Lunch Ticket
  • Current Issue
  • Archive
    • Issues Archive
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Genre Archive
      • Creative Nonfiction
      • Essays
      • Fiction
      • Flash Prose
      • Interviews
      • Lunch Specials
      • Poetry
      • Translation
      • Visual Art
      • Writing for Young People
  • About
    • Mission Statement
    • Lunch Ticket Staff
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
      • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
      • Issue 1: Spring 2012
    • Achievements
    • Community
    • Contact
  • Weekly Content
    • Friday Lunch Blog
    • Midnight Snack
    • Amuse-Bouche
    • School Lunch
  • Contests
    • Diana Woods Award in CNF
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
      • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
      • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
      • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
    • Gabo Prize in Translation
      • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
      • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
      • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
      • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
      • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
      • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
      • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
      • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
      • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
      • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
      • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
      • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
      • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
      • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
      • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
      • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
    • Twitter Poetry Contest
      • 2021 Winners
      • 2020 Winners
      • 2019 Winners
  • Submissions
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

The Persistence of Wolves

May 25, 2015/in CNF, CNF, Summer-Fall 2015 / by Fabienne Josaphat

I

Stillness in the mountains, in the way the mist clings, eternal, like suspended cobwebs on the prickly pine needles and limbs of green guavas, in the way the mountains curve like the rolling hips of the women hiking red dirt clearings far away. They’re balancing bread in baskets atop their tightly turbaned hair. Time, here, is crystallized against the mountains around my friends’ house. The stillness is abruptly broken, first by their adhan, a call and response weaving a song, their song a prayer, their prayer a call to persist, persistence to desire a right to live, to exist in the flesh among the fertile minarets of Haiti.

From the balcony, we watch this world stretch wide like a vintage post card of the days before we were broken by putsches and pillage, before we learned to turn our rage inward.

Stillness, first broken by song, now splinters like desiccated bamboo. The crack is irreversible. The clouds huddle overhead as frightened ewes in the approaching storm, but it does not rain. It’s just the sky bracing itself to cry over Port-au-Prince, as bullets crack the afternoon down its middle.

II

I hide behind the pillars of my father’s legs and plug my ears with my fingers. I’m thankful and aware, perhaps for the first time, for his height, finding reassurance in his stillness. He is unmoved and unimpressed. He is a mountain, too, arms folded on his chest. Next to him, his friend adjusts the butt of a rifle against his daughter’s shoulder and teaches her to aim, to seek out the peak of pines through the rear and front sights, to target the imaginary enemy who isn’t yet at their door. It’s only a matter of time, he says, showing her how to wrap that finger around the trigger, and pull.

“This is a necessity,” he says to my father. Foolish is the man who cannot provide safety for daughters and mothers in a country where men have morphed into wild dogs. They rape and hate and teach submissiveness, he says. They force the husband to watch as they take his wife, and force the father to rape his daughter and force the mother to watch, and the violence is now a flash flood rushing through our veins. Blood, blood in our eyes and blood in our mouths and blood on our hands, ready, aim, shoot, and try again.

The girl pulls the trigger. She is my age, and she wears a dress hemmed above the knee, and I can see her brown legs tensing with each blow of the gun, like chords on a violin before they snap. It’s only a matter of time before they come for you, or me, her father says. My father is still a mountain, unimpressed, deciphering for himself the silence of mountains around us.

I imagine what blood tastes like in the mouth when a bullet hits the flesh. I think it tastes like a shrapnel explosion would, like cold iron or peppered gunpowder. The clouds close in, thick layers of cotton dripping a milky, misty film over peaks, swallowing the songs of women.

III

He has four daughters in these mountains, and my father has just one in the plains.

We meet here on occasional Sundays to measure and compare the effectiveness of fathers.

Other families have both parents to shield them in the midnight hour when the werewolves come bursting through doors to feed. Violence now becomes a need, and we are teaching each other self-defense by arming babies.

It used to be that what we feared bumped in the shadows: hairy tarantulas, vicious centipedes, or the blind collision of bats in the night hunting for fruit, tossing almonds and custard apples against our windows. It used to be that we turned our clothes inside out or smoked our pipes upside down to ward off evil spirits, night walkers, zobop and chanpwèl and loup-garou roaming the dark, reaping innocent souls. We used to fear the unknown, the impenetrable mystery carried through the Middle Passage, woven in the cavernous hold of the Negrier ships, hauled through the oceans from coastal beaches of Benin, or the Congo.

Fear, for a while, was killing mothers by licking a table knife, or pointing to an owl at night, or letting a black butterfly flutter close. Fear was dying of a coup de poudre and living death to be zombified.

Haitians now fear two things in this world, they say: rain drops, and bullets. When they feel or hear both, they disperse and disappear, ducking for shelter.

Now, fear inhabits us during the day and at the onset of night. Now, each man, and woman, and child, learns to survive the edge of machetes and the fatal blow of machine guns, which seem to abound more than magic. Now, fear is sending a child to school with nothing for food but a rock of salt under the tongue for sustenance, or a glass of sugared water for breakfast. Fear is a rubber necklace that begins to melt into the skin when a tire holds a man’s arms in place and he is set on fire. Fear is the silence on the radio after the voice of the journalist has been silenced with bullets. Fear is the knocking on the metal gate. Fear is a man in uniform entering the house, asking to use the telephone. Fear is the men in khaki driving past homes, eyes hidden behind dark glasses.

I devise to hide under the bed, as if bullets cannot pierce my mattress. I devise to crawl inside the armoire, as if men with machetes cannot smash through mahogany and reap the limbs they came for. Violence is already in my house, in the way fear possesses my father at the thought of the task to raise children alone. There is no sleep tonight, or tomorrow, or any other night, for a long, long time, a never-ending time, for as long as those wolves persist in the dark.

IV

On the way home, driving from the mountains, my father clutches the wheel and veers left, then right, to avoid the ghosts roaming the road. They walk through dusk as zombies do, fighting the density of the city, blending in with the darkness, barely grazing each other, arms wrapped around buckets of glorious gladiolas and sunflowers, around strings of leather masks and clusters of feathered hens and cocks. They pack the remnants of their day as the clouds descend lower onto the needling domes of cathedrals and fences, their midst opening a wide mouth to swallow them whole.

Night falls on Port-au-Prince at its own pace, yielding them with time for the final offerings of oranges and avocados, the fear of the dark already twining in their eyes. We’re all afraid of the same monsters, I think. But I wonder if we—my father and I—aren’t more susceptible, behind our oak doors, beneath our blanketed beds, inside our acacia armoires, than they are within the four walls of their slum villages, and somehow I manage to resent the world for that cold critter crawling up my esophagus as we arrive home and lock our gates.

There will be no sleep tonight, nor tomorrow, nor any other night, as long as fathers teach daughters to shoot, as long as my father teaches me to feel safe and still as he, in the dark, unpacks his own secret weapons and slips a pistol under his pillow.

Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat is a native of Haiti living in Miami. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has been featured in Fourth Genre, Grist Journal, Damselfly, and Off the Coast Journal.

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 David Bumpus https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png David Bumpus2015-05-25 13:56:402016-02-29 17:02:14The Persistence of Wolves

Issue Archive

  • Issue 22: Winter/Spring 2023
  • Issue 21: Summer/Fall 2022
  • Issue 20: Winter/Spring 2022
  • Issue 19: Summer/Fall 2021
  • Issue 18: Winter/Spring 2021
  • Issue 17: Summer/Fall 2020
  • Issue 16: Winter/Spring 2020
  • Issue 15: Summer/Fall 2019
  • Issue 14: Winter/Spring 2019
  • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
  • Issue 12: Winter/Spring 2018
  • Issue 11: Summer/Fall 2017
  • Issue 10: Winter/Spring 2017
  • Issue 9: Summer/Fall 2016
  • Issue 8: Winter/Spring 2016
  • Issue 7: Summer/Fall 2015
  • Issue 6: Winter/Spring 2015
  • Issue 5: Summer/Fall 2014
  • Issue 4: Winter/Spring 2014
  • Issue 3: Summer/Fall 2013
  • Issue 2: Winter/Spring 2013
  • Issue 1: Spring 2012

Genre Archive

  • Creative Nonfiction
  • Essays
  • Fiction
  • Flash Prose
  • Lunch Specials
  • Poetry
  • Interviews
  • Translation
  • Visual Art
  • Writing for Young People

Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

How to Kill a Cat, or How to Prepare for CATastrophe

March 10, 2023/in Blog / Meghan McGuire
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/51458407-FB7D-4C1F-AD98-9E3181F097C9.jpg 2288 2288 Meghan McGuire https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Meghan McGuire2023-03-10 11:55:512023-03-08 12:08:20How to Kill a Cat, or How to Prepare for CATastrophe

The Night I Want to Remember

December 16, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Sanaz Tamjidi
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/paul-volkmer-qVotvbsuM_c-unsplash-scaled-1.jpg 1704 2560 Sanaz Tamjidi https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Sanaz Tamjidi2022-12-16 16:12:142022-12-16 16:12:14The Night I Want to Remember

From Paper to the Page

November 18, 2022/in 2023ws-migration, Blog / Annie Bartos
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/IMG-7101-1-scaled-1.jpg 2560 1920 Annie Bartos https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Annie Bartos2022-11-18 12:27:332022-12-07 19:27:42From Paper to the Page

More Friday Lunch Blog »

Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

March 3, 2023/in Midnight Snack / Michaela Emerson
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ECD45731-BD0A-4144-9DDE-DBE45519C4A6.jpeg 2461 1882 Michaela Emerson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Michaela Emerson2023-03-03 23:45:542023-03-04 00:06:21Point Break & Top Gun Are More Than Homoerotic Action Movies

Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

October 7, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/jason-briscoe-VBsG1VOgLIU-unsplash-scaled.jpg 1707 2560 Megan Vasquez https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Megan Vasquez2022-10-07 23:55:352022-10-07 19:31:09Mending the Heart and Slowing Down: Reintroducing Myself to Mexican Cooking

The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

September 23, 2022/in Midnight Snack / Kirby Chen Mages
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/image2-scaled.jpeg 2560 1920 Kirby Chen Mages https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Kirby Chen Mages2022-09-23 23:56:162022-09-23 21:56:42The Worth of a Billionaire’s Words

More Midnight Snacks »

Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Litdish: Ten Questions with Lise Quintana

March 31, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Interviewed by Gail Vannelli
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Lise-Quintana-headshot.jpg 500 500 Interviewed by Gail Vannelli https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Interviewed by Gail Vannelli2023-03-31 11:21:262023-03-31 12:40:37Litdish: Ten Questions with Lise Quintana

On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

March 17, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Jemma Leigh Roe
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/JLR.jpeg 1204 1042 Jemma Leigh Roe https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Jemma Leigh Roe2023-03-17 11:55:192023-03-20 12:27:25On Such a Full Sea Are We Now

The Russian Train

February 24, 2023/in Amuse-Bouche / Cammy Thomas
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/06BA84B9-9FF6-4D6C-97E3-9F02075E851D.jpeg 2042 1609 Cammy Thomas https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Cammy Thomas2023-02-24 14:30:592023-02-24 11:40:48The Russian Train

More Amuse-Bouche »

School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL-Insta-Brendan-Nurczyk-2.png 1500 1500 Brendan Nurczyk https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Brendan Nurczyk2021-05-12 10:18:392022-02-01 13:24:05I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-FB-Isabella-Dail.png 788 940 Isabella Dail https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Isabella Dail2021-04-28 11:34:132021-04-28 11:34:13A Communal Announcement

Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
Read more
https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL-Insta-Abigail-E.-Calimaran.png 1080 1080 Abigail E. Calimaran https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Abigail E. Calimaran2021-04-14 11:22:062021-04-14 11:22:06Seventeen

More School Lunch »

Word From the Editor

Our contributors are diverse and the topics they share through their art vary, but their work embodies this mission. They explore climate change, family, relationships, poverty, immigration, human rights, gun control, among others topics. Some of these works represent the mission by showing pain or hardship, other times humor or shock, but they all carry in them a vision for a brighter world.

More from the current editor »
Current Issue »

Connect With Us

lunchticket on facebooklunchticket on instalunchticket on twitter
Submit to Lunch Ticket

A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.

Get Your Ticket

We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.

Newsletter Signup
Copyright © 2021 LunchTicket.org. All Rights Reserved. Web design and development by GoodWebWorks.
Scroll to top