WHEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, my mother declared the school in our South Shiraz neighbourhood to be ‘Ashghal,’ nothing but trash. I was to move in with my grandmother in Northern Shiraz within a week, yanked out, a transplanted weed.
My grandmother had rabbits. One mama rabbit gave birth a week after I arrived. Six small babies, pink, naked, and ugly. The babies had angry expressions and couldn’t even open their eyes. My grandmother put them in a wrinkled, old shoe box. She lifted the lid, ‘Bebin,’ she said, showing me how the mother rabbit had yanked her own fur to cover the babies, raw patches of her skin swollen with bumps.
For dinner, my grandmother and I sipped warm milk, a congealed layer of fat glistening on the top. We dipped fresh bread in the milk and watched its empty holes become saturated and turn soft.
New neighbours, with a boy two years younger than me, moved upstairs. His name was Hatef. He stood on their balcony that overlooked our backyard. Hatef’s face looked so soft, so round, so warm.
‘Sham chi dareen?’ I asked, wanting to know what he was going to have for dinner.
‘Ghormeh Sabzi,’ he said, kicking their balcony dust on my head.
The baby rabbits all died one night, turning into shrivelled angry balls. My grandmother and I buried them, still in the shoe box, under the orange tree as Hatef watched from their balcony. It was spring, the air moist with the scent of orange blossoms, which my mother was allergic to, tiny white flowers that covered the dirt like snow.
One day, outside another neighbour’s house, I found a big box with a sign, Majani, ‘free’. I dragged the box inside, packed tight with greeting cards and books. I felt rich. One card had a painting of a lone cottage, smoke spiralling out of a chimney, and a few deer roaming the distant woods. I cut out the pictures, the evergreen trees, a fluffy duck midflight, and pasted them into my notebook. I closed my eyes and imagined a life in that lone cottage, free from north or south, free from angry little rabbits. In the box, there were also medical books about AIDS. Every day after school, I picked the newly fallen orange blossoms and pressed them dry in between images of swollen gums, yellow face warts, peeling toe skins, and crusted eyelids.
My grandmother made her special French fries exactly three times when I lived with her. Each fry burst with oil bubbles trapped inside a crispy exterior. The fries were a random addition to the meals, Estamboli rice and fries, Kookoo sabzi, Sangak bread and fries. Yet, the fries became the queen of those three meals. Without any effort, they belonged. My old school was like Ghormeh Sabzi, and I felt like the well-cooked kidney beans in the dish. At the new school, I was like coal in milk, a brick in cooked rice.
Hatef invited me to play a new version of the Hokm card game with him after school. ‘Inverted Hokm,’ he called it. All the rules were reserved, the ace not the most powerful card but just one point, a two worth more than a five. He explained the game over and over, but the upside-down rules refused to make sense.
Hidden under the AIDS books, I found a small green book with a picture of a man with grey hair and large glasses. The book was titled, ‘How to win friends and influence anyone.’ Smile, say their name languidly, generously, every person’s name is their most favorite word in the world. As Hatef explained the inverted rules each time, I whispered his name slowly like I was chewing on a golden fry, like I was smelling the orange blossoms. He smiled at me, and for a few moments, I forgot about the angry little rabbits and what their bodies looked like now that they were under all that dirt, so far from their mother.
One day, after school, I found the box of books and cards gone. ‘I gave it to Namaki in exchange for this plastic bottle. We can make khiyar Shoor now. Help me clean these cucumbers,’ my grandmother said. The bumpy cucumbers looked like vomit- green toads. They poked my fingers. I chewed my lips, sucking up my sniffles because now, how would I ever know how to become Hatef’s friend.
I stayed with my grandmother for seven months, until a round man proposed to her, and she accepted – her third marriage. The week when we packed her plastic jars of pickles and cups for the new home, her golden fries tasted like sour milk. I made up a Hokm game with no rules at all, woke from nightmares of Hatef with puss-filled, cracked lips, and could almost smell my mother’s nail polish scent. We piled my grandmother’s boxes on the back of a truck and said goodbye as our truck drove away, the house shrinking, I wondered if I should have warned them about the angry baby rabbits buried under all that dirt.
Pegah Ouji is an Iranian-American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip, Necessary Fiction among others. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly as well as an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words.
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