This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers. Locked in a strange house in an unnamed country, a brown-skinned girl grows up. Her papa is domineering and abusive, her mother vain and impotent, the servants hateful. Only the visiting Egyptologist pays her any mind. That is, until the day the dog shows up, long and pointed and black. With this new companion, the girl begins to unlock the secrets of her strange life, but what she finds may be more than she was looking for. Taking cues from Egyptian mythology and the Victorian gothic, In the House of the Jackal is an unsettling story about a girl’s struggle to control her own destiny—and how desires can be twisted if denied too long.