Waking Nightmares
Stories from Iran
by
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Waking Nightmares
The winter wind wails without. I peep out of my quilts and stare at the darkness. The oil-burning stove mumbles with the voice of the wind, and darts uncertain flickers of light quivering on the ceiling. Above my head, my coat is hanging, parodying my pose, and poising over me, as if in expectation of my wearing it.
I find myself peeping out of my quilts. A dark figure towers over my head in my coat, bending towards me. … The apparition holds an eloquent hand to me, as if expecting me to attend to him. It overwhelms my thoughts and actions, my mind and body. I want to say something but my voice fails me. I know that that is a nightmare. I need to yell and know I can't.
Sanctuary
“There may be somebody lurking in the house,” I thought, "Such an empty house is tempting for tramps, and it may also be the nightly haunts of some homeless hermits.” I didn’t dare to peep into the windows lest I should frighten somebody, who would likely shriek at my snow-shrouded ghastly sight, and would frighten me, too.
I must go now, before daybreak, or else I may not find the way home. If people discovered you, they wouldn't suffer you to stay here for a single night. People are quick and very efficient at such things. They wouldn't mind your smile, either. They would just take you, or whatever remains of you, by a whining car called ambulance. They would draw a white pall upon your smile and take you away.
Nausea
You run desperately and without feeling in your knees, but then you have to lean against the walls to gasp for breath, and to spit your nauseating spittle. But it becomes slimy and sticky, and it is attracted back to your mouth whenever you try to spit it off. You have a wild wish for vomiting, I know, yet you neither can afford the energy nor the opportunity for it, and the prowling footfalls of the dark diabolical dame are persistent behind you.
Once Upon a Midnight Drear
Sometimes I think I hear noises. I hear something rustling outside my room; as of somebody stalking barefoot in the corridor, and I feel that somebody or something has leant against the door of my room. It is just as though a tired wrathful raven rubs itself to the door, or a bat flaps its cold biting wings against the door; demanding me to turn off this lone light of the house. Or maybe it is a big lazy animal at large, who sweeps its thick tail on the door; imploring for entrance.
My bed shakes. I wonder whether it is because of my tiredness, or that I am again subject to fancies. I bend down and look under the bed. There is a pair of eyes glittering sickly through the darkness of the under bed, and one
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About the Book
Words, words, words… For a nation endowed with the art (in both negative and positive connotations) of word production, it is ironic that her authors, her eloquent Scheherazades, have been author-ized to be silenced, for the very sake of survival. Waking Nightmares belongs to a nation that shuns dialogue and is shrunk into interior or dramatic monologues.
It is hard to make your voice heard to the world when you have been unable to make it heard to your own people, since you have been harassed and hushed for so long that Silence has become a mandatory temperament, and has crept deep into your collective unconsciousness, and has been developed into a holy institution.
About the Author
Translator of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales into Persian poetry (Cheshmeh Publishers- Tehran), and the author of a textbook on the short story, Reading between the Paragraphs (VDM Verlag Publishers-Germany), Alireza Mahdipour is also a freelance short story writer. He was born in He got his BA and MA in English Literature from His fiction blends horror with humor, melancholy with mirth, and silence with satire. Waking Nightmares is his first and therefore his most reserved and controlled collection of stories with thick melancholic chilling atmosphere and thin layers of plot and action. They are so devoid of external clarity that they tend to shrink into allegories or dream visions.