Black Dog Summer by Miranda Sherry

has stopped breathing. A sudden blast of wind pushes her closer to the window as if it wants to smash her right into the glass just as the dark cloth finally falls to the floor.
    It’s just a mask! One of those creepy African masks. Bryony almost giggles in relief. She rests her forehead against the cool window and gulps air at last. But then, just as she is about to leave, the mask, as if desiring to join the blanket that once covered it, suddenly slips off its hook and crashes to the floor. Bryony leaps backwards, stumbles, and then wills her legs to move.
    She runs with blood pounding in her ears. The first drops of warm rain start to splatter down, and her feet skid on the dampening grass. Above the garden, the clouds open and the storm breaks. Bryony chokes on lungfuls of rain and hurtles towards the safety of the wall, running straight into the edge of the dustbin cover, oblivious as its sharp corner bites into her chest. She struggles for a grip on the wood, unable to see anything but the rain.
    It moved. It fell, just as I was looking at it. It saw me! Panic has turned her muscles into cottage cheese, but at last she scrambles up onto the Matsunyanes’ dustbin housing and drags herself up and over the wall. Bryony lands so hard on the dustbin cover on her own side that one of the slats cracks and, for a moment, the splintered wood yawns like ragged teeth beneath her foot.
    Bryony yelps and throws herself down to the muddy ground before sprinting towards the house, her wet blond hair plastered to an almost transparent sheen across her scalp.
    I do not follow.
    No. Something calls to me from that room with the masks and the beads and the hair, something that promises silence. I allow the call to rush through me, and all at once, although I can still see the rain and the grass through a shifting skin of shadow, I am no longer just in the garden; I am no longer sure where I am.
    The charcoal-colored wind swirls and parts, and the white wooden mask that so frightened Bryony seems to hang in the air before me for a second before it resolves itself into a painted face. I notice dark smooth skin between the cracks in the white face paint. Black eyes with curly lashes. And then, a slow smile. Lesedi.
    I see you, Ancestor.
    I feel the words. They come at me from everywhere, resonating into the very center of me and echoing far, far out to the edges of the black sky.
    For a moment, I am Africa’s rain, nectar-sweet, thumping onto and soaking into brown earth. I am rank cowhide, dusty, twitching, covered with flies. I am river sand, washed caramel-sugar clean by the waters of a flooding stream.
    Why have I not left? I send my own wordless question back. It pulses and beats like the wings of a hundred birds around the white-painted face. Tell me. Why must I follow the noise? Why am I still here with all the human mess and the aching and the past?
    A shard of lightning flicks down.
    I understand your frustration, Ancestor, I know what it is to have to follow a path that has been thrust upon you by forces you cannot see or understand.
    The storm is both around and within me. For a moment it is me. Africa’s thunder shakes through me like laughter.
    You need to stay until the end.
    I’m dead. What more of an ending do you want? I wait. For a long moment, there’s nothing but the rain.
    And then: Gigi . My daughter’s name is a wild wordless song that rises up on the wind, and for a moment, it is one high, clear note on the tumultuous air.
    What about Gigi? What am I supposed to do? But there’s no reply.
    Softly at first, barely distinguishable from the sound of the storm, the story noise returns. It banishes the white face and the voiceless voice, building to a scream until it is everything. Urgent.
    I follow where it calls me. There is nothing else I can do.
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    Bryony hurtles in through the kitchen door and smashes straight into Tyler.
    â€œWatch where you’re going, Bryo—Jeez,