Something like a cry that sounds neither male nor female creeps into the room through the gap of the window. It’s the caw of a crow. My sister always says, “Every time there’s a caw, someone dies.” I close the window. Our neighborhood’s noisy crow is a politician. He wants to become the representative of other crows. He’s wise. He’s a go-getter. My mom says, “It’s better to be both a go-getter and wise.” I’m just wise. I don’t know how to be a go-getter.

In a hump-like protuberance, my sister carries all the decayed words on her back. Every day, she lays them down on an operating table. She pulls out every parasite egg lodged between them with a pair of tweezers. She lays them on her thoughts like gems, sticks them to her forehead, or wears them as a tongue ring—like many women and men who wear rings on the corner of their eyebrows, on their nostrils, on their bellybuttons, or wherever on their bodies that a ring could hang.

She takes what remains of the vomit and phlegm of the wet waste and shoves it into her ears. The earrings will turn into gold if a bunch of people stares at them. Most of the time, I have to shout for her to hear me. Most of the time, she has a headache and heart palpitations. I’d say it’s the stench of the waste to blame. Maybe she should make gems out of something else. She says, “Everything’s so expensive these days. A dollar is 30,000 tomans. You can’t afford anything better. To be creative is to upcycle. Art is to create a valuable thing out of something insignificant.”

I’m reading Khwaday-Namag[1] and thinking, “Why were the world’s first two brothers rivals?” I like melodic words. “Asha vahishta, khshatrava’iriya,” I keep repeating like an incantation. “What a pile of drivel you’re keeping yourself busy with,” remarks my sister. “Those are some difficult words,” observes my brother. I tell him, “If you run into a strange word, just read it upside down. It must have a meaning.” He says, “Translate hatshihu hasha.” I stand my ground: “It must have a meaning; maybe in some other world.” I mean, yesterday my friend said, “They don’t have Khwaday-Namag in other worlds. All tales originate in the Shahnameh[2]. And then there’s this other world where they only have Daeva-Namag.” Everything’s too expensive around here, but hey, at least we’ve got Khwaday-Namag.

Like my sister, the myths have planted parasite eggs in the hands of the two brothers’ archetype. The book says, “Good is always the opposite of evil.” Words can’t be evil. You have to reverse evil words so they become less evil, then you can live. Actually, maybe that’s why my sister doesn’t love me. But why did Cain murder Abel, or why does Inanna live in our world and her sister in the underworld? The Creation has planted the seed of division in the core of siblinghood. So, in that other world where they have Daeva-Namag[3], are Abel and Cain close and do Ishtar and Ereshkigal live in the same house?

My brother is always angry. Rather than blood, only filth and serum run in his heart. I believe that for the river of words to flow, you must be pure, but he’s won the “Pop Rhetoric” literary award. All my life, I have done nothing but thinking. I’ve won no awards nor have I received any praise. My brother wins one every year. He mocks me, saying, “Try to win at least a single award with this purity of yours!” I see the words in his head, and they’re round—round like crucified uninflated party balloons.

Words don’t go around in my head: they take a journey. Their journey is yet to receive a destination, but they’re happy just to be flowing. I’ve never seen anyone in the world who would enjoy doing something over and over again—unless they’re trying to forget something. Maybe that’s why people give my brother an award every year: they’re trying to forget his words. Every time I screw up, I resort to eating popcorn—I eat and eat and eat them away. And then, the thoughts are gone; there only remains the clickety-clack of corn cracking. My mind gets trapped in a loop. It forgets it was on a journey. And then I find peace. You can do the same thing with ice cream or lollipops: just licking it away and wondering when it’ll finally finish—and losing yourself so much in that thought that you miss the moment it actually gets finished!

My sister’s thoughts sound seaweed green. She’s planting the seeds in her mind again. She routinely waters them. My sister is pregnant with etah. She now has two humps: one on her back, another on her belly. How heavy my sister has become. My mom says, “A young woman should be heavy”—ladylike, she means. I’m light. I get blown around like a stalk of hay. Actually, maybe I never belonged to this world. What if I’ve stepped into this world from some parallel universe?

My friend says, “In that other world, they’ve awarded the Nobel Prize to the person who discovered that darkness is the absence of light.” We don’t have the Nobel Prize; we have the “Pop Award”—and it has different categories, like the Pop Physics Award and Pop Chemistry Award. The masses have to comment on everything and like everything. After all, we have democracy. But sometimes, some members of the masses get sidelined. But no one cares, of course. After all, if we were to sing in a choir, my voice—and the voice of folks like me—would get drowned away by the voices of the rest. In our world, if this guy spouted his theories, they wouldn’t even give him a goat’s schmuck, let alone the Pop Award. After all, in our world, darkness has a character of its own, so has light—just like Ahura[4] and Ahriman[5], like Abel and Cain, like Ishtar and Ereshkigal, like my sister and I, like my brother and I.

Maybe the reason I have two enemies is that I’m trans. Maybe that’s why my sister doesn’t love me and my brother dislikes me. My sister said, “Go close the door before the caw of the crow brings us bad news again.” I had already closed the door. I think the caw was just in her head. I mean, the crow wasn’t even sitting on our tree. Early in the morning, I saw him on his way to cast his ballot in the election. I saw him pouring feces of excitement over the city—no excitement poured from the feces.

I like playing with words. I like reading history. I like traveling alone to other paper worlds from my room. My mom says, “That’s why you’ve never earned a dollar in your life.” The dollar is the currency of every good thing in our world. Even my sister asks her husband, “How many dollars do you love me?” Her teacher had once told her, “Anything that can’t be measured is worth dumping in the wall,”—as in “it’s worthless.” I like walls. I’d be better off inside a wall than behind one. The last time I weighed myself on a scale, it didn’t show any number. My mom said, “Because you’re too light.” My sister said, “Because you throw away too much of your things or donate or give them away.” I don’t like hoarding stuff. Like words, things should always be traveling. After all, I’m always locked up in my room; all my journeys are on paper.

My brother gives a speech today. He opens up words and puts sweetness in them. My brother is a “flattering man,” as Abdul-Rahman ibn Es’haq Jowhari puts it in Kutub al-Sittah. “You’re tripping? ‘Cause you’re blethering on and on again,” says my brother. “It’s blathering,” I correct him. “Just go back to napping in the purity of your fluent words,” he replies. My brother leaves the house to go win a new award. The masses like sweet words. My words are always flavor-free though—always tasteless. I keep them on the corner of my mouth, just like Hrabal would. They never taste like anything. They smell gray. They’re transparent like glass. As soon as the opinion of the masses flicks them, they come crashing down on my own head. Nobody likes flavorless, gray-smelling, glassy words. Words should come in colors. They should taste sweet or at least sweet-and-sour. They should hover like party balloons. With every hurrah, they should get more and more and more inflated and rise to the highest sky. I think my brother is going to fly a hot-air balloon instead of a party balloon this time.

“Go fetch a doctor;” cries out my mom, “you’re sister died giving birth.” I didn’t know her belly had ripened this fast. I mean, she had just become pregnant. Her belly ripened even faster than apples in wildlands. My mom gives me the stink eye. My sister died giving birth to twins: Hanik and Hudna.

She’s now probably gone to the underworld. Below there, down here. It’s better this way. Now our rivalry means something. Each of us two lives in a separate territory. “They were big babies,” the doctor says. “They have blinded her eyes.” But I can see that all those parasite eggs have sprouted like the seeds of a Nowrooz Sabzeh, intertwined, and obstructed her airway. The crows eventually brought her bad news. My reasoning is never the same as that of others. I mean, what does getting blinded have anything to do with dying in childbirth? “The cause of death was vision loss,” the doctor says. “It was suffocation,” I contradict him. “The nerve of this kid!” he exclaims. “And the ignorance of you!” I hit back. “I won the Pop Medicine Award. What have you ever achieved?” he continues the quarrel. “All she’s ever done is talking nonsense and daydreaming,” my mom responds.

[1] Book of lords

[2] Book  of kings: is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi

[3] Book of demons

[4] Ahura is an Avestan language designation for a particular class of Zoroastrian divinities.

[5]Ahriman is the Avestan-language name of Zoroastrianism’s hypostasis of the “destructive/evil spirit” and the main adversary in Zoroastrianism either of the Spenta Mainyu, the “holy/creative spirits/mentality”, or directly of Ahura Mazda, the highest deity of Zoroastrianism.