A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

their fingers. “You should just admit Mahtab is dead . . . like everyone says.”
Mahtab would have played a hundred games of possibility before admitting such a defeat, especially without proof. How can everyone believe that Mahtab is dead without seeing her body, without putting an ear to her chest and counting the beats? Sometimes Saba wakes up in the night, her skin wet and salty again, after having seen Mahtab’s body in her nightmares, drowned and fished out from the bottom of the sea. It looks just like her own and so it is doubly frightening. Maybe there is no body because Mahtab never existed. Maybe she was only Saba’s reflection in the mirror. Is she trapped there now? Can Saba break the glass with her fist and pull Mahtab out?
Reza is still standing beside them, glancing at the main road now and then and chewing his lower lip raw. Ponneh keeps signaling him to sit beside Saba, to pay her some attention. This is Ponneh’s way of soothing her best friend: offering up Reza as a gift; he is just a boy and good for such things. But Reza keeps his post. “Do you think the pasdar will find us here?” he says, and peers down the alley again. He chews his lips and gives the ball a few nervous kicks whispering, “Iran, Iran! GOAL!”
“Maybe she’s not dead, though,” says Saba, like she has done a hundred times in the last month. She touches her throat, rubs it with both palms, a recent tic that she knows worries her family and friends. “Maybe she went with my mother to America.”
“My maman says that your maman didn’t go to America,” whispers Reza from above them. “And she’s not coming back.”
“Your maman is a lying viper,” Saba shoots back. “You’ll see when Mahtab finds a way to write me a letter. She’s a lot smarter than both of you.”
Ponneh puts on that affected look of concern that she perfected by the time she was eight. It is convincing, even comforting—Ponneh pretending to be an adult. “There aren’t going to be any letters,” she says: a fact as simple as the blue sea.
Reza crosses his arms and mumbles, “Why would my mother lie?”
“There are a million reasons,” says Saba. “I saw them—both of them—at the airport. And besides, Baba and I drove Maman there ourselves . She had a passport and papers and everything. Ponneh, you remember that, right?”
Ponneh nods and clutches Saba’s hand even harder. “Still.”
“Exactly,” she says, and doesn’t flinch when Ponneh, who likes to pick at things when she’s nervous, begins peeling the polish off Saba’s fingernails. “You believe me. I saw them with my own eyes. Maybe they said she’s dead to throw the pasdar s off my mother’s tracks . . . so they’d leave us alone. Probably Baba paid everyone to lie.” With her thumb, she rubs out the dirty spots from her shoes, the last pair chosen by her mother that still fits her feet. After a while she decides that all is well. Mahtab will write soon enough and the facts are unchangeable—the passport, the drive to the airport. No one can deny these things. She wipes her face, takes a last deep breath, and drags herself out from the abyss. She licks her salty upper lip and offers a distraction. “I heard Khanom Omidi has four husbands, each in a different town.”
“No. Really?” Ponneh looks up, all bad things forgotten. “How do you know?”
“The Khanom Witches.” Saba shrugs. “They’re always talking about each other.”
The Three Khanom Witches is Saba’s name for the neighbors who have invited themselves into the Hafezi home since her mother left. They know how to do things that her father can’t, and so they have become her surrogate family. They tell stories, cook, clean, gossip, and best of all, they betray each other in the most entertaining ways.
Khanom Omidi, the Sweet One, says, almost daily, “I have a surprise for you, Saba joon. Big surprise. Don’t show the others.” She lumbers over, dragging all that extra flesh in a colorful