NINE HOURS UNTIL THE BEGINNING
When I was twelve, my mind developed the ability to hear my real name and pronouns whenever someone deadnames or misgenders me. It’s come in handy over the past three years since I don’t want to go to prison for patricide.
Tomorrow—Sunday—is Norooz, marking the end of spring break but beginning of spring, and I’m supposed to be helping with the haft-seen. Norooz is my favorite holiday on principle: Marking the new year on the spring equinox is some next-level new age shit, and our people have been doing it for literal millennia.
But instead of setting the table with the seven-plus items beginning with the letter seen, Maman is lecturing me because of the phone call she just got from one James P. Hudson, PhD in being a pain in the ass, who happens to be my supervisor at the OI (undergoing a name change but technically called the Oriental Institute, which, I mean, yikes on bikes).
“He must not have confirmed it, Farz-joon,” she says, after I remind her that I already told him I couldn’t come in today.
I’ve been volunteering at the OI, located in the middle of UChicago’s campus, since last summer. Dr. Hudson, asshole though he is, is sort of a big deal. Smithsonian internships—my dream—are rarely given to high school students, but he’s all but said an official recommendation from him would remove that hurdle.
“It’s spring break!” I argue. “Besides, we still have to cook.” Plus, I sort of stayed up until two in the morning reading a 150 thousand-word fanfic. (Under the covers, of course; I don’t have a death wish. Maman makes me read a study on the importance of sleep for teens every time she catches me staying up late.)
“I can make everything myself.” Maman purses her lips and switches to accented English. “If I was still doing experiments and one of my techs left me stranded, I would fire them. You made a commitment, bacheh-ye-man.” While my dad teaches music theory at the University of Chicago, Maman is the lab director in the very fancy Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, focusing on teaching after years of research with too many acronyms and prefixes.
Having impressive immigrant parents is a lot. Having impressive immigrant parents who push you to pursue this archeology thing you’ve been into lately without knowing why you’re into it is a whole other matter.
And then Maman adds the absolute kicker: “He said you promised to help set up the new exhibit.”
That lying sack of shit. I’ve been asking to help with the new exhibit on the Shahr-e Sukhteh for weeks, and he kept saying he’d “get back to me.” Now he wants my help? The weekend before it opens? The day before it’s shown to investors?
I was wrong: The real kicker is when she adds, “And you need his letter of recommendation.”
Seven months of weekends after those three-ish months in the summer. I’ve talked to every graduate student, sat in on as many lectures as I could, and even done some of the college readings. What other high schooler is this dedicated?
“Chee shodeh?” asks Baba. I hadn’t even heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. He picks up the red-gold tea I made for him before this argument started and pops a sugar cube between his front teeth. “Don’t talk back to your mother. That’s not becoming of a person.”
Why would he ask what’s up and then immediately take her side? And then bring gender into this, of all things? My ability could have short-circuited if it weren’t such a common refrain. That’s not becoming of a [ERROR]. Carry yourself like a [ERROR]. Sit like a [ERROR]. Dress like a [ERROR].
There’s no way I can ever come out to my folks.
I’m panting and sweaty by the time I get to 58th and University, shirt plastered to my back underneath my coat. When I burst into the museum, Dr. Aiber, who looks like a Nordic Viking, is saying something over his shoulder as he steps out. Despite not being part of the original Iranian team, he’s somehow our visiting contact. “Oh, hello, Farz,” he says. “Glad you could finally join us.” He quirks an eyebrow over his shoulder and heads out.
In the lobby stands Dr. James Hudson, professor emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. The flap of skin under his chin, the one old people sometimes get, wobbles. “Well. You’ve made it,” he says with a sniff. I hate that sniff. “While I appreciate the importance of preparing for Norooz, I cannot help but wonder why, with Chaharshanbeh Soori already behind us, you have waited this long to set up your haft-seen?” He gestures to the one in front of the Suq gift shop, decorated with the vinegar and apple and wheaty samanoo and garlic and sumac and oleaster fruits and the ever-tricky sprouted sabzeh—all symbolic items for spring.
I want to tell this Bastion of Academic Knowledge that he’s missing items on his haft-seen—the hyacinth and coins and special book and mirror and eggs. And goldfish, I guess, though it feels cruel to get a fishie and then abandon it to its fate. But I know he’ll lecture me about weird diasporic inaccuracies and that as an institution, which he’ll say in that way I hate, the Oriental Institute—he objects to the impending and more specific name change to the Institute of the Study of Ancient Cultures because the “Oriental Institute” has history and meaning—vows to uphold truth and accuracy. Never mind that those things are subjective.
“Farz-jan, I know you’ve yet to visit the country of your ancestors and survey the sites,” he blathers, “but surely you understand how important this tradition is to the Persians.”
I hate how he fully enunciates chaharshanbeh, and I hate that he rubs in my face that he’s been to Iran and I haven’t, and I hate that he looks at me like I’m some sort of fake Persian, and I hate that he says jaan with the long aleph sound instead of my Tehrani joon, and I hate that he adds that totally inappropriate affection only when something Persian is brought up, to show that he, too, Knows Farsi; that he, too, is Knowledgeable About [My] Culture™ because he studied it.
God, I am so freaking tired.
Dr. Aiber pushes the door of the lobby open with his back and wheels in a wooden box on a dolly. “Got her right here, James, as promised,” he says.
“Excellent.” Hudson rounds on me, his eyes gleaming. “Farz, you can make up missing your earlier shift by staying late tonight to finalize the exhibit, and you can begin by looking through the exhibit listing.” He shoves a binder at me.
“Late?” I don’t hide my dismay. I’m going to miss out on the Norooz prep with my mom. “But I had plans—”
“Could they be more important than preparing for this astounding discovery? I suppose”—he gestures grandly, scoffing—“all this is run-of-the-mill to you now, eh? Frankly, I expected more from you, child. I am giving you remarkable and unprecedented access to resources on your people’s rich history, and yet…” He sighs dramatically. “When I took you under my wing, I had hoped to share with you the wonders of what the Persians have created. I am disappointed you have not jumped at this opportunity.”
He should be grateful I don’t sink my teeth into that excess skin at his throat and tear it off. I’ve sent him emails. I’ve caught him before and after staff meetings. I have all but begged to be involved in the Burnt City exhibit. But I’m sure if I said that, he’d tell me he can’t remember anything of the sort and then smirk off into the sunset. “Took you under my wing” my ass.
Letter of rec. Letter … of … rec.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I clutch the binder. “Fine.”
The sign for the special exhibit room proclaims, WORLD’S OLDEST PROSTHETIC EYE. Underneath, in smaller letters, reads, Burnt City, Iran: One of the world’s oldest cities. And under that, an image from an archeological dig showing a curled skeleton: Who Is She?
Dr. Aiber rolls the box while Hudson micromanages. I follow them into the special exhibit room off the lobby. I flip through the binder, dismayed at everything still unfinished. I could have done this necessary bitch work weeks ago.
In this pile of disorganization, I finally find the text for the introduction label.
Shahr-e Sukhteh, or the “Burnt City,” is a Bronze Age urban settlement first excavated in 1915 by British archeologists. It is estimated to have been founded around 3200 BCE and abandoned between 2350 and 2100 BCE. Spanning four eras of civilization, Shahr-e Sukhteh was sacked three times, hence its name, and was in trade contact with regions as far as modern-day Turkmenistan and Pakistan.
“Gentle, gentle!” moans Dr. Hudson, as Dr. Aiber moves the box to a table. “She’s so delicate!”
“Mansour wouldn’t have lent her if he thought she couldn’t survive the trip from Iran,” says Aiber.
“Ah, forgive my overeagerness. I’ve heard so much about her. I assume Mansour has told you his current theory of her being a woman of high socioeconomic class.”
I hate the way Hudson says the name Mansour.
“The gold filigree on the eye did alert me to that possibility,” says Aiber. “Quite luxurious for 2800 BCE!”
Both men chortle.
How are old cishet white male professors so annoying? I flip through the binder of doom to find the description for the main attraction.
“Indeed, indeed,” says Hudson, “which causes me to wonder whether there is more to her story. What if, instead, we’re witnessing evidence of an ancient form of taarof, where she received the eye in exchange for services rendered?”
Uh—what? How the hell would you even find evidence for taarof, the Iranian back-and-forth show of hospitality via humble servitude? I glance over to see the remains, but they’re wrapped.
“Or could she be an Elamite priestess, perhaps?” asks Hudson, not doing anything to help with the unpacking. “Such a stature! Six feet is no small feat.” He guffaws at his terrible not-pun.
“Is there enough information to know whether the Elamite pantheon was worshipped in the Burnt City?” I interrupt. I’ve never argued directly with Dr. Hudson before, but he must have asked me here for a reason—maybe my perspective? At least on Persian and proto-Persian things? I mean, this time period is way before the Persians, but many Elamite cultural practices were absorbed by the Achaemenids. “Wouldn’t that imply the Elamites influenced Jiroft culture and not the other way around?” And then I take a deep breath, even as my stomach drops, to add, “Also, is there any reason to suppose these remains are from a woman? Pelvis size doesn’t necessarily correlate to gender.”
Recent work by bioarcheologists has said concepts like sex and gender are relative depending on culture, and when looking at skeletons, archeologists use a five-point scale to determine “most likely male” or “most likely female.” I’ve brought this up in multiple staff meetings, but Hudson mysteriously never hears me, even when some of the archeology students have taken my side. But he can’t ignore me when I’m talking to him point-blank.
Dr. Hudson’s back stiffens as he turns to me. Dr. Aiber, who hasn’t heard me make this argument yet, strokes his chin. Hudson’s jaw quivers. “The tablet found in the proto-Elamite language makes clear that the connection between the Elamites and the Shahr-e Sukhteh is not incidental. And as there is overlap with the Mesopotamian pantheon—”
“But it’s not even clear whether there was a Mesopotamian influence that far east!”
“—we can postulate that the contradictions are due to regional variations, which does not mean those gods were not worshipped in that era or area, nor does it contradict the thought that the so-called ‘Jiroft’”—he actually uses air quotes—“culture, unsubstantiated though the claim is, was established first.” He gives me such a scathing look that I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut. “And this idea of gender…” He shakes his head. “My child, do not import these modern ideas onto ancient peoples. Political correctness has no place in ancient history.”
Because nonbinary genders are only a thing from the modern era; got it. As if this isn’t the entire reason why I’ve been into archeology in the first place—because I know there have been people like me since the beginning of time.
I just know it.
Last year, when I was waiting to hear about volunteering at the OI, I tried to tell my parents about this idea: that there are genders outside the binary across time and space. Usually, when I argue queer issues, my parents humor me, but this time, Baba laughed and said these ideas are “issues of a full stomach.” That in countries like Iran, where people are desperate for access to water as climate change worsens or struggle to feed their family as sanctions are enforced or are fighting for their lives and liberty against an unjust regime, they aren’t so concerned with issues of identity.
But he’s wrong. Plus, there are plenty of nonwhite nonbinary genders. “Political correctness,” bah.
Speaking of, I hate the way Hudson says political correctness. Actually, I probably just hate when he opens his mouth.
“The youth nowadays have these ideas,” he says to Aiber, shaking his head. “It is important to mentor young diasporic folk”—uh, since when has he thought that?—“but it is difficult to instill in them academic integrity.”
“I think you’ve done well mentoring them,” disagrees Aiber. “They’re challenging old ideas like any scholar should—you’ve taught them well.” Aiber smiles at me. I can’t tell if it’s condescending or encouraging. “Perhaps that’s methodology your generation could further, young person. I admit, when James told me he’d specifically sought an Iranian intern for this project”—he pronounces it eye-rain-ee-an, which should be illegal if you’re a Persian scholar—“I was expecting someone a bit more experienced. But he has a lot he can teach you, so perhaps it’s for the best.”
My jaw trembles. My body flushes hot, then cold, and if I could Hulk-smash Hudson, I would. What other lies has he fed Aiber about me?
Aiber snaps on gloves and begins the painstaking process of unwrapping the remains. He goes through layers of paper and Bubble Wrap before revealing a brown hemisphere. It’s small, almost black, roughly the diameter of a quarter, with sunburst markings running along it.
It’s a bit anticlimactic.
“The eye,” breathes Hudson. “Behold.”
I stand there and shake, wishing desperately to be someone—something I’m not. To escape my body by making it no longer mine. Wings to lift my fat body effortlessly. Extra limbs to flex and bend in every direction, to express what I cannot with my pathetic mouth. Crafty fingers that don’t fumble and extra eyes to see everything coming.
The room becomes very still. I have the peculiar sensation of time stopping, dust particles floating midstream, all breath suspended for this moment.
Then the eye’s markings flare to life, golden radial bursts that, as I stare, collect into a single beam, and that eye, that convex hemisphere once gilded, focuses that beam onto me. Neither of the others reacts like they notice as Aiber places it on a purple velvet cushion.
Blood of my blood, I name you kin.
I’m alone in the bathroom, and the lights flicker as I splash cold water on my face. How did neither Hudson nor Aiber see the eye light up? Did neither hear that weird echoing voice? Am I just sleep-deprived? I mean, damn, it was only one night of staying up late; I shouldn’t be freaking hallucinating.
The bathrooms are in the basement, which is nice since no one can see me do the “which bathroom do I go into” dance. The emptiness means I can scrutinize my reflection in peace. Coarse facial hair, which I can’t decide whether I should get rid of. That big Iranian nose with its hook at the end. Thick eyebrows coming together in the middle—I’ve been teased for that as long as I can remember, but I’m torn between honoring my heritage, where a single eyebrow is traditionally beautiful, and freaking hating it.
A cold wind stirs the hairs on the back of my neck. I stiffen. There aren’t any windows down here. So how—?
A stall door slams shut, then another. I whirl around, but no one’s there. I bend down to look under the three stalls, but there aren’t any feet. I tiptoe and throw open one of the stall doors, but still—nothing.
When I turn back to the mirror, a skull with gleaming teeth hovers over my reflection’s shoulder, its forehead broken so the eye sockets merge into one space. A glowing golden ball hangs suspended in the middle of that gaping cavity like a cyclops’s eye. I shout, throwing my hands up to bat around my head, but I only connect with air. When I get ahold of myself, I’m alone.
What the actual fuck?
My head is going to split open like I’m about to birth a god. I need caffeine, but the staff room’s coffee pot is broken. At least I’m away from Hudson’s narcissistic babbling. My hands shake as I slide the box cutter down the foam to finish making the labels. Since my phone has like 15 percent battery, I’ve been working in silence for the past few hours; the work computer is too slow to stream music.
My kin?
I’m so startled by the warped sound slicing through the silence that the box cutter slips. It bites into the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, and I yelp and shove my hand into my mouth. The tang of warm pennies floods my tongue.
Shit—I’m bleeding fast. Blood drips on the foam board, on the papers I’ve printed, and I clutch several tissues and hurry downstairs to the bathrooms. I stick my hand under the open faucet, hissing. It stings, but there should be a first aid kit somewhere.
Pink water fills the sink. There’s a trail of red dots on the floor behind me, and on the white porcelain, and smeared on the metal faucet.
Static fills the air before resolving into a high-pitched wail. Chills race down my spine as the temperature in the tiny room plummets. It’s like I’m outside during a Chicago winter without a coat, my hand a block of ice under the running water as my breath fogs the mirror.
I’ve been waiting for you, my kin.
I shriek and flail, blood flying in an arc, splattering the floor and bathroom stalls. When I spin around, the broken skull from earlier floats in front of me—except it’s different from when it last appeared. Flesh now hangs on sunken cheeks, the forehead, gaping red and brown. A centipede crawls from the nose through the open, bruised mouth with yellowed teeth. Maggots squirm in one cheek. Only the golden eye in the center of the forehead remains untouched, glowing.
I scream.
I fall to my knees.
The room blurs and spins, centering on that shining light.
When my world comes back into focus, I’m frozen in a field, a clay city in the background. A bonfire dances in the center of a crowd, but no heat reaches me. A tall figure steps onto a pedestal, wearing a dark dress patterned like fish scales, the white collar flaring with triangular rays like a sun. They lift their arms in a noiseless chant, and the dagger in one of their hands glints before plunging down—into their left eye. Blood spurts down their face as they scream soundlessly, lifting the dagger back up with an eyeball skewered through the end of the blade, the optic nerve resisting its pull. With a fierce yank, the nerve snaps, flopping onto the bleeding cheek like a fish out of water. Blood darkens the sun collar as the eye is raised for all to see, then thrown in the fire.
I stagger back and bump into the rigid porcelain of the bathroom sinks, and my vision clears. I’m half panting, half squeaking, my hand clutched to my own eye as blood winds its way down my wrist. For a moment, my fingers meet an empty cavern—but no, I’m imagining it. There’s my eye, whole and intact. The smell of smoke is thick in my nostrils, and the taste of ash is heavy on my tongue, laced with the copper tang of blood.
My legs take me to a stall, and I vomit the little I’ve eaten today. The bathroom is no longer freezing, but cold sweat breaks out on the small of my back. What is happening to me? Am I experiencing psychosis? Has Hudson drugged me? Is it worth staying and risking another episode of whatever this is?
Or else do what, go home and have my mom freak out at me? Yeah, right.
When I crawl back out, the skull is nowhere to be seen.
I’m in the exhibit room, and my body is breaking. I watch it happen in the ridiculous mirrors Hudson suggested I hang up for “stature comparison” between visitors and the remains.
Another hallucination for me, I guess. Oh boy.
First one wrist snaps, then the other, splinters jutting out like fish bones. Then each shoulder unhinges, arms rotating up and around. I’ve become a doll with too many joints. One knee bends to the side, then the other, femurs twisting in their sockets until each leg faces backward. The pain should be astronomical, but I feel like I’m floating in water. A lightness I’ve never experienced that has nothing to do with my weight.
Finally, the spine—my spine—flexes up until it tears along the fault lines and shoves the—no, my—ribs through my skin, the snapped curves protruding through my chest. Blood fountains over my body, splashing the mirrors. My guts are tight under my skin but eager for escape, intestines pulsing and writhing, longing to spill out and smear viscera on the beige tile floor. It tickles, the only sensation besides floating.
What’s happening to me? Am I going to be stuck like this forever? How am I alive? Disgust wars with fear.
In the mirror, I look like something from that “humans getting fused together” movie I refuse to watch. My hands support my body like I’m doing the most fucked-up gymnast bridge pose: brokenly quadrupedal with my knees facing backward, my head upside down as the gaping maw of my torso drools and my ribs jut out like fangs.
The grotesque, naked shape I’ve become should rip a guttural scream from me. But it doesn’t.
A part of me is curious. My lips curve into a smile.
Crablike, my body shuttles one way, then the next, lost in its transformation. It is nothing like walking or crawling; it’s an awkward flailing of limbs smearing red in my wake. Slipping, I collide into an exhibit stand, sending it crashing to the floor. Glass shatters, and as I scuttle away, I smack into another stand, which careens. This time, it’s easier to steady myself.
I should care about the destruction, but instead, I’m hyperfocused on settling into a rhythm.
It feels good to move like this.
For so much of my life, my body has been a meat cage. A thing that defines me but that I have little control over shaping. But now, now, my jiggling thighs bounce free instead of being constricted in jeans. My joints have no trouble hoisting me aloft, even though I’ve never been flexible enough to try a position like a bridge. My spilling belly barely holds in my guts even as my ribs reveal the cavern of my heart.
This feels freeing. This feels right.
Blood of my blood, I awaken, booms a voice, a resonant gong.
An eye, reddish-brown turning black from being buried for five thousand years, floats above me and multiplies, doubling, tripling, quadrupling in the mirrors. It pales into a golden color as bleached bone bubbles out of thin air around it, centering the eye in the middle of a forehead as a skull assembles. Like a bad PowerPoint transition, vertebrae fade into view and stack together, clicking into place, followed by the other bones. Then come bundles of nerves, a thin webbing of vessels; then ropy red muscles layer over the arms, the legs, the hollows of the cheeks. The skinless body suspends itself against the ceiling, looking down at me as I gape at the unmoving heart suspended inside the ribs, where no flesh hides it.
The skull rotates 360 degrees before spinning back in record speed like a windup top. The golden eye fixes on me.
Like recognizes like, says the voice. I see you, child of my blood. I see you as you are meant to be seen.
The distorted words flex the bulging veins in my disjointed hands. My hair, hanging limp, rustles.
Neither man nor woman, child nor full grown; you are the in-between and the both-and and the beyond. You are the past and present and future. You are the liminal space.
The ribs poking out from my skin move with my breath, twitching with each heartbeat. I allow the garbled words to run through my mind, until slowly, the speech resolves into modern Farsi—not exactly what was spoken in Eastern Iran five thousand years ago. Even the words I don’t know in Farsi are clear in their meanings.
And when I comprehend the message, I want to laugh until I scream. Shocker, of course I’ve invented someone—the only someone—who knows my truth! A thing I rarely allow myself to confront. Wherever it came from, I’m grateful for my ability; it keeps me safe. I don’t have to hear my parents tell me it’s an issue of a full stomach or that I’m confused. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I also don’t know how to even begin the conversation when it’s centered around me.
The cyclops eye roams over me. From the skeleton’s back, black legs unspool, spider limbs as thick as my arm and covered in fine, twitching hairs. The legs descend toward me, and I scream for real, my wayward organs vibrating with its force.
If I could run away—if I believed in prayer—if I were a good Muslim (whatever that means)—
And then my body lifts, chest up. I droop, arms and legs dangling, and my vision goes white.
Your body does not know yet how to take its shape, explains the skeletal remains from the Burnt City. This may cause you pain.
Fire lances through my torso. I struggle, but my body flops uselessly. Whereas turning crablike had been painless, the stabbing agony of crunching bones now makes me howl, like the time I dislocated my shoulder, except now, my shoulders—rotating back; my knees, twisting forward—aren’t the only things that hurt. I am such a nightmarish ball of sensation that I don’t know where it begins and I end, or vice versa, and is this how I die, with the giant person found with a prosthetic eye who maybe was a priest or maybe was a rich person or—
All at once, the fire burning through me extinguishes. My body steams and pants. Bones are no longer broken; skin has been reknit. I’m back to “normal.”
But the mirrors remember. They’re splattered with blood, smeared with viscera, a thick mucus pooling where I stood—lay?—moments before. The glass from the broken cases glitters like fallen confetti.
My body begins to shake. Someone is calling. Farz. Farz. Farz. Farz.
“Farz!” snaps the angry voice of Dr. James Hudson. “For heaven’s sake, wake up!”
I startle. “Huh?”
I’m in the special exhibit room, draped over the case where Aiber had set up the skeletal remains—including the eye. My breath fogged the glass where my head lay, some drool classily left behind. And blood—blood smeared from my hand through the gauze.
Shit.
“This is most unprofessional,” Hudson continues, flustered. “What on earth are you doing here? You’re supposed to be finishing the labels, not taking a nap! And on the display case, of all places! Why is there blood everywhere? Good grief, child.”
Was I … sleepwalking? A trail of blood stains the floor, leading from beyond the room’s entrance and ending in a pool by my feet. My chest aches.
“—first aid kit in the bathrooms.” Hudson’s voice reels me back to reality. “Do not get blood on any of the labels, I implore you. Redo them if you must.”
My hand is bleeding again. I stumble to the door and look over my shoulder.
The eye stares back at me.
“I’m sorry, Baba, I had my phone off since the battery is almost dead.” I barely contain my sigh as I cradle my phone between my shoulder and ear and pace. I finally turned on my phone when I saw how late it’s gotten and was greeted with fifteen missed calls, seven voicemails, and thirty-two texts from both my parents.
They probably thought I’d been murdered. I should have known my gonna be late text hours ago wasn’t going to cut it. Nice going, asshole.
“Dr. Hudson gave me a lot of work,” I cut in when my father takes a breath mid-lecture. “And—”
And then I started hearing voices and seeing a disembodied skeleton and watching my body break itself from the inside out to free the real me.
I called Baba instead of Maman because his lectures are way less intense than Maman’s rants. But now I sort of wish I’d sent another text and turned my phone back off.
“I’m sorry, Baba,” I manage again, and something in my voice takes him off guard, because he doesn’t respond for a long moment.
Then he sighs. “How long will you take?” he asks in Farsi, which is a good sign because my parents always lecture me in English to “make sure you understand.”
“A couple hours at most,” I say. A hopeful estimate. “I just need to finish setting up the room.”
Another pause, then: “All right. Two hours, and we’ll come get you even if you’re not done. Bacheh-ye-man, please don’t scare us like that again.”
I hang up knowing I’m the worst kid in the world.
Unsurprisingly, my feet have led me to the exhibit room during my call. Blood still stains the exhibit case and floor; I run downstairs and bring up the janitorial cart via the elevator to clean up.
It’s not until I start wiping the glass of the remains case that my vision blurs, a sudden headache roaring to life. I drop the spray bottle and clutch my forehead, the pulses sharp—until they abruptly stop.
When I look up, I’m back in the field from earlier, another bonfire blazing. This time, the person in the scaly dress, whose left eye is now wrapped in bandages, no longer holds a dagger. Instead, they watch as someone else throws a bound and gagged person atop the fire; the figure wriggles like a worm as they burn.
There are others wrapped and piled, forced to be next.
A sacrifice, willingly given, was once my price, says the luminous voice from before—tied to the remains of the same person I see before me. When the Seer sacrificed their eye, they gained my voice for a time, on condition of their willing death after. But their leaders, greedy for eternal prophecies and futures, used the lives of their captured enemies to desecrate the ritual and shackle my spirit to the Seer’s body.
Though no sound reaches me, I see the crowd cheer with each new victim. The one-eyed Seer looks afraid.
I know I’m not really here. My lack of smell or taste or anything other than vision, like I’m watching a silent movie in a sensory-deprivation tank, tells me I’m not. But I still shake. “Who are you?” I croak.
Some called me the voice of our creator, a manifestation of the power of our deities. I was the mouthpiece of the divine.
My temples pulse; my body fever-aches. “What should I call you, then?”
To be named is to submit. My name is the vastness of the waters of chaos. My name is the height of the Tree of All Seeds. My name is the cosmic mountain that reaches out of this sphere and into the next. A pause, then: That is to say, should you wish to bestow upon me a name of your choice, I will accept it as a proxy.
A stand-in name. How does one encapsulate an idea? I catalog the little I know of the person found in the Burnt City, and my chest flares hot—not with pain, but with righteous fury.
“Dr. Hudson thinks your Seer was an Elamite priestess”—I sneer the words—“despite there being no indication that they identified as a woman. So I guess a good name would flip that off. I mean, Farsi doesn’t even have gendered pronouns.”
Oh. Of course. Ou makes sense as a pronoun for the skeleton. A commonality in ancestry. A commonality in tongue.
Womanhood or manhood is beyond the likes of me. Another person is thrown on the pyre. The crowd silently sings its bloodlust. As it is beyond the likes of you, my kin.
I flinch.
There is no shame in who and what you are. Do your people not celebrate your unbridled potential?
“No one knows,” I whisper, my throat dry. The fire is larger now. How could a disembodied voice see my truth before anyone else in my life? It’s almost unfair. It’s almost painful that an ancient spirit understands when my own family doesn’t. “I … don’t know how they’d react. I mean, I don’t think my parents would disown me or anything. My guess is they’ll dismiss it. It’s just … easier not to tell anyone.”
Yet there is more to this, I think. Do you feel at home in your body?
At home in my body?
I consider the way my stomach muffins over my jeans, the flaps under my arms. The hair coating my belly and chest. My stubby fingers and how the bones of my big toes poke out like bunions, like Baba’s. My body doesn’t bother me, not exactly. What bothers me is how caged I feel. But human bodies aren’t made to be expansive. Human bodies are made to be simple and symmetrical, not monstrous.
I’m bound in flesh, and I wish I could break through my skin—grow tall to survey a space for safety or extra arms to swoop all the groceries and Maman’s gigantor purse at the same time. Be able to pluck my musician dad’s daf and setar and tombak and ney with delicate spindle fingers. Empty out the abandoned lab next to the one my mom has to share with three colleagues so she can move into it, finally ridding it of unused centrifuges and disconnected fume hoods and broken freezers and incubators.
“I don’t know.” The last victim is tossed on the flames, and bile surges in the back of my throat. “I have to think about it.” I hug myself. “So they killed their enemies instead of allowing your host to sacrifice themself, and that kept you caged. You’re … not human, are you?”
I am beyond such designations. Ou gives a haughty sniff. But I have been bound to these bones for millennia, and such time has eroded the distinction between human and non. My spirit was meant to be freed in that final sacrifice willingly given. Those were the terms of our bond that were not honored—and so the Seer passed into the hereafter, and I remained.
“The modern Farsi word for freedom is aazaadi,” I say. “I could call you Aazaad—free.” Not much of a name, and I’m sure Dr. Hudson would have some thoughts on diasporic linguistic liberties, but it’s something.
Preparing myself—for ou’s disappointment, perhaps, or lest there be more gore awaiting me—I turn. But behind me isn’t a stretch of field, the towering city, but instead, the empty exhibit room. I look back to the case, and that eye—the eye made of tar and animal fat that only I seem to see whenever its focus moves—swivels its golden light and stares straight at me.
That is a profound wish upon me. I thank you for it, blood of my blood.
Oh. That’s relief I feel, isn’t it? That, for once, I’ve done something right?
“You can call me Farz.” I haven’t spoken my real name aloud to anyone. Its weight feels right on my tongue. “That’s fe, re, ze. Although I guess you didn’t use those letters in—” I blank what to use here and switch to English. “Elamite, if that’s what you spoke. How are you understanding me right now, anyway?”
Blood ties transcend language. Hello, Farz.
I’ve never heard someone else speak my name.
In another context, I would object to equating blood and family. But in this case, because blood could refer to our shared culture or our shared language or other similarities—in this case, I’m okay with being claimed in this way.
When I daydreamed about coming out, I never thought it would be to someone outside my parents or friends. And I never thought it would be to someone who is beyond being a someone or something. Tears prick my eyes, and I bat them away, even though what I really want is a hug.
Someone sees me.
I place my bandaged hand on the case, near where the skull sits. This time, it does not bleed through. “It’s nice to meet you, Aazaad.”
After sunset, a spring storm pounds on the high-up courtyard-facing windows as I finally, finally, finish setting up the exhibit. Aazaad kept me company with quiet observations, but mostly allowed me my silence. Now I survey my handiwork: pottery, including what we’re calling an early form of animation; scraps of clothing; an early backgammon set. I can’t help but feel a surge of pride that my ancestors created this.
Dr. Hudson sweeps in, Dr. Aiber on his heels. Aiber whistles, looking around the room. “Well done, Farz,” he says. “James has taught you well.”
Dr. Hudson hasn’t taught me jack shit.
“Farz’s work does add a layer of authenticity to the whole thing, doesn’t it?” says Hudson, his chest puffed. “Our goal, after all, was to honor our Persian brethren.”
Oh, so bringing me in last minute to do the bitch work adds authenticity and honors my people, huh?
“We’ll be sure to mention your contribution to the investors,” adds Aiber, clapping me on the shoulder. “Well, I’d better head home before the missus gets angry.” He chortles. “Good night, James, Farz.”
Aiber’s footsteps fade. Hudson says, “A word, Farz, before you leave for the evening.”
To remain calm, I press my fingers to my wrist and count my heartbeats. Just a few more minutes.
“I’ve been mulling over our earlier conversation, when you insisted that a widened pelvis may not correspond to womanhood.” Oh, great. “In my extensive work on Persia”—oh, great times two, we’re back to being Persia again—“there is no indication of such an idea. Nor have my colleagues encountered evidence to suggest our modern understanding of”—his lip curls—“gender applies to such ancient peoples.”
Lightning cracks across the sky in the window behind him.
“Projecting such agendas onto the past is not only a fallacy but also intense hubris on your part,” he continues, as if he hasn’t made me three inches tall. “And, furthermore, it’s unbecoming of an archeologist. You have brought these objections up before, and your spirited defense has long felt personal. Being unable to separate your emotional state from academic work leads to messy scholarship.”
Thunder clamors belatedly. My breath shallows, trapped in my chest. “But how can you separate scholarship from lived—”
“And that,” he interrupts, “is precisely why I cannot in good faith write you a letter of recommendation for the Smithsonian. I am sorry, but this situation feels for you, Farz, an expression of your own … questions and insecurities. What is it called nowadays, transvestites?”
It starts slowly, so slowly, and then all at once: rage envelops me. The way he looks at me as he spits a slur, as if his colonizing impulse, his academic knowledge, is superior to centuries of my people’s history in inherited memory. As if it’s unusual to think that transness has taken different forms across cultures with different degrees of acceptance over time. As if he’s justified in using my identity to excuse barring me from my future.
I tremble from head to toe, clutching the keys to the exhibit cases. Wait, when did I pick the keys back up?
Foolish, arrogant human, sneers Aazaad in my head. How fortunate for him that my true powers lay dormant as long as I do not have a human host.
What does…? I want to clear my throat, but I’m not speaking aloud. What does having a host mean for the human? Do they always have to die?
The eye, sitting on its purple cushion, spins its golden gaze my way. It unlocks your potential. I will not lie: There will be unfathomable pain as your body adjusts. You must expand yourself to become vast enough to hold me. But that is enough—from you. You do not ask for my voice, so I am happy to take another to fuel our joining. Five thousand years is a long time without … sustenance.
Sacrifices willingly, and unwillingly, given.
I raise my chin to meet Hudson’s smirk.
In the dream, my body had tried to uncage itself but couldn’t go all the way, forced back into the form I know. Aazaad, I named ou, but really, I wished that for myself.
Rain pelts the windows as more lightning snakes across the sky. My resolve hardens. Ou feels it. First, what binds us; then, my eye.
What binds us?
Oh.
Before I can doubt myself, before I can talk myself out of this, I unwrap my hand and tug. Gauze glued by clotted blood rips open my broken flesh. Dr. Hudson splutters, but I unlock the glass case and shove my bloodied hand inside. Ignoring Hudson’s shrieks, I grab the eye.
Hudson leaps back and shouts as the glass enclosure explodes.
Ah, at last … thank you.
Golden light washes over me.
Free yourself, my blood. Become who you were meant to be.
My body shifts.
My back itches and itches and itches as something wiry runs over my shoulder blades before it releases, the way pus erupts from a wound. First one bony branch unfurls, then another, then a third, and a fourth, and finally, my shoulders open wide as if my back has been cracked for the first time.
A pimple blooms in the center of my forehead, the skin growing taut until it bursts open with a wet sploosh. Liquid oozes down my face as extrasensory information floods through me—an awareness of heat, of motion, of the air shifting. The edges of my skin are peeled back and raw to the touch when I finger the writhing wound’s perimeter before easing the eye, convex side out, into its place of honor. It settles onto its fleshy throne with a squelch.
Sharp pain lances through my legs and arms, then my pelvis, then my chest. The ground falls away as my growing legs shoot my torso to the ceiling. I can feel every bone in my body break as I encompass the space in the room.
I look into the mirrors Hudson insisted I set up. They cannot capture my full monstrousness, and I twist to see every angle they obscure. Extra spider legs and bat wings and giant arms throbbing with muscles. I do not need to see the eye shining in the center of my forehead to know this hybrid creature I’ve become is the embodiment of power. Of freedom.
Now there’s a transformation worthy of gods.
I can feel Hudson’s miasma. Gingerly stretching two of my new legs, I reach over and pluck him up from where he cowers on the floor. He squeals and demands to be put down. Entitled, even now.
I dangle him, holding his calf with the careful consideration of a scholar. His face, pale and horrified, stares back at me.
“Norooz pirooz, Dr. Hudson,” I say, my voice transformed into a deep rumble, a spidery whisper, the growl of a monster in the dark.
First, I tear off his small human arm. His screams pierce the air as thunder booms in the distance. Blood squirts from his shoulder as excess flesh dangles from the ends, and I slurp the arm like I would marrow. The blood is warm and fresh in my mouth, and Aazaad sighs in relief as I crunch phalanges and chew on muscle fibers.
Hudson wails, flailing his remaining limbs in my grasp. His face is sheet white. “Please, let me go, let me live—”
Try the thigh next, Aazaad suggests, so I grip the knee and jerk it outward as I might a chicken leg. Hudson weeps, begging for mercy, howling with each tug as I wiggle and eventually rip open his skin like a banana peel. The consistency is like beef, but it doesn’t taste like beef—kind of like veal? A little stringy, a little tough, but a meaty kind of tough to sink my many teeth into.
Hudson’s whimpering now, his body slack, beyond shock. He’ll pass out from blood loss soon. I’m more preoccupied with the bitter aftertaste in the back of my throat and the tender flesh of the buttocks, the sweet melt of the ribs. Is this what pork tastes like?
The blood flowing from his limb stumps has slowed; he is no longer responsive. I raise his body and allow the blood to drip down my mouth, onto my face, into the stringy remains of my hair, tart like warm tomato juice.
The vibrations from oncoming steps hit me as Aazaad says, Someone approaches.
Hudson’s half-eaten remains drop to the floor. Despite my bulk, my wings beat once to lift me, and my beautiful spindle legs twirl my body around before rearing up, poised to strike. If it’s Aiber, he should have come back tomorrow.
The figures at the glass door are familiar. Before Aazaad can attack with our shared body, my parents step into the room.
My parents look from the monster I’ve become, to the blood splattered everywhere, to the remains of James P. Hudson, PhD. Their brown faces pale into an unhealthy sheen.
I completely forgot Baba said they’d pick me up.
Are their expressions of shock and fear because of me?
My mother swallows and steps forward. “Farz?” Her whisper is unsteady.
My body contracts. My back rends itself as the spider legs retract. My arms shrink back to their normal sizes, and my extra ones retreat with my wings. My legs shrivel until I’m just me again, normal Farz, covered in blood—on my mouth, on my hands, down my chest, in my hair. I can smell it like someone smells dog shit or vomit or the carcass of the supervisor they just ate. I want to regurgitate everything, but Aazaad has already absorbed the meal as the sacrifice for our binding.
I tremble. The transformation shredded my clothes; I stand naked before my parents, and that, more than anything, fills me with shame.
“Farz-joon,” whispers my mother, her steps hesitant and careful as she moves toward me. She takes off her coat as she does, swallowing as she puts it over my shoulders without touching me. “Azizam, what happened?”
Baba’s lips move in what is probably quiet prayer as he looks up to the ceiling. I put on Maman’s coat, and at the sound of the zipper closing, Baba drops his gaze to me. I can’t tell if he looks afraid or disgusted, but he surprises me when he says, “You didn’t pick up your phone again. We got worried.”
“We were supposed to make reshteh polo and koofteh ghel-gheli.” Maman sounds on the brink of tears, unsure and untethered. I did that to her—me, her only kid, whom she and my dad have sacrificed so much for as immigrants. But carefully, so carefully, she brushes back a strand of my blood-matted hair. “Are you okay?”
Am I okay? Inside me, Aazaad purrs and curls up like a cat, satiated. But is the danger gone?
My mom keeps her attention on my face. My dad steps toward us, a paper towel in hand from the janitorial cart outside the door. She takes it without looking and begins to dab at my cheeks.
I want to explain, but my voice catches in my throat. How do I explain to my parents that I entered a pact with a millennia-old spirit to transform into a monster and eat my racist colonizing professor-boss?
Baba brings the cart inside and lifts the mop from the grimy water from my earlier cleaning. He drops it onto the ground with a heavy thud. The blood, not yet settled, stains pink. He makes a wide berth around the corpse in the middle of the floor.
I try again to speak but fail. My mom licks her finger and smears it against my nose. She tsks. “Where’s the bathroom?”
I numbly half follow, half lead her downstairs, where she washes my face. She gets paper towel after paper towel and rinses my hands, my arms, the inside of her coat I’ve bloodied but which she puts back on me once I’m wiped. She doesn’t bother with my legs, but once we’re done, she does take more paper towels up to my father, whose bucket of dirty water is now a filthy gray-brown.
The room looks as spotless as it did an hour ago. The glass from the broken exhibit case has been swept up, and that missing cover is the only sign that anything happened here. Wiped clean, the eye lies nestled on its pillow, placed beside the remains. The body of James P. Hudson is nowhere to be seen—I don’t want to know how Baba got rid of it.
The results of what I’ve done bowl me over. I whimper, cover my mouth. My mother wraps her arms around me as Baba chokes out, “God forgive me, but you’re my child.”
“I’m not,” I blurt. It tumbles out of me, and I let it free. “I’m—I’m not a—I’m just your child. I’m transgender. I’m nonbinary. I’m not a boy or a girl. I’m just … me.”
Maman cradles me—without fear or repulsion. “We know.” I stiffen, but she doesn’t let go. “We saw you researching it on the computer but weren’t sure how to talk to you about it. It’s okay, azizam. It’s okay.”
My kin, Aazaad’s voice purrs, they accept you.
Despite the tears streaming down my face, I smile.