Number sixty-two

It’s been seven months and sixty-two blogs for me.

Here, at “Groves of Spears.”

I’m having loads of fun and meeting great new people. You’re not new people but you’re new to me. I know you were around somewhere else before you were here.

Thanks to all of you for stopping by to say hello like you do. I will try to make this blog better and better for you.

Now here’s a picture called “Motherships” by an Iranian artist named Maryam Hashemi.

My super power

Listen to me. I tell you that I’m always wrong. I’m quite certain of this.

It’s not that I am a liar, no; I’m just a poor guesser. If it should so happen that you are talking with me and it turns out that I am right about something, then you can be reasonably confident that it is not me you’re talking with but rather someone else entirely.

The one about the screaming

I am not a person prone to emotional outbursts but sometimes I scream out in my sleep.

It begins in my sleep, at any rate, and continues on for a time after I’ve been awakened by the screaming. By my own screaming, that is.

People run in to see what is the matter. My sister. When I was younger, my parents. People run in and they usually say the same thing. They say, “Nasreen, what is it that’s scared you?”

My father or a visiting relative or that woman they took me to talk to about it: “What are you afraid of? What’s making you scream?”

I never remember but what if I did and what if it was something really to be scared of? Have they even considered this?

What if I told them of the thing that makes me scream in my sleep and then they were scared, too? What if, upon learning of it, they woke in the night screaming, too?

You know, like it’s some kind of fear virus.

What would have been accomplished in that case, really?

That in itself, that’s something to be scared of. I’m scared of that: Making the world a more fearful place. Making the world a place where more people wake up screaming in the night.

What an awful idea. A fear virus. I would not want to be responsible for perpetuating such a thing and that is why I would never, ever share what-

Oh. Wait.  

Forget I said anything, maybe?

 

Family album

This is a picture post.

This is my family.

My family is wonderful and yours might be too. You should feel free to post pictures of your family in the comments, though you are under no obligation to do so. 

I was distracted

She had an unnervingly tiny face.

In saying this, I do not seek to imply that she was tiny in body nor that her head was statistically smaller than that of the average person. Her head was, in fact, if anything, slightly larger than that of the average person in my experience. I grant you that my experience of heads might not have contained a representative sample.

Still, neither the body nor the head was at issue.

Instead, her unnerving quality involved only her face, the features of which appeared all bunched up in the middle, where only her nose rightfully should have been. The eyes, nose, mouth and associated lines all squeezed into an area no larger than a baby’s fist.

Mere moments after the commencement of our lunch meeting, I found myself unable to focus on anything save this tiny face before me. Why would Allah deem so large a head necessary for holding such a microscopic visage? It was all just wasted space, really. A veritable skin desert.

I should have been engaged and conversing. Wheeling and dealing. But there was none of that.

I imagined this woman as a normal woman with a proper-sized face on a proper-sized head. I imagined her as having had – for reasons both unknown and unknowable to me – pushed her face up, into, and through a large, flesh-colored, papier-mâché orb. Perhaps she was wearing it now solely for the purposes of our meeting. 

But there was no line visible where a makeup artist or gluemaster might have worked at hiding the seam between face and surrounding papier-mâché head. There must be a seam, right?

I stared and I stared and once even believed I’d found it. But then the woman proceeded to smile, revealing the seam to be nothing more than an ordinary dimple.

“This is great!” she said, and loudly enough to snap me out of my trance. “Once this deal goes through, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other!”

There was no question but that I would have to hijack the deal.