By Joseph Celizic

We’re watching our sons play in my new basement, in the house we’ve saved a decade for. High interest rates are nothing compared to leprosy.

There’s grief in the air, flashcards laying frustratingly on the table, but we’re thankful for the rough blue carpet that’s older than us all. Forough tells me the basements in Tabriz are used as pool rooms and they keep their kitchens there to stay cool.

“All of them?” I ask, and she pretends my words don’t sound silly.

“Just some.”

She’s here posthumously, like Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season. She’d knocked on our door, a warm “Hello” on her lips. The wind ruined the streets and combed her hair as she waited on our porch, hand-in-hand with Hossein, somehow a young boy again. She wondered if we were up for a playdate. I was too entranced to ask how she got here.

“I am cold,” she’d told me, and I made us coffee.

We sip and they teach my son Everett new signs in ASL. Moon. Sun. Flower. Game. Beautiful in every tongue. All morning I’ve been at a loss with the flashcards. He can recite them, but only if I lead with the sounds. It’s like I’m bracing his tongue, the same way he holds my hand when he walks downstairs, or how I help him pull up his socks each morning. I need him to not need me.

“It’s slow, like rain. Then all at once,” she says, her eyes never leaving Hossein. There’s no halo or aura, but there’s something eternal about her. Maybe that’s how she always was.

Hossein shows off his somersault and my son tries to follow, falling sideways and
laughing. Always laughing. His joy is as relentless as peak Schwarzenegger on the bench press. It’s lifted us out of some dark places.

I want to tell her that I too have watched children run barefoot after dogs, my daughter and son infatuated with the neighbor’s Scottish terrier, but she’s already down on one knee, holding out her arm. She tries to roll my son over it. “Here, let me show you,” she says, but he gives her his stomp-foot grunt, lowers his chin.

I start to tell them that Everett has Down syndrome, but they seem to already know. “He does that to everyone,” I say instead, and I try the flashcards again, one word each. “Help. Please,” I read.

“No, no,” Everett says, almost as strong as his laugh. She smiles at his spirit.

Still, I feel the incapacity of concrete hands. I feel rude. I want to apologize.

“Let him speak,” she tells me.

The room’s too full to talk of the ones we’ve lost. Her son, Kamyar. Our unborn, unnamed. She’s so full of love. Of course she is. The one who visited the lepers and told their story. The one who adopted Hossein, his parents already passed. If the nations were full of her then I wouldn’t have trouble sleeping. I wouldn’t fear that the aged world has lost its heart.

They let him choose his own words from the scattered cards like he’s seeing their beauty for the first time, finding them through the wreckage. Horse. Orange. Rest.

Everett hugs her, slow and soft. Hossein comes in too, and it’s the three of them huddled, like they’re worshipping grief, all as the clock strikes four.

I know that she’s going to leave. She’ll ascend, her skirt full of lilies. She’s going to set the sky with geraniums and the sun will finally reach her. She’ll turn the corner, riding that last ribbon of road, and never look back. I keep trying to think of ways we can keep from losing her. Maybe if I don’t write it, she’ll never actually be gone. Maybe, if we keep it in future tense, it’ll stay a stanza away. With every syllable and second, maybe we can recover what we lost.