"Unidentified Young Woman" by Narges Anzali

May I never be forgiven the circumstances of my birth. 

1.

There was no question about it—the body had shown up independently in the middle of the street. Not on the concrete, where she would have gone gray around the edges, stepped over like the masses of the unfortunate that line the curbs of cities. No, her body was laid out on a rolling gurney, hands placed over each other on top of her stomach. Her hair hung down over the hard plastic sides of her makeshift bed, swaying every so slightly in the morning breeze. The gurney was tilted where the sidewalk met the crack of the curb, and it seemed to the people walking by that the gurney might eventually be worn down and carved out like a mountain, her body sliding hair width by hair width down the blue plastic towards the wet ground. 

The first to encounter her were the shopkeepers of the supers, the small grocery stores about the size of a hallway crouched at the corner of each block. As they opened the shutters to their shops, tea in hand, they blinked their eyes against the crust of sleeping and turned towards their silent shelves, heaving with the weight of plastic-wrapped biscuits and bags of rice. By the time they ventured into the light of the ripening sun to hang the shades which protected the rows of cheese puffs displayed outside, the body had failed to fade wavy into the underbelly of things which was erased from the allies by daylight. There she lay. They made the journey from the corners of blocks to the corners of other blocks, consulting with their fellow fat, balding owners. 

Glasses of tea in hand, their index fingers worried at the gold leaf on the rim of the saucer. Flakes of metal swimming in the whirlpool of cooling brown dregs. 

Have you seen the…they whispered into the chinks of the glass. 

It’s a damn shame the state of…they muttered as they swept around the wheels of the gurney. 

And who would…they wondered, tossing their words like dice onto the counters. 

The pedestrians, feet keeping time to the clock that called them to their offices, glanced too at the gurney. They streamed around her like ants circumnavigating a rock. This is not food, their bodies said. You cannot take it with you. Occasionally one or two would stand for a minute and stare. They would take out their phones, heart pounding, and take a picture. Shoving their phones into their pockets as though it burned. 

The people accumulated like dust. First came the photographers who scuttled, backs bent, over the concrete, adjusting the angles of the wheels of the gurney. Then came the young people who, having only 16 years to lose, flocked to the street in droves, swarms of school uniforms surrounding the body like a school of fish, their bodies blue or white or gray of maghne and manto. Last came the mothers and fathers, who formed between them a contact book of the city. Look at her eyes, insisted one. Don’t they look like Mina’s? Shaking his head, another interjected—She has Ehsan’s eyelashes. In this manner they tried to decode the lines of her face and shape of her nose, reading around the bruises that spanned the left side of her face down to her neck and the bloody mess that concealed the pattern of her hairline. If we could get closer, you know, my cousin's daughter has a mole hidden behind her ear. 

The police were finally called because traffic had been blocked by the swarm of bodies buzzing on the sidewalk and spilling into the lanes. The crowds parted for their fatigue-clad bodies, like static being swept gently to the sides of a TV screen. They stared at the body for a while, considering between them something that the crowd strained to hear without ever breaking the drumbeat of their conversations. 

Suddenly, they stuffed her head into a black bag, shoving her hair underneath the dark cloth until it bulged like a trapped creature. The wheels of the gurney hit the streets with a slam. The doors of the van snapped shut, and the people circled around it, bodies forming concentric rings. Searching for something taken. The smell of burning rubber filled the air. Someone had set a trash can on fire. 

2. 
   

The concrete was hot. The frozen yogurt was melting faster than she could spoon it into her mouth, little mango bubbles swimming in a sea of vanilla. The corners of her mouth were beginning to feel sticky. Her baba handed her a napkin from underneath his leg where they had been hastily jammed to keep them from floating away on the breeze. She wiped her mouth and kept scooping bubbles out of the sea with her little blue spoon-raft. 

“It’s a good day, babai.” Baba patted Jina’s hair and slipped his fingers through the long sheet that ran down her back like a thunderstorm. It was a good day, she thought to herself. She had been able to finish her seven times tables faster than anyone in the class, even Rachel. And Baba was happy, so they got to have sweets before dinner, which was almost never allowed. 

A buzz came from the park across the street, or rather a drone of insects preparing in the dusk for the night’s frenzied pilgrimage towards light. There were still lilacs on the trees on either side of the steps of the library. Jina tilted her head onto Baba’s knee, because she had finished her bastani. 

“Well hey there, Hamid!” exclaimed a man passing by on the sidewalk. He stopped and put his grocery bags down on the pavement, the plastic handles falling onto his knees which were knotted with shades of forgotten scars. The top of his head shone with what was left of the sun’s rays. It was so strange how most bald men’s heads were globes, she thought. She felt sure that her head would be bumpy underneath all her hair, or her wool as Baba called it. 

“Hi, Jim.” said Baba. His accent always tilted slightly to the right. HaI jiM, he seemed to say. She cocked her head slightly to the right, and it looked as if her sister were about to fall over. 

“And who are these lovely ladies?” 

“This is Mahsa, my eldest, and Jina.” The sweat from the little cardboard cup that her frozen yogurt was sitting in was flung from her hand down the stairs as she waved. 

“Those are some lucky girls? Ice cream before dinner, huh?” She smiled, because she knew that children were supposed to smile when adults make jokes, or at least, her parents thought she was being spoiled when she did not smile at adults jokes, and said that was not what they had come to this country for, so now she smiled. And nodded her head, scooping her chin up in the air. Her hair fell in front of her eyes, and it itched the soft piece of skin in front of her ear.

“Yes, I brought them to celebrate,” said her father, hand still resting on the top of Jina’s head, “The nuclear deal was signed today, we are happy, you know.” Her baba smiled a smile that exposed his wolf-teeth to the air. That’s what her maman called them, his wolf-teeth, pointy and hiding at the edges of his mouth. The top of Jim’s head bobbed, deflecting light into her eyes. She squinted down into her pool of melted ice cream. He was so tall, and so bald. She wondered whether that was what Humpty-Dumpty felt like, sitting all the way on top of the wall. Maybe the wall was just a body.

I’M GOING TO BREAK! She imagined his egg-head screaming as he took a tumble. His neck was long enough that maybe his egg-head would stay intact, she thought, watching the wrinkles on his throat expand and contract as he talked to her Baba. Expanding and contracting like how she imagined a pneumatic tube. That was how her favorite cartoon character received his letters, and she liked to think of words coming out that way. Her baba tapped her side with his elbow. 

“Hm?”

“Are you happy about it, young lady?” 

She blinked. The strap of her Reeboks had come loose, and it was now flapping against her ankle like a flag in the wind. The smell of the flowers was just like her grandfather’s garden. He might even be in it now, circling the small patch of grass in the middle of the big city. The water had been turning off, he had said to her Baba. He shuffled around the garden in his plaid shirt, nothing in his hand to water the flowers with. Insha’llah, he said to her Baba. Insha’llah they listen to Amreeka—maybe then they will turn the water on. 

“Yes. We are very happy.” She smiled. The lines around his eyes were tighter than they had been. She scooped another bubble out of her ice cream soup and popped it between her one front tooth and two bottom. The next tooth, said her dentist, would not come in until spring. 

3. 
   

Legs leaned up against the wall like skis, I stared at my own toes. The toenails were cut oddly because things often felt too short in that region and I was afraid of somehow reaching flesh. My second toe on the left was taller than my big toe, but not on the right. I wondered how many people on earth could relate to that statement, and if there was anything to it that could really stop us from killing each other if it came down to it. I imagined myself in a dark alley, faced with a tall hooded man who was pulling a gun out on me. I would point down to his feet, and my feet, and say, but we both have longer second toes! I wouldn’t know, I’d just be guessing. And he would look at me, the glimmer of his eyes barely visible from behind the mask, and lower his gun, and just walk away. And it would have been my toes that saved me—how many people can say that? Not many, I’m assuming. 

The bath water dripping down my legs plopped back into the tub, landing like a dead mouse on concrete. I wiggled my toes again, and then submerged my head underwater. Toes up, head down. My hair reached all the way from the bottom of the tub to the top of it. For a while, I had been obsessed with these videos where divers would go to the bottom of kelp colonies and peel urchins off the bottom of the rocks there, chucking them one by one into their huge nets. What part of me would qualify as the urchins, if my hair was the kelp? Is it the kelp? Could it be kelp, or is it too brown? Smooth enough, coily enough certainly. Bubbles float up to the top, suspended in water. Defending precariously their position as air. 

The phone buzzes, on the ledge next to the tub. I am born again above the water to reach it. I gasp in air, and if I didn’t have upstairs neighbors, I would scream. Just to really assert the birth metaphor. I flip the phone over, only touching the edges because of that one time I dropped it in my own piss and the screen died. It’s the Signal group chat. The notification is read out loud by the little man's voice. It declares: STUDENT TRAPPED IN GROCERY STORE AND ARRESTED NEXT TO TOMATOES. The ceramic starts ringing again. Anabell, without an e. 

“Hello?” 

“Hey, did you see the news?” 

“Like, just now yeah. When they texted it.” 

“We’re so fucked.” 

“Mhm.”

The water shifts around me like a blanket. I feel like she can hear the suspicious tinkling, the bright sound of all that water hitting itself. 

“You’re still giving the speech, right?” her voice rings out across my tiles, my tiles that I just scrubbed on my hands and knees. They give her voice a kind of lemony scent. 

“Yeah, of course. I wrote it like a week ago, Annie.”

“Good, good.”

She goes quiet on the line. I can hear her soft breathing. I know her well enough to imagine the small rise and fall of her chest. She never looked as though she was breathing enough for what her lungs needed, short little breaths that must have left her lungs running after more. 

“I’m sorry about like” she starts, “I’m sorry about everything. Do you know where your family is?” The quiet tinkling of water bounced off the porcelain. It sounded like a million wind chimes. 

“Ummmmm.” I tapped my nail against the side of the tub. I closed my eyes and slid back into the water up to my eyes, blinking at the unbroken surface. I recited their addresses in my head one by one. Two of them still where the bombing was worst. What would I do if I got bombed in the shower? I wonder whether my embarrassment would be enough to make me look for clothes in the rubble. 

“Yeah, they’re ok.” 

“Ok, well. Let me know if you need anything. I’ve been thinking about you, you know.” 

“Thanks. Thanks, Belle.” 

Somewhere a world has collapsed, maybe on top of my cousins. I refresh the list of explosions, the videos taken with shaky hands. God save us, God save us. The litanies play, I look at my toes. One longer than the other. Just like my mother’s.

And if God never forgives us the circumstances of our birth? 

Narges Anzali is an Iranian-American writer and student at Princeton University. Her work focuses on themes of migration, exile and love. She has been published in the Nassau Weekly, Beaver Magazine, and Iris Youth Magazine.