Strange Horizons Xenophobia
We, guests in the family’s mouseholes, may not know what we are now but we know loss. Fatou used to tell her children stories from their homeland, The G. In them we were daafeng, formless entities given temporary shape beasts, monsters, even singing rice once for the sake of whatever tale was being recounted. We were educators, in a way.
We had free roam of the house.
But our displaced hosts have all but forgotten us. No longer do we take form. Shapeless, we diminish in mouseholes that grow ever smaller and dimmer.
Some among us cannot even remember our folkloric associates, the Talking Animals. So different were our methods that we were rarely in the same stories. They preferred education through tricky words and acts while we favored the threat of violence. Still, we loved and respected them as fellow educators.