alalehbanu
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Mahin in the Wind
Mahin Banu had a dark but lustrous imagination, which unlike her static coiffures, ran windswept and untamed. One winter afternoon, as the curly trees and clouds of Tehran blew across the city, Asqar Aqa came home from work for his daily lunch break and siesta and found that something other than the leaves from his…
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Part One. The Moftakhar House in Moftakhar Alley
The Moftakhar house snaked itself around Moftakhar Alley with all the wiggling hips of a Wednesday market girl. When they first assigned surnames in Tehran, Asqar Aqa’s father, Ali Aqa, chose the name “Moftakhar” because he had studied Arabic and in Arabic moftakhar meant “proud.” In Persian, it lent itself rather easily to ridicule and…
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The Many Faces of Annika
1620 My name is Annika, but it was not always so. I was born in Safavid Persia in the Gregorian year 1620, and was made vampyr some twenty years after that. In those days they called me Anna Khanum. As you can see, I was a great and very dangerous beauty. That is why Mother…
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Don’t Skip
Every night, I hold up my magic mirror. Show me Gaza, I whisper into the darkness until they appear. Familiar faces, I’ve seen them now for over a year. Some smile, some plead, some weep, some hold up their children in despair. “Don’t skip” “I know you are tired of us” “We know you are…
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The Flour Massacre
“What cannot be said, will be wept.” – Sappho If I were a mermaid, I would weep large paisley tears into an ocean of black gold. If I were a pari of the sea, I would shed black-moon pearls from the warm underbelly of the world. If I were a mermaid, I would not comb…
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Preface to White Mulberries
Every family member who visited us from Iran in my youth, with their smoky blazers and suitcases full of embroideries, pistachios, handmade trinkets, saffron, and gold for our future wedding days, also brought with them a far more precious collection of family folklore and personal memories that were shared over cups of tea as we…
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Little Tree, A Prelude
Mahin Banu Sameni came from a long line of wealthy bazaari merchants. With hair like a soft, swift death and eyes that just knew better, the Sameni women married well above their social sphere. In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Mahin Banu, the most luminous of her sisters by far, married Asqar Aqa Moftakhar,…
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The Fool
Divinity: Asmān, Guardian of the Sky Manthra: To the high, powerful heavens; to the bright, all-happy, blissful abode of the holy ones. ashnô berezatô sûrahe vahishtahe angêush ashaonăm raocanghô vispô-hvâthrô. (Flowers, Original Magic, 96) Sometimes numbered zero, sometimes twenty-two, often not numbered at all, the Fool is a card of beginnings, or pre-beginnings. A carefree…
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The Night Mare
I struggle to keep up with the speed that global tragedies are hurled at us these days. There is simply no time to process every devastation or threat of devastation, so they get filed away into a cobwebbed cupboard in my psyche, only to resurface later in some other unholy way. Panic attacks, altercations with…
al-majus 