“I...” The sand in my throat had spread to my eyes.
“Stop crying! You’re always crying! Pedar sag. Nothing bad has ever happened to you. You do nothing but complain. You’ve never had anything to be sad about in your life.”
I couldn’t speak.
I just stood there, blinking and crying.
“Go away, Darioush,” he said.
And then he said, “No one wants you here.”
No one wants you here.
Sohrab turned and left, slamming the living room door behind him.
And then he screamed.
His voice shattered like glass.
Everything he said was true.
No one wants you here.
I knew it was true.
I stumbled out the back door.
No one wants you here.
I ran.
FIRST, BEST DESTINY
My socks crunched over gravel and concrete.
I had left my shoes at Sohrab’s house.
I couldn’t go back for them.
And I couldn’t go back to Mamou’s either.
I just kept running.
I was a coward.
Sohrab had left that off his list.
Clouds had rolled in off the mountains, casting the whole of Yazd in gauzy gray light. Without the sun, the old houses weren’t blindingly khaki anymore. They were brown and dirty and sand-worn.
There was litter everywhere: white plastic lavoshak wrappers, and empty plastic bottles crusted yellow with dried-out doogh; scrunched up sun-faded newspapers and pictures of my new, unfortunate namesake, the real Ayatollah, frowning up at the gray sky.
I didn’t like Iran anymore.
I wanted to go home. To Portland, not to Mamou’s.
I kept thinking about Sohrab. About his father. How he would never see him ever again.
I thought about Stephen Kellner. How sometimes I wished I saw him less.
