hanged himself, and Phyllis blames herself for being too shy to support him more. 

A week into her stay, Amy wakes up freezing, and she feels she is being watched every night after. When Amy calls her mother to ask about ghosts, her mother reminds her of a visit with Aunt Phyllis when Amy was younger. Amy and her mother were driving near the dorms and passed a man walking with a blanket wrapped around him. Amy’s mother stopped to see if he needed a ride. After rolling down the window, however, she sped away in terror, telling Amy the man was a ghost who was floating across the ground.

One night, a young woman shakes Amy awake. Amy finds herself on the prairie and can tell the woman does not like her because Amy is Dakota. The woman drags Amy up a hill, where they see men leaving a fort. Amy recognizes General George Armstrong Custer among them and realizes the woman is Libby, Custer’s wife. Amy tries to run, but Libby pins her to the ground and chokes her. As Amy loses consciousness, she hears a screech and Libby disappears. Amy sees a young man beside her. 

In the morning, all the owls in the room are smashed and Amy finds blood on the couch. Aunt Phyllis cleans her up and notices Amy holding something in her hand. She pries Amy’s fingers apart and finds a small origami crane. Aunt Phyllis cries as Amy reassures her that Hiro saved her.