My mom insisted we were the descendants of Scheherazade, the storyteller from 1,001 Arabian Nights. It was something she could never prove, especially since we’d left Iran when I was one. I grew up in a California suburb with street light banners touting which high school kids enlisted in the armed forces. The portraits aged. The city updated the headshots annually, citizens propped up in their military drag watching the rest of us outside of bargain movie theaters and Barnes and Noble. The latter was the only cultural institution in town. I hung around the art book section and treated it like a museum, too scared to touch any of the glossy covers.
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My mom brought up Scheherazade when I asked her to take me to Barnes and Noble for a Writers Club meeting at age twelve. I had worked up the nerve after several anxiety-ridden months.
“Of course,” she said with a hint of magic. “It’s in your blood.”
“You can take the chair if you like,” Elle, the moderator, said when I walked in. She assumed I was another pre-teen loitering the bookstore just so I could peruse magazines for free.
Lying down with five more on my throat, pomegranates were my pearls.
“I’m here for the meeting.”
Introductions came after they realized I was serious. Elle had found minor success ghostwriting a breastfeeding manual. There was a kindergarten teacher named Lola, and half a dozen stay-at-home moms. A writer of erotic poetry hesitated to tell me about her day job. It was unavoidable because it was her turn to bring snacks. She plopped a pink box on an empty chair.
“Just keep it shut in case any employees walk by.” Inside the pink box, the poet had brought a Jell-O sculpture. “I make ‘em for bachelorette parties,” she said.
A raspberry penis jiggled before anyone had the nerve to cut in. I took two servings, just the tip. The writing prompt that night was “the little yellow pencil.” We wrote for ten minutes, then everyone except me shared their work. Most of them wrote fairly tame stories about teachers and librarians, DMV employees and vehicle registration applicants, or randy women and waiters. I didn’t read anything aloud.
“You sure you’re not offended?” Elle asked after the workshop. “Because we think there’s a teen workshop several cities over.”
“I can handle it,” I said. “I’ve read The Story of O twice.” They gave me blank looks.
After the workshop, the women crossed the busy street to go from one Mission-style shopping center to the next. They ended the night at Applebee’s, drinking and probably talking in a way they couldn’t with me in tow.
*
Mine was the town with graffiti turbans painted on all the neighborhood watch sign criminals after 9/11. Hearing white fathers and sons tell me to suck it and to go back where I came from expedited the realization I was gay. I quietly owned my queerness while local teens made the news for throwing cabbage at Arabs, knocking over a woman who turned out to be from Spain.
I was safest at the Writers Meeting. I had a kinship with Lola, the kindergarten teacher.
“Nervous?” she asked once before the workshop began.
“Very.”
I’d never really shared my writing with anyone. My teachers were encouraging. But this was personal. Lola showed me how to fold origami birds.
“Like I teach my kids. It’ll help get your mind off of your nerves.” I watched her make a swan from a page from her notebook. She then made a crane, folding its neck with precision. “I think I invented this one.” She held up her take on a hummingbird. “And when you’re done, unfold and start again.” She deconstructed her aviary until they were back to being wrinkled sheets of paper.
That night, our prompt was fruit. The women read stories about cozy couples eating strawberries, and a picnic smooch-fest over a slice of cherry pie. There was a lumberjack in an apple orchard who had the kind of chest you could imagine.
I chose to rewrite a Greek myth. My local library had a meager collection of mythology, so I was usually in the company of Classical antiquity. Persephone was tricked by Hades with pomegranate seeds. Having tasted the food of the underworld, she was condemned to spend half of every year amongst the dead.
I didn’t write as much as I wanted during those ten minutes. Persephone kept me company all week, while my parents fought, while my dad wept during another suicidal episode.
I read my piece aloud the following Friday. The women perked up.
“Actually, there’s potential,” the erotic poet said. “Care for some advice?”
“I can take it.” I wasn’t there for praise, nor did I expect it.
“The bones of the story are interesting. It’s just missing the meat. You can keep your characters at a distance if you want, or you can make them feel real.”
Elle was more blunt. “Why would I read your story and not just read an old text?” I didn’t have an answer. “Make it come alive. Start with your senses like in erotica. What does your character taste, touch, see, and feel?”
Lola had something else to add. “No, no. Start with yourself. What do you taste, touch, see, and feel when you think of pomegranates?”
Pomegranates I knew. My mom tried showing me how to scoop them many times, tapping the skin until the seeds spilled into gold bowls from old samovar sets.
“Tastes better in these,” she’d say before sprinkling salt on the mound.
I didn’t care to eat the fruit. Instead, I tried collecting twenty seeds. With ten, I could balance a pomegranate seed on each of my fingernails. The stains would be the closest I’d come to wearing makeup.
Just some color, I thought.
With five more pomegranate seeds, I dotted my lips, my subtle version of drag. Perhaps my Persephone wore pomegranates on her neck like I did. Lying down with five more on my throat, pomegranates were my pearls. And if I cried from loneliness or longing, at least lying down the tears fell sideways, not down my lips, not on my neck.
*
I wanted to remind my mom about Scheherazade when she found out I was gay several years later. It was my fault. I had left out my journal.
My family thinks I’m going to France for a film program. I’m not. I’m going to see a boy I think I love.
That was all. That was enough. I came home from my closing shift at the Barnes and Noble Café, my first job. Three sentences undid my careful planning for a film program that never existed. My mom questioned me while bawling out her colored contacts.
“Do you want AIDS? Is it because your sister has hairy arms? What if we never left Iran?”
The last question was the most pointed, since staying in Iran could have been a death sentence for me. I didn’t respond to any of her questions, just pretended to go to sleep. She cried at my bedside and firmly held my hand, as if she could transfer the sense of mourning over to me.
I met Christopher online. I was seventeen and he was beginning grad school at the American University in Paris. He studied the sex lives of saints, those who writhed from being penetrated by God.
Because I was studying film in college, a film program made the most sense as an excuse to visit him. I don’t know why I felt I needed to build such an intricate lie. I wasn’t supported by my parents financially. My dad was in jail again, his third stint, and my mom was doing the labor of his latest get-rich-quick scheme. She traveled around California business plazas restocking vending machines. Their garage was full of smashed Twinkie knockoffs.
It must have seemed romantic to me then, working three jobs to pay Christopher back for the one way ticket to Charles de Gaulle Airport. For the supposed film program, I made fake permission slips, a long list of fake contacts, and a signed orientation packet I showed off to my mom. See, it’s real. I’m really going.
“It’s a prompt I learned from the Writers Club,” I told her as she sobbed. “You start with something true, and fold it into something else.”
Maybe I was like Persephone, or the Red Princess. Perhaps a third liar was more appropriate.
She didn’t buy it, even though she was the one who started the Scheherazade lie. She knew I was planning to leave for good.
*
On my flight to France, I read the twelfth-century Persian epic Haft Paykar, full of stories told by princesses in different pavilions. The Red Princess was my favorite. She lived in a castle guarded by many secret passageways, barricades, and traps, because she didn’t care to fall in love. Just outside her palace doors, hidden sculptures with real swords beheaded many men who hastily ran into the blades. Hundreds of heads rolled down the hill as a warning to anyone else who dared to approach.
I arrived in Paris with a suitcase full of CDs I burned prior to the trip just to fake being cool when Christopher and I met. While he flipped through my Cocteau Twins and Galaxie 500 CDs, he just laughed.
“These are all burned CDs. Might as well have none.”
We stayed in his friend’s apartment in le Marais while she was on holiday. On my first day in Paris, I ordered in English when we dined at a taco spot. Afterward, the server spoke to the rest of the table in English too.
“You’re ruining my education,” Christopher said. I drank too much sangria and vomited red down the tilework of some corner of Rue de Renard. “I can’t see myself with someone like you,” he said when we got back to our spot. “Never, ever, ever.”
I blamed the burned CDs, but there were probably many reasons. He paid for a cheap return ticket scheduled two weeks away and left me in various apartments while he went out to sleep with other guys.
I cried on the airplane ride back to California. Thankfully I had the entire row to myself.
“You hungry?” The flight attendant asked when I finally stopped bawling. She placed a danish in front of me anyway. “It’s pomegranate though, an acquired taste.”
There were six pomegranate seeds on top of the pastry. I could make five into a necklace, I thought, dark red pearls. And the sixth one belonged on my tongue.
So, I thought, this is the underworld where I’ll spend part of my life.
Maybe I was like Persephone, or the Red Princess. Perhaps a third liar was more appropriate. I sat up, tore a page out of my journal, and tried to fold a sheet into a bird.
“Does this look like anything to you?” I asked the flight attendant. She shrugged. I knew what to do next. Unfold and start again.
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Medusa of the Roses by Navid Sinaki is available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.
