My home has always been Kerman, desert-city of Iran, heat ripples ascending from the asphalt. Above sunbaked clay walls, the cacti poked their green heads shyly. Walking back from middle school, I daydreamed about how if I was taller and more courageous, I could reach into Mrs. Habibi’s yard, our elderly neighbor, and snatch away one sweet-fleshed purple prickly pear. Maryam, my classmate loved by a mother who canned rose-water prickly pear jams, rambled during recess about the lingering sweet tartness, leaving my mouth flooded with unsatisfied saliva.

Usually Mrs. Habibi, cocooned tight in a white chador, perched on her door with its rusty frame, her fat tongue yellowed by a new saffron lollipop every day. She never offered me one. One day, my stomach grumbled its usual symphony as my feet dragged, dreading the return to an empty home. Mrs. Habibi’s door was shut. My heartbeats amplified my bodily orchestra. I confirmed several times that the alley was empty except for the single crow roosting on an electric wire. I reached my toes slid and crammed into the tip of my shoe. Certain of my imminent fall, I plucked one glistening purple fruit. Thousands of tiny thorns pierced my palm in protest. 

I smacked my lips in delight and bit of the stolen fruit’s flesh, juice drops tracing sticky red rivulets. Girls should make no noise with their lips, my mother’s warning flashed in my mind, but she was gone at work until past nightfall. Until then, Kerman, this purple prickly pear, this tart sweetness, the story I would tell Maryam tomorrow were all mine. Itchy scalp, sweaty hair strands, ruffled up Roosari— all were under the breath of Kerman’s hot breeze.

I wanted to rip off that black Roosari but in Kerman this was a crime, a ticket to merciless lashes that would cleave open my veins, blood trickling in the same place where once the sweet juice of the prickly pear had run. 

Years later in tenth grade, I, too, was snatched from my home in Kerman and dropped in San Diego. Farsi words dried out under the heat of California sun; even as English words eluded my grasp like a restless sea breeze. Through the disorienting years of high school, I wondered if my loneliness was God’s punishment for stealing that purple fruit. I wrote Mrs. Habibi apology letters, tossed their crumbled balls into the Pacific Ocean’s raging waves. I watched as they dissolved into all that vastness. Sweat still moistened my hair, but my hair was no longer prisoned under a Roosari.

Nightmares of monstrous prickly pears invaded my dreams, thorny blades etching swollen constellations on my arm, chest, and face. I scratched myself raw. Blood caked under my chewed fingernails. Sometimes when I met other Iranians, I stole sneaky glances at their scratch marks, tucked hidden under long sleeves, cashmere scarves, socks reaching up to knees. Homeless wanderers, whether inside or outside of Iran, we all left claw marks on our own skin.

As years passed, San Diego with its quiet fireworks of palm trees, its never-ending flood of sunshine, grew familiar. In City Heights, I crossed paths with more shades of humanity than I knew ever existed. Here, parents yelled at their children in a dozen more languages than was spoken at a United Nations congregation. I came to love the cacti here, the scent of eucalyptus trees after a surprise winter rain, the gushing pink of Bougainvillea’s.

Now, in late autumn, the sun is a golden lollipop, powerless to induce even a drop of sweat. What can explain the fact that even after all these years on some days, I still miss the brutality of Kerman’s sun?

Years after I stole it, yet the fruit’s purple shade still taunts me. I don’t steal this time. I knock. The owner doesn’t speak any English. “Russian!” she says smiling, pointing at her chest. Maybe for her, home also lives in the heart. Her hair is a faint golden waterfall, her eyes two drops of the ocean. I point to the cacti fruit; she raises a finger and disappears inside her home. Her tabby cat traces lazy circles around my feet, his fur soft, unlike the unforgiving cacti thorns. She returns, handing me a glove and a knife. Her smile is almost warm enough to make me feel at home. 

+++

Pegah Ouji is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip among others. She has been a scholarship recipient from Kundiman, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, Literary Arts, Grub Street, and Shipman Agency. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly. She is currently an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words where she is working on an anthology of creative work by BIPOC justice-involved and impacted artists.