Before Forever.

The young girl felt hesitant--she could or she could not, her two options shone clearer than the crystal chandelier blinking overhead. She decided upon the former choice, just as a quote expressing the stomach-twisting discomfort of regret snapped awake in her head. The young girl could see Peter, positioned near the punch, discreetly attempting to ease the itch in his left foot with the toe of his right. She smiled to herself, for he entertained her: here was this man who craved appearing suave and slick, yet who could not even scratch his own toe without looking clumsy. Nevertheless, he looked handsome, as always before. Although secretly, the young girl hoped that Peter's excessive party-going would one day get to him. Perhaps he’d awake, late one afternoon in mid-July, the unexpected sting of sunlight sharpening the pain in his left eye, and miserably discover that his black hairs had all turned gray, that his skin had worked with gravity to droop around the delicate nape of his neck, and that his eyes had transformed into a listless blue. At the same time that she hoped such a tragic episode take place, the young girl also wished against it, primarily because she loved his looks and the memories they reintroduced.

Time was running short, the party crowd already thinning while the smooth silver platters, once colored by stuffed squid, jiggling gelatin and puff pastries, offered nothing but a diverse array of crumbs--the evidence of mindless nibbling strewn for everyone to observe. The young girl shuddered with the thought of leaving without muttering even a single word to the gentleman who apparently had, during the thick mulch of her miserable musings, disappeared! Her heart hiccupped. She couldn’t quite believe herself, her one chance had vanished like the appetizers! Helplessly, the young girl scanned the staircase, longing to spot Peter’s lithe, delicate form, yearning to watch him transfixed by the beaming cluster of Picasso paintings, or by the marble Henry Moore sculpture…Suddenly, the young girl received a painful jab in her right shoulder. At that moment, her simmering feelings of sadness and regret swirled with frustration and anger. Furious, she swiveled around, her mind violently piecing together the most bitter of reprimands, when she realized, deliciously, that it was him.

Nothing Lasts.

I remember limping up to your apartment four years after I’d last seen you. In that time, your mother died in a freeway accident. They found a wet-nosed bunny cradling her skull outside of Yazd. Your apartment building was the color of blended chicken heads before they are fed to the cats. It was a pale pink, so pale that it intersected with gray and I could not bear to think of you, colorful like the opalescent moon, inhabiting a cockroach-infested building, with smells like the rotting sea. The elevator reeked of sweat, its walls sticky and the entire building tasted humid. I felt my many layers of clothing stick to my back and to my chest. It was an oily-dirty feeling that I could only shake off when I saw you, grinning faintly as you opened the door. I missed you so much! How many years had it been again? I paused a moment to remember.

The Showroom

The showroom was so hot that the editors and the buyers and the ex-supermodels soon slumped over in their chairs, like silly putty that starts out stiff then softens over time to show what it really is. And so their crisp layers peeled away, their make-up skidded down their oily cheeks and streamed down their shiny foreheads. Their flat hair curled at the edges and at the top. Soon they turned into what they long attempted to conceal behind expensive makeup and luxurious clothing and leather boots that zipped up to their knees. Finally, the models emerged, each one more pale and more wiry than the last. They marched to the murmuring of a thousand flapping paper fans.

The models wore simple black dresses that appeared too small and too large at the same time, swallowing their perfect, painted toes and obscuring their shiny stilettos. The show was very dramatic. I choked on its suffocating silence, I choked while studying the slow, reverse transformation of one thousand beautiful people. I observed them revert back into their natural states, how gently yet how surreptitiously the heat folded away their smiles and placed them on the floor, near five thousand dollar handbags and two thousand dollar clutches. How quickly the men wore their tight lips and the women their lopsided expressions.

Separation Sturdier than Brick

I remember you. Desolate and dark, swinging supple, golden girls into the warm air while crying inwardly. Sometimes I regret letting you go, regret rejecting the mere thought of you until it broke apart and dissolved. On nights such as these, when the wind plays a sweet melody with the tree’s heart-shaped leaves, I am reminded of you. The memories flicker for seconds at a time, their duration short and severe. Though it is still enough to whisper open my wounds and will the sand-paper scars to reappear.









image by laila riazi

The wind carried many mouth-watering smells: boiling cow fat, sweet pomegranate seeds, ripe and bulbous figs, crunchy, grease-drenched tadik, and slabs of salty tachin. Reshaleh stood outside of the kitchen, her wet hair dripping into the pebbles below. She could hear the kettle's soft whimpering and Belghez's shuffling across the floor. The cook, shaped like the full-bottomed eggplants she often used to flavor her dishes, turned around with Reshaleh's entrance. Belghez's smile stretched her face, specifically her nose, so for a moment it resembled a ripe pear crowned with a single prick of sweat.

The kitchen itself was admittedly plain. The counters were sturdy and gray and only one shade lighter than the walls, which bore the usual expressions of old age, most notable were the large smatterings of soot. Therefore, decorations were instead provided by the sights and smells of many different foods sizzling, brewing, or simmering to life in several pots and pans. In the farthest left corner rested a dozen figs, which had been plucked at the peak of ripeness, so that their dark purple flesh smelled sweeter than the sweetest cherry jam. Only inches away from the figs glowed a watermelon nearly three feet long and four feet wide, while that night's dinner, of saffron dusted rice, simmered into completion. Reshaleh liked to think that by standing in the middle of the kitchen every aroma would perfume her hair and flavor her skin.

"Would you like a taste?"

Belghez pinched a fig by its stem before Reshaleh could reply, and placed it into the young girl's palm, where it rested a moment before she drew it into her mouth. Everything but the delicate seeds dissolved. Reshaleh crunched a moment on the seeds, some of which found themselves wedged between her teeth, so that Belghez began to laugh. Her chuckles shook her heavy breasts and rattled her plump thighs before fading like the curls of silver smoke escaping from a nearby pan.

image by laila riazi

Sometimes I wonder why I turned vegetarian. Perhaps because I cherished the bustling chicken coops of my childhood, which smelled sweetly of warm sawdust and fresh feces. Perhaps because the last word you spoke to me, you spoke while I stared down at my unfinished meatloaf, and now any whisper of that word stirs uneasy recollections. Perhaps because a raw steak oozes with blood and the flat echo of a cow's helpless moans. One day I might return to chicken legs for lunch, pulling stringy pink meat to reveal a polished bone. I imagine that I would lunge forward and vomit, dumping one thousand angry memories onto the cold floor.

I miss you, simply

your sallow complexion, the grim, gray-eyed baby of peer pressure and social obligation, revealed that you are a man of expectation, struggling to catch up with wealthier, worldlier, worthier "friends", who think of champain as they think of beautiful women bundled in fur: pleasurable, disposable, forgettable. That picture always gets me. I squint first, in disbelief that it is you: painfully thin, disintegrating, everything either pulling away, sinking in, sagging down, everything but your sterile white smile, a gash splitting open your face-- fooling yourself so that you can fool the world.