Sand People

Excerpt

The kid is brought to us by a social worker. She ushers him onto the sagging porch tender with rot, and they look up at the house. The salt spray has peeled the paint back, curled its edges until it looks like patches of fungus along the clapboards. We are also looking, from the faceted window, looking at the boy standing there bewildered and wind-slapped with a green duffel at his feet.

He fingers the wind chime we made from shark teeth and fishing wire, runs his hand down the sea-snake spine nailed to a porch beam. He is skinny and pale and delicate-seeming. Reminds us of a lost sea bird, the kind that’s slammed against the peninsula by nor’easters blowing through. The kind we make into stew, beaks and all.

The social worker raps the screen door with her knuckles. We slide back the deadlock and step out onto the porch.

You are his closest living relatives, the letter had said. We hadn’t had any mail in years. We only dimly remembered his mother, met her once when she was a child not much younger than this boy. We remembered her because when she asked us why we looked like this, and we said we’d been enchanted, she nodded thoughtfully, believed us. Do you wish to rescind your guardianship and put him in the foster system? No, we’d decided, after thinking it over some. That seemed cruel, especially once we read what the boy had been through. Still, we’re apprehensive about this change.

Maria Lioutaia

Maria Lioutaia was born in Moscow. She now lives and writes in Toronto, where she is working on a novel. Her fiction has also appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Conjunctions, and others. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her last name means “fierce” in Russian.

Hannah Tinti on “Sand People”

Living by the sea is one thing in spring and summer and something else entirely after winter sets in. The beaches are deserted, the sky turns gray, and the cold wind seeps deep inside your bones. But there is a magic to winter beaches—the open emptiness, the twisted driftwood and monstrous carcasses of boats and creatures that wash onto the shore. It casts a spell, just like the kind Maria Lioutaia does in her wildly creative short story, “Sand People.”

Set on an isolated peninsula for lost souls, “Sand People” begins with the depositing of an orphan boy into the home of his aunts, a set of conjoined twins. These witchy aunts make him skirts of seagull feathers and teach him how to weave nightmare-catchers but also warn him to stay away from the Sand People—the human-shaped holes that glide up and down their shoreline. These sand shadows are captivating and ultimately heartbreaking, just as the affections and jealousies that arise in this three-legged, broken family. “Sand People” is about aloneness and togetherness. About the sucking pulls of despair and the saving ties of connection.

I hope you’ll read our author Q&A, where we discuss the inspiration behind “Sand People,” and how to find balance with the strange and the surreal. It’s exciting to see the leaps of fierce imagination on the page, and it’s a thrill to wade into these winter waters with Maria Lioutaia. You never know what will be conjured next.