We Shadows Have Offended

The memory often played itself inside Mensonge’s head as he slept, though seldom vivid enough to cause him to wake up screaming. On the plane from New York to Chicago, he fell into a twilight slumber full of an endless loop of the worst thirty minutes of his entire life.
One second, it had been four boys sitting on a rusty metal carousel as it lazily spun in the late October breeze. Bill was lighting matches and flicking them off into piles of leaves. Hammond was smacking him on the back of the head for doing so every time he caught him. “My mama’s going to bust you, fool,” Hammond would say. “Gonna burn the whole house down.”
Sam just laughed at the two of them, while Roger himself wished he were brave enough to go play with tiny Nona Centini as she sat on the sidewalk nearby, alternately hugging and beating her beloved grey teddy bear. Roger’s tiny cousin whom they’d left back in Haiti was just Nona’s age, and he missed her painfully.
“What’s the funny talker think?” Bill was asking.
Roger glared at him and longed to answer in his native tongue but didn’t dare. Bill was the only one of the boys who mocked him, and Roger didn’t care for his attitude. “Something is wrong with your head,” he told Bill.
That was when Sam had gasped and began to point. “Not his head,” Sam had murmured. “What’s wrong with Nona?”
There was no longer a sweet toddler on the sidewalk. Nona’s bear was cast onto the grass, and there was still a tiny figure wearing her crisp, white dress. The thing inside the dress, however, was very clearly no longer human.