Fordow. Anomaly of Rain

1 Tir 1404 (June 22, 2025)

The road to the checkpoint went uphill, along a slope strewn with red pebbles. During the day, when the sun beat down on the stones, they looked like embers someone had forgotten to extinguish. Now, after noon, the heat had subsided slightly, but the air still trembled—not from warmth, but from the vibration of time itself, which had become fragile and unreliable after the night’s strike of light.

Abyaneh breathed lazily. The narrow streets smelled of dust, goat manure, and melted butter, on which Aunt Nilu was frying flatbreads. The shadows of houses lay on the ground in broken script, like lines from surahs no one could read anymore. Somewhere a dog barked—listlessly, more out of habit than necessity.

Nasrin walked, counting her steps. To the first stones where the dirt road began. To the old plane tree, from beneath which the view of the checkpoint opened up. To the very line where the red clay suddenly broke off, giving way to gray, worn asphalt.

She felt bored and scared at the same time. Bored—because the day in the village stretched like rubber, without internet, without news, without the usual background noise of other people’s lives. Scared—because out there, beyond the horizon, something was happening on which their own lives depended, and she knew nothing about it.

The Starlink, carefully mounted on the roof, stood like a dead white dish. At night, the diode had blinked, then gone out—and hadn’t lit up again.

“They pulled the plug,” Nasrin thought. “Someone upstairs decided Iran had enough of its own sky without Musk’s satellites.”

She wanted to see someone who still remembered the world beyond this crumb of clay on the map. Someone holding a real machine gun, not a TV remote. His name was Zahir.

The checkpoint emerged from the haze suddenly. A couple of concrete blocks, sandbags, a rusty booth the soldiers called the “comms office.” On a pole—an antenna that looked like a crooked cross.

There were five of them today. Two were playing backgammon, clicking the pieces with the rhythm of a metronome. One was cleaning his rifle, another smoking, looking toward the airfield. The fifth, Zahir, stood with his back to the village, peering at the horizon.

His camouflage was covered in dust, as if he had grown through this earth. His badge still read “Zahir Mashhadi,” as if the world hadn’t changed in a single day.

She walked up almost close enough to touch him before he turned around. The smile didn’t appear on his face immediately—first came mild surprise, then joy hidden behind regulations.

“Nasrin-khanum,” he straightened up. “Good day.”
“Good,” she replied. “Or whatever kind of day it is today.”

She looked around.

“Do you have a connection?” she asked, nodding at the booth.
“No,” one of the soldiers at the table responded without looking up from the backgammon. “The radio only picks up our own curses. They broadcast well. The last thing we heard was: ‘Do not leave your post.’”

Zahir chuckled.

“We tried to contact headquarters last night, when… when that happened,” he looked north, to where the sky had flashed green and violet yesterday. “Thought it was interference. That something was wrong with our equipment. Twisting knobs…”
“You didn’t even see it?” Nasrin was surprised. “The aurora?”
“I only saw our voltmeter needle go haywire.”

The soldier with the cigarette snorted:

“I was asleep. But if it’s the end of the world—let it take me in my sleep. Don’t want to watch the credits.”
“And you?” Zahir asked, looking at her. “Did you see something?”

Nasrin nodded.

“I was sitting on the roof. It was…”—she searched for the word—“Unnatural. As if someone took a normal sky and ran it through an Instagram filter. Green, violet… And dirty, too. Like it was painted with dirty hands.”
“Beauty with a taste of rust,” the soldier with the backgammon noted. “We’re good at that.”

A pause hung in the air. The sun seemed to have moved a couple of kilometers closer.

“Any news?” Nasrin asked. “From anywhere. From HQ, from the city…”
“Radio silence,” Zahir said. “The sergeant major says: either they have everything under control, or the exact opposite. In both cases, we’ll be told last.”
“The sergeant major is a wise man,” she sighed. “My parents are there…”

He nodded.

“My brother is in Ahvaz. In air defense. They say it’s boring there. Now I’m glad if he’s bored.”

The soldiers lowered their eyes for a moment. People with loved ones “in air defense” know what it’s like to wait for a call you’d rather not receive.

“I had a friend,” Nasrin said, surprised herself at the past tense. “Adil. A classmate. We were preparing for entrance exams together. Me for med school, him for law. The word ‘lawyer’ suited him very well. He pronounced it so seriously…” she smiled sadly. “Once they took him straight from school. For interrogation. Said he was a US agent. And he… he barely knew English.”

She looked at Zahir.

“He came back. Two days later. Aged ten years. And started talking less. But smiling more. Probably to hide that everything inside had half burned out.”
“Were you…” Zahir stumbled, “were you… close with him?”

This “close” sounded so cautious, as if he were walking barefoot through a minefield.

Nasrin shook her head.

“We were friends. Just friends. I loved him like…” she grimaced, picking the words, “like you love an old diary. With tenderness and shame for past foolishness. But you wouldn’t want others to read it.”

He nodded. In his gaze, there was neither jealousy nor relief. Only the understanding that everyone here has their own old diary.

Somewhere in the distance, a rumble rolled—either a stone tumbling down the mountain, or thunder.

The first drop fell on her hand. A dark, wet spot on tanned skin. She looked at the sky. It was still cloudless, scorched, but rain had begun to fall from an invisible crack in it.

“Rain?” someone wondered. “In the Kavir?”

The drops began to fall more frequently. They were warm, slightly sticky, like poorly rinsed soap.

“Does anyone have an umbrella?” Nasrin asked automatically, and immediately laughed.

The soldiers exchanged glances.

“In the desert, an umbrella is like an air conditioner in a cave,” one said. “Good idea, but impractical.”

Zahir looked at the sergeant major, who leaned out of the booth.

“Comrade Sergeant Major, can I drive Nasrin-khanum to the village? In ‘Uri’. Otherwise she’ll get soaked to the bone.”
“It’s just rain, not acid,” the sergeant major grumbled, looking at the sky suspiciously. “Although… who knows now. Go. But be quick. And watch around you on the way. We’re stuck here for God knows how long.”

The KIAN 160, nicknamed “Uri,” stood to the side, rough and dusty like an old lizard. The cab was scorching. Zahir yanked the door open, helped her climb in.

Inside, it smelled of diesel and something else—a mix of sweat, old leather, and cheap cologne used to drown out the smell of war.

Zahir started the engine. It growled like a beast with a cold.

“Buckle up,” he said, then remembered the belt hung here in shreds, and chuckled. “Never mind. Just hold on.”

The rain drummed on the roof in a heavy staccato. The wipers finally found something to do, scraping across the glass with the diligence of a failing student erasing a mistake.

The truck crawled down. The road became different in the rain. Dust turned into paste, pebbles slipped under the wheels.

“Strange,” Zahir said, peering through the murky glass. “Last year mules were dying of thirst, and now…” he nodded at the streams of water. “As if someone upstairs decided to compensate.”
“As if someone upstairs is trying to wash something off us,” Nasrin said. “The question is what: sins or skin.”

He cast a quick glance at her.

“Do you always… talk like that? As if you’re taking a philosophy exam.”
“Medical,” she corrected. “But philosophy is a side effect of life here.”

They both smiled.

For a moment, the rain, the lack of connection, the switched-off sky—everything receded. Only two figures remained in the cab of a battered canvas-covered truck, floating through water and time. The vehicle moved toward the village, where it still smelled of smoke, bread, and dates.

Nasrin looked ahead and thought: “That’s the whole story of my youth. A checkpoint, rain, and a truck. But maybe that’s exactly what our life looks like.”

The rain intensified. The drops became heavier, thicker. They beat against the roof as if someone were knocking from the heavens: “Open up, we’ve arrived.”

“Almost there,” Zahir answered them.

And for a second, it seemed to Nasrin that if this road could be stretched for another hour, two, a lifetime—they would drive and drive under this strange, warm, possibly poisonous rain, and the world outside would have time to change its mind about dying.

And a line from an old song she used to listen to with Adil, sharing one pair of headphones for two, floated in her head: “In a world packed with empty words, she parts with her dreams. Forget, forgive, and let go, our paths no longer cross. The sand has run out in your hourglass…”

The sand had run out. The water had begun.

Zeynab →
← Shiraz
← Isfahan