Destroyed Cities

At first, it was just an oasis… then it became paradise! Three years ago, at the invitation of a dear friend to the Jamalzadeh Short Story Competition, I was asked to write a short story about Isfahan. Although the professor and other informed individuals expected a straightforward story about the beauties of Isfahan focusing on its beloved people, my story turned out to be a fabrication about the distortions of Isfahan’s future centered on a not-so-beloved character who was not even originally from Isfahan! After disappointing and disheartening everyone, I wrote another story for a different place, time, and topic. These two stories gathered dust in a drawer for months and were completely forgotten until during the hiatus after “Please Wait” when I was thinking of new ideas and preparing to write a new novel, I remembered them. Their atmosphere was very close to my own feelings at that time (and now), and a force pushed me to expand them. Gradually, events around me gave me new ideas, and the stories completed themselves. I was merely a tool; they dictated themselves. The result of this dictation and composition was nine seemingly separate but actually interconnected stories. Set in Iran 40 years later, in a future where despair and corruption have become a normal part of primitive human life, and perhaps the most political thing I have ever written.