Surplus Killing - A Short Story

by Kasra Karami

I had seen this look on my mother’s face before, in the early morning when she entered my room and told me that my grandfather had passed away. “Get ready to go to Anzali.” she said. The city where we lived was seven hours away from the town where my mother’s family lived, and during those seven hours in the car, I could see the mix of loneliness and despair setting on my mother’s face through the rearview mirror.

I was born in Anzali and spent my childhood in that town, at my grandparents’ house. The house was next to the pier, and every morning, I woke up to the sound of ship horns and the bustling noise of dock workers. My school was located behind the fish market and I spent my afternoons wandering around the lagoon and the breakwater. Through experience, I learned that this feeling of familiarity brutally faded away each time I would return to the same place; either because the people I knew were no longer there or because the few that still remained no longer remembered me. My family moved to a distant city, my uncle moved to a city even farther away, and my grandparents’ relatives had either departed or were struggling with diseases from old age in the corners of this small town. Long after my grandfather was gone, my grandmother, Mehri, remained in that house, so big that it flaunted her loneliness in her face at every moment. The constant noise of the pier affected her hearing, and she slowly began to forget things. I don’t know if it’s a blessing that she no longer remembers her grandchildren’s faces to avoid feeling upset for not seeing or hearing from them, but I know that Mehri was the last root of mine in a city to which I belonged, and on the day my mother called me in her presence and she mistook me for another grandchild, I knew I no longer had any roots there.

Yesterday, my mother had that same feeling of helplessness on her face when I saw her on my phone’s screen. On that day, she had called Mehri, who was confused and angry that her son, along with his wife and two daughters, came to her house and were standing in the living room, without saying a word to her.

“I don’t know why they won’t talk to me? I am giving the phone to Farzad. Talk to him, maybe he will respond to you.”

My mother was scared. It had been thirty years since Farzad had moved to another country. She wondered whom Mehri had mistaken for Farzad. Who was in the house with her?

“Say something! Why aren’t you talking to him? Talk already.”

“Hello? Hello? Hello!”

My mother burst into tears on the phone. She couldn’t do anything and even understanding what was really happening seemed impossible. She called her other brother and found out that the day before, Farzad had sent a photo with his family and he had framed it and placed it in the living room with the other photos. She realized that Mehri’s mind deceived her into believing that the people in the photos are present in order to make her feel less alone.

I wondered whether my photo on the telephone table was talking to my grandmother. Or was it like Farzad’s, silently looking at her and making her angry?

Years ago, during spring break, I visited Mehri’s house. One day, while walking by the lagoon, I saw a small black creature jumping up and down in the narrow street. It was an immature swallow that hadn’t learned to fly and left its nest, ending up falling onto the street. Swallows migrate to northern Iran in the spring and therefore became the sign of the new year there. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wrapped the bird in it. I looked around to find the nest, but there were only buildings surrounding the road. The bird had probably flown from its nest on one of the rooftops. I wondered if there was any chance for the bird to live on if I decided to take care of it for these two weeks of vacation. I wanted to see something resembling hope in its eyes, but instead, I noticed a bigger problem: the tip of its beak was crooked, and its upper and lower beak did not align properly. The bird had crashed badly onto the ground.

I brought it home because I knew that if I just left it in a corner of the street, I would never be able to walk on that street again without searching every corner for its corpse. I took it with me, not for its sake, but to escape the unbearable guilt I would feel if I had done otherwise.

Two weeks passed. Every day during these two weeks, I gave it food and water, on the tip of my finger in its broken beak. I would make it jump from the table and chairs, but it did not learn how to fly and I was not the best tutor for that. On the last night, when I was bag, I didn’t have the courage to go up to the terrace and see the next day. Mehri was sitting in the living room. I had to leave her as suddenly the house that had five guests would be empty and it is customary for guests not to leave the host’s house sud with the host for a few days after others have left so as not was not possible.

I remember Mehri sitting on a chair in the living room, deep in her thoughts and gazing at the flowers on the carpet. Whenever I wanted to take something from the living room, her eyes were following my feet going away, and she said something like “I love you, my dear.” or “Come back soon.” I promised to come back soon, knowing it was a lie and my next possible vis it would be in a year. I lied and my mouth became bitter. She told me she will give the swallow to the neighbor who has another bird and knows how to take care of them. I didn’t be lieve that anyone would accept the swallow, but confronting it only revealed that the bird would die soon af ter our departure, and I was responsible for that, so I said nothing.

After returning to our city, every time my mother talked to Mehri on the phone, I had no choice but to sharpen my ears to hear any news on the swallow. Fortunately, it was not brought up, as if we had silently agreed to stay oblivious to be able to live on. Yesterday after calling my mother, the memory of the bird came back to me, and I thought about how immature carnivores kill smaller baits to practice hunting bigger ones when they grow up.

*Surplus killing is the is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can eat. Possible causes might be for pleasure, to gain killing experience and so on.

*Tassian is a word commonly used in the northern regions of Iran, representing the feeling of emptiness after others leave one’s home.