For a Nation Divided by Hate and Anger
Author’s Note
This piece is inspired by Nalusa Falaya, the Long Black Being from Choctaw tradition—a figure that feeds not on violence or spectacle, but on despair, isolation, and spiritual imbalance.
In its original context, Nalusa Falaya is not a monster meant to be hunted or defeated. It is a warning about what happens when people become cut off from one another and from the responsibilities of community.
A Political Allegory
I did not shy away from political allegory in this story because the conditions that give Nalusa Falaya power feel deeply present in the United States today. We are living through a period marked by intense division, fear of difference, and anger that fractures families, friendships, and neighborhoods. Disagreement has hardened into hostility. People often choose silence over connection because it feels safer, not because it heals.
From an Indigenous worldview, that kind of withdrawal is not neutral. It is dangerous.
The Long Black Thrives
Nalusa Falaya thrives when individuals allow despair to fester in isolation—where people stop listening, stop showing up, and stop believing that connection is still possible. The being does not need to spread hate itself. It feeds on what hate leaves behind: exhaustion, hopelessness, and emotional abandonment.
This story is not an attack on individuals or beliefs. It is a caution drawn from an old tale that recognizes patterns rather than moments. Indigenous stories persist because they address cycles of imbalance: what occurs when people reward fear, when difference dehumanizes, and when a community sacrifices itself under a single, yet powerful, individual’s whims.
The monster in this story is not a leader or a movement.
The monster grows when we let anger replace care and silence replace responsibility.
Whether we continue down that path—or choose something harder and more humane—remains an open question.
Cultural Respect Disclaimer
Choctaw folklore inspired this blog. I wrote it with respect for its origins and meaning. Here, I do not present Nalusa Falaya as a cryptid, villain, or piece of entertainment divorced from its cultural context. Any errors are mine alone. This work is not a retelling of a specific traditional story, but a contemporary reflection informed by the themes and warnings embedded in Indigenous oral traditions.
FLASH FICTION
What Thrives in the Widening
The arguments started small.
A comment at dinner. A glance held too long. Words sharpened by something that lived behind the words. The house filled with noise—voices overlapping, anger layered on anger—until silence became the only refuge left.
Jonah chose the silence.
He stopped answering messages. He skipped gatherings. When the shouting spread beyond the house and into streets, screens, and churches, he retreated further, convinced distance was the same as safety.
“I just don’t want to be part of it,” he told himself.
At night, the television glowed with faces twisted by fury. Every story carried the same heat. Every conversation demanded allegiance. Jonah turned it all off. He sat in the dark and told himself he was protecting his peace.
It Waits
That was when the shape appeared.
It stood at the edge of the room, tall and indistinct, darker than the corners where shadows usually lived. There was no shouting. The Long Black didn’t accuse. It didn’t ask Jonah to choose a side.
It waited.
Each day Jonah withdrew further. He stopped calling his sister. Stopped answering his father’s emails. He told himself there was no point—everyone was too far gone. Too angry. Too loud.
The shape grew taller.
He began to feel emptied out. Not sad exactly. Just thinned. Conversations replayed in his mind without resolution, stripped of warmth, reduced to slogans and wounds. He told himself he was above it all, untouched.
But something was touching him.
Division
Nalusa Falaya does not thrive on hatred alone. Hatred burns too hot. It consumes itself. What the Long Black Being feeds on is what comes after—the quiet despair that follows division, the loneliness that settles in when people stop listening and start disappearing.
Jonah noticed he no longer felt joy when he remembered his mother’s laugh. That memory felt distant, as if it belonged to someone else. The shape leaned closer.
One night, Jonah sat on the floor, his back against the couch, the dark towering across from him.
“I’m not angry,” he said aloud. “I’m just tired.”
The shape did not move. It absorbed the words like water into dry soil.
He thought of the last thing his grandmother had told him before she died—not advice, not a warning, but a plea.
Stay with us. Even when it’s hard.
Stay
Jonah stood. His chest ached with it—the effort, the fear. He picked up his phone and typed a message he didn’t know how to finish.
I don’t agree with you, he wrote. But I miss you.
The shape wavered.
He sent it.
The next morning, sunlight cut through the room, bright and ordinary. Jonah’s phone buzzed. A reply. Not forgiveness. Not agreement. Just a beginning.
That night, the dark was only dark.
Nalusa Falaya does not vanish because anger ends. It retreats when despair loses its privacy—when silence is broken, when people stay present, when community is chosen despite fracture.
Division feeds the Long Black Being.
Connection starves it.
And Jonah, trembling but present, chose to remain.
Background
Earliest Recorded History of Nalusa Falaya
The earliest written mentions of Nalusa Falaya in documented Choctaw history appear not in pre-contact records (which don’t survive in written form) but in early 20th-century ethnographic collections of Choctaw oral traditions. One of the earliest and most detailed recorded accounts comes from anthropologist David I. Bushnell Jr.’s interviews around 1910 with Choctaw elder Pisatuntema, in which Nalusa Falaya—referred to as the long evil being—is described in Choctaw lore as a shadowy creature living in woods and swamps that interacts with hunters and can bewitch them.
Oral Recordings
Because the Choctaw originally passed their stories down orally, there are no known written references to Nalusa Falaya predating European-American ethnographic documentation like Bushnell’s collection. These early 20th-century accounts preserve the myth from community storytellers at a time when anthropologists began recording Indigenous traditions that had existed for generations.
So in terms of recorded history, the earliest specific documentation we have for Nalusa Falaya in Choctaw mythology comes from these early ethnographic accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Oral tradition itself is much older, but without written records prior to that period, ethnography provides the earliest surviving historical attestations.
For more on Nalusa Falaya and other folk horror and urban legends, check these out.
- A Warning From Nalusa Falaya, A Choctaw Legend - January 30, 2026
- Nalusa Falaya: The Long Black Being. A Choctaw Legend - January 23, 2026
- The Yara-ma-yha-who, An Aboriginal Legend - November 20, 2025
