Mamadi and the Chickens
As children, wild and unwatched in the streets of Kerman, we played dodgeball religiously. Every day, no exceptions. Those days our bodies were still as swift as hummingbirds, as agile as fish, swooshing away from the yellow ball thrown at us as if it were a comet on fire. The most glorious moments of the game were the final ones. With only one person left in the game, the fate of the entire team was tethered to one. For that one person, we shouted strings of encouraging chants until we sounded like horses suffering from pneumonia: ‘You are the golden haired one! You are the hope of our team!’ None of us had golden hair; we were the children of the desert, our skin as dark as the evening sky, our hair the color of a cave. On the last person to remain in the game, however, we bestowed the honor of being blond, like the lovely princes and princesses we saw in Disney’s shows—Cinderella, Elsa, Rapunzel, Kristoff, and Prince Phillip.
That one summer day, the sun was so blinding that our tears ran down, mixed with the dust perpetually residing on our faces, and drew brown streaks. In the middle of the game, one of our mothers called us inside, tasking us with brewing fresh tea for the group of mothers who, like us, did things religiously. Be it the scorching sun or a sandstorm, every afternoon, our mothers lined the clay walls of our narrow street, sipping endless cups of black tea, their shrill chatters perkier than the host of sparrows perched in the sycamore trees.
That day, our mother issued a new command for us: ‘Go, change the water in the chicken coop.’ We dragged our feet, our cracked lips pouting.
‘Hey, don’t play without us!’ we shouted through the half-cracked kitchen window as we waited for the limescale-crusted samovar to fill up with water.
In the chicken coup, we noticed something strange. Mamadi. He was laying on the floor, his elbow tucked under his moppy head of hair. He was the neighborhood’s resident loiterer, lurking around our streets all day and night, carrying on lengthy conversations with stray cats, letting them perch on his head as he curled his body into a ball on the dirt patch under the eucalyptus trees. We were told not to talk to him, though we did our best to at least walk by him and the cats. ‘How many diameters of love fit inside a lonely heart?’ ‘What is the radius of a magnanimous mind?’ ‘How does the sun decide which direction to spin the galaxies in?’ ‘Who taught the butterflies to weave the clouds?’ His questions for the cats were endless; we sadly wished we could understand the feline replies.
Sometimes our mothers made us carry bowls of leftover barley soup or burnt chickpea patties for him. He was never anyone’s guest. On seeing his spindly body in the coop, we screamed, running loops in the yard, ‘Mama! Mama!’
Our mother came out, hitting her head, a twig-headed broom under her arm. Standing as far away as possible, our mother waged a stick war inside the coop, shouting, ‘Come out, Mamadi. Shame on you. How dare you come in other people’s homes?’
Mamadi’s usual rancid smell was now mixed with the chicken manure. We were worried for Mamadi, maybe he had chomped on too many whole pomegranates. He also ate other things whole, oranges, kiwis, honeydews, really anything the neighbors handed him, usually with a few moldy spots.
Our mother’s poorly aimed, vigorous pokes only sent the chickens flying, a flurry of white feathered bodies skittering in the dim coop, like clouds stuck in a jar. We were giggling by now. Our mother threw at us a sour glance. Despite our expertise at dodgeball, we were not quick enough to dodge it. We never were. A single look from her electrified our lips shut.
Mamadi still did not move.
Soon the news permeated the entire neighborhood like a sandstorm’s swirling dust clouds. Our home was packed with people who stood huddled together, hypotheses as to the fate of Mamadi running rampant. ‘He has finally lost it,’ ‘We’re not surprised it came to this,’ ‘He smells like birthing cows.’
With the hubbub around us, we felt excitement bubble in our blood. It felt similar to last year at our great-grandfather’s funeral. Our home brimmed with black-clothed people then. Nothing could make us forget the creamy flavor of thick chocolate drinks served in tiny glass cups. Taking advantage of the crowd of mourners distracting our parents, we sneaked trays of saffron halva into the chicken coop, stuffing them inside our mouths until our cheeks bulged out. We stomped around the coop, pummeling our chests, pretending to be gorillas.
Someone had called our father. He hurried near the coop through the parted crowd, his hands still stained with the motor oil from his mechanic shop. Our father squatted by the coop’s wiry door and called, ‘Mamad Agha.’ We thought a witch must have cast a spell of silence on everyone as the only noises among us were the clucking of the chickens and the whooshing of the breeze ruffling the leaves of our lemon tree. Our father shook Mamadi’s body slowly.
Our mouths already were watering at the thought of the halvas and chocolate drinks to come for Mamadi’s funeral. But just then, our daydreams dodged our minds as Mamadi jerked up, and sprang out of the coop with an agility that astounded even the best dodgeballers among us. We wished he could be on our team. He stood still for a second before unzipping his black hoodie in one quick movement. Our mothers screamed, covering their eyes with their head scarves; our fathers hurried to stop him.
What we saw next is still vivid in our minds all these years later. From Mamadi’s black jacket, torn in so many places that it was more holes than fabric, now more than a dozen chicks burst out. A flurry of little yellow, fluffy bodies sending the crowd into an hysteric mania. We chased the chicks, others tried to catch the chickens though some chicks refused to leave Mamadi; tiny paws clutched around the ropes of his hair.
My father, his angry face red as a pomegranate, grabbed the collar of Mamadi’s jacket and yanked him away. Mamadi stumbled, losing his footing several times though he never lost that wide smile of his which showcased his two missing front teeth. While being dragged, Mamadi looked straight at us, unperturbed, and made the shape of butterfly wings with his hands. He fluttered them up into the sky. We traced the flurry of the chicks, the flight of the chickens, the flutter of one hundred invisible butterflies unleashed into the sky by Mamadi’s hands. We could see in our minds a cloud of turquoise, azure, emerald morphed in the sky, tiny black dots against the sun.
With our jaws agape, our eyes patulous, we wondered how Mamadi had recognized the call of the chickens before any of us had. Maybe those languid clucks the night before were the chickens calling for him.
We still think about Mamadi, the one who never dodged, not even a call from the chickens.
Pegah Ouji is an Iranian American writer with short stories and poems in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Fugue, Epiphany and Joyland. She is currently an Emerging Writer Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly as well as a writing and editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words.