LISA SIMPSON AND ROYA SHAMS

Lisa eyed Cyrus’s mother.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Lisa said, saying “you” with the particular vein of incredulity only her voice, among all human voices, could produce.

“Have we met before?” asked Roya.

They were in a white room. Its blankness overwhelmed; against it, Roya’s blue lipstick and Lisa’s yellow skin pulsed like neon.

“I’m Cyrus’s friend. My name is Lisa Simpson.”

Roya’s eyes got big.

“You know Cyrus? How is he doing? I haven’t seen him in years.”

“I know! He’s talked to me about you. You’re not watching from where you are?” Lisa studied Roya’s face, which barely moved when she spoke. Maybe it didn’t move at all, not even her lips.

“Cyrus must be, what, how old now?” Cyrus’s mother used the American “Cyrus” instead of the Persian “Koroosh,” but pronounced “Cyrus” the Iranian way, “sigh-e-ROOSE”—adding an extra half-syllable in the middle, snapping the r like taffy.

Lisa was getting anxious: “You really can’t see him?”

Roya winced. The room began to come into clarity around her, a great hall with high ceilings and windows blocked with long scarlet drapes. A long table, some sort of dark wood. There had been a fancy meal; scattered across the table were melon rinds and lamb bones and half-filled glasses of wine. Something that had once been a roast duck, stuffed with pistachios. There was a fireplace and in it some logs blazed silently, casting shadows of Roya and Lisa many times their actual size.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Roya said. “It’s not flying around, smiling happily down from a cloud.”

Two chairs appeared and they both sat down, facing the flames. Lisa was flat, two-dimensional, and when she turned to face Roya’s chair there was a fraction of a second where she disappeared completely.

“So you can’t see anything on earth?” Lisa’s voice relayed some mixture of impatience and disbelief.

“Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?” asked Roya.

“We read that story in Miss Hoover’s class,” said Lisa, a little too eagerly. “Ray Bradbury.”

“Right. When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

On the food table, in between silverware and plates, grass had begun growing. Its growth was visible to the naked eye, getting longer each second. It was patchy grass, not healthy looking, but still it grew and grew quickly until the food remnants and table settings were completely lost in it.

“It’s the same way with the future,” said Roya. “We plant a tree imagining our kids will play under it one day, or we go to some shitty business meeting because it might be the one where our boss singles us out for a promotion. Every tiny decision becomes mired with importance, and we’re immobilized.”

Lisa stared. This hadn’t been her experience. Wild, grand things did happen to her, quickly, as a result of her actions. It was almost eerie. She couldn’t go for a walk or visit a petting zoo without sparking a madcap escapade.

“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “I don’t know.”

Roya continued:

“We have difficulty seeing our present selves in history the same way we view our past and future selves. That’s all I’m getting at.”

The table full of grass had become Lisa’s bed, the great hall morphing into Lisa’s bedroom. Out the window it was storming, the lightning occasionally illuminating a craggy oak near the glass.

“Sure, that makes sense,” said Lisa. She and Roya were sitting next to each other on the bed. Lisa’s feet dangled a foot off the floor. “But what does that have to do with Cyrus?”

Roya said, “Well, we fly through our days. We move from one decision to the next, only we’re not even aware they’re decisions. We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything in our stories. Stories are the excrement of time. Someone said that.”

“Adélia Prado,” said Lisa.

“Adélia Prado, right,” Roya answered. “How did you know that?” Roya asked.

Lisa blinked. The silence hung between them like a bell.

“I flew once,” Lisa said, finally. “I was getting braces, and they put a gas mask over my face. Suddenly I was flying over a giant field, this giant field of flowers and eyeballs and hands.”

“That sounds terrifying.” Roya was sipping tea now, and getting larger. Against the bed, Lisa’s dress looked like a red handkerchief.

“It actually wasn’t too bad,” Lisa said. “I think I was so excited to be flying I didn’t feel any fear.”

Roya laughed.

“What?” Lisa asked. Roya stared at her, waiting. Lisa shrunk even smaller, now a drop of yellow paint against a drop of red.

“Oh my gooosh,” Lisa said, dragging out the o like someone who had just solved a difficult math problem. “I’m so sorry about…I forgot about…”

“It’s fine.” Roya chuckled. “I wasn’t afraid either. One second I was flying, the next I was dust.”

Lisa’s face got very flat, almost blurry.

“Turned into dust,” she muttered under her breath.

“Turned into dust,” Roya replied.

They both sat quietly for a minute. The light was warm and blue, despite the storm outside.

“What did you want to be when you were my age?” asked Lisa, now the size of a teddy bear.

“How old are you?”

“I think I’m eight. Maybe sometimes I’m seven.”

The rain was beginning to come in through the windowpane. The glass had gone mushy, bad.

“When I was that age, I had this idea about being an oceanographer florist.”

“Hah! What’s that?” Lisa was leaning into Roya, like a sunflower bending into the sun.

“We had an uncle who sold flowers,” said Roya. “He rented a field where he grew them and every morning he would cut bundles and put them in his bike basket and ride them into the market to sell.”

Lisa nodded along, and Roya took a sip from a silver teacup.

“One day I saw pictures of a coral reef in a book from the Tehran library, and I decided I would be the first florist who cut and arranged coral into beautiful bouquets. Taking my uncle’s idea and improving it.”

“Aw, that’s very sweet,” Lisa said. “But coral is alive!”

“So were flowers, I figured. So was yeast. I didn’t really understand coral. I just wanted to swim in it, to put my fingers through it.”

“Soon there won’t be any left,” said Lisa.

“What’s that?” asked Roya.

“Coral. It’s all dying.”

They both paused.

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?” asked Roya.

Lisa looked up at her. Now when Lisa moved her head her features were lagging a second behind the rest of her face, so her eyes and mouth sort of dragged through the air for a moment before settling into position.

“Stop that,” Lisa said.

“Stop what?” asked Roya.

“Stop trying to make everything mean something,” Lisa said. “Trying to flatten everything to a symbol or a point. The coral is dying because of microbeads in body wash and because of Monsanto and because there’s no reason for anyone powerful enough to do anything about it to do anything about it.”

Roya stared down at the little girl, who was now the size of a little girl. Yellow skin, white pearls, red dress. The bedroom was filling with water. A saxophone floated out from under the bed and Lisa picked it up. She started playing a song that seemed to be about the immeasurable mercy of animals, though it had no words.