An Emotion of Great Delight by Tahereh Mafi

Author:Tahereh Mafi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

When I got home, the house was dark.

I closed the door behind me, the familiar whine of an ungreased hinge preceding the heavy close. I leaned back against the door, rested my head against the cheap wood. I smelled new paint, stale air, the faint aroma of Windex. We’d moved into this sterile rental not long after my brother died. It had become impossible to live in a place that housed the museum of his life, the modest bedroom from which my father would drag my mother’s prone, sobbing body every night. I saw her with my own eyes only once, just once before my father chased me out, shouting at me to go back to bed. My mother was curled on the floor of my brother’s room, banging her head against the baseboard, begging God to be merciful and kill her.

Somehow, through the power of violent self-delusion, my parents thought we wouldn’t hear them fighting late at night, thought we wouldn’t have ways of seeing them in the hallway, thought we wouldn’t hear my father begging my mother to come back to bed, begging in a voice I’d never known him to possess. Come back, come back, come back, come back.

She’d slapped him in the face.

She’d thrown feeble, desperate punches at his chest, clawing at him until he finally let go, let her sink to the floor. I watched from a half-inch opening in my bedroom door, my heart pounding so hard I could barely breathe. In the dead of night my parents became strangers, each utterly transformed into versions of themselves I did not know.

I watched my father fall to his knees before my mother, a penitent dictator. I watched my mother reduce him to ash.

On the morning my father announced we were moving, no one even lifted their heads. There were no questions, no discussions.

There was no need.

We left that place behind, did not drive past our old street, did not discuss the hours my mother now spent in her closet. But when I closed my eyes I still heard her voice; I still saw her desperate, inhuman face. Kill me, dear God, she’d cry. She’d slap herself in the chest, drag fingernails down her face. Mano bokosho az een donya bebar. Kill me and take me away from this world.

I turned on the lights.

I dropped my backpack by the door, kicked off my shoes. My chest was tightening like a vise around my lungs, my vision blurring. In my mind I saw a stethoscope, a brown smudge, a scuffed gold wedding band.

Has she ever said anything to make you think she might be a danger to herself?

I felt heavy and cold.

I stared at an ancient, painted nail buried in the wall by the door, stood in the entryway staring at it for what felt like forever. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was hungry, I had homework, I needed to shower, I had to find my phone, I wanted to put on a

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