Roshana Ghaedi
peek-a-boo “I wonder if there’ll be war this summer,” my mother says as she rifles through the salad with a spork, trying to resurrect the damp, unappetizing lettuce leaves. “Not in the summer,” my aunt responds listlessly, too busy braiding her daughter’s hair to look up. “It’s much too hot.” My mother sighs with disappointment at her wilting salad and drops the subject without much fanfare. For weeks now, my family has been toying with the idea of war: casually, furtively, between bites of food, in the momentary silence when I am tying my shoelaces before going out the door. The idea is passed around with dessert after dinner, posed anxiously to the mailman as he turns to leave, dissected with the butcher as we wonder whether to stock up on Iranian saffron before prices go up. We’ve been playing peek-a-boo with war my whole life. Dozens of charming family anecdotes have ended abruptly with: “and then the bombs dropped and all the windows in the house shattered.”
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antilang. no. 5
