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Fordow. Aurora Over the Desert
14 Tir 1404 (July 5, 2025)
On the night the sky cracked open, I saw the Northern Lights.
They were here, over the Dasht-e Kavir desert, over the fractured clay of Iran where rains had forgotten the way before I was even born. They danced in green and violet ribbons, writhing like ghostly snakes. They moved slowly, like the breath of a massive beast that had woken up underground and was now breathing into our faces. It looked nothing like what they show in documentaries about Norway. It was dirty, like gasoline in a puddle. It was impossible. And it was beautiful to the point of nausea. As if Allah had turned the sky inside out to show us its guts.
No one believed me.
Aunt Nilu—Mrs. Nilufar Yezdi, who asks everyone to call her Aunt Nilu—said they were just reflections of fires. “Oil depots are burning, child. Or ammunition dumps. In Qom, they say, the whole sky is red.” She was kneading dough, and her hands, white with flour, looked like the hands of a ghost. She was trying to create bread out of dust and fear, and she was succeeding.
Zeynab didn’t believe me because she was asleep. At fourteen, she possesses the superpower of ignoring the end of the world unless it’s streamed on TikTok. She lay on her mattress, curled into a ball, earbuds in, listening to some new boy-band K-pop recorded in a world that might not exist anymore. The battery in her player is dying. When it dies completely, Zeynab will wake up in silence, and it will be the loudest scream in history.
Zahir didn’t believe me. Zahir, who was on duty that night at the checkpoint at the village entrance, later swore he saw nothing. Only a flash, as if the sun had risen from the north. He said I had overheated in the sun. “Nasrin-jan, go to sleep. At night, shadows play cruel tricks on the mind.” He stared at the empty road as if expecting enemies, but the enemy was already here. The enemy was in the sky, in the air, in the very structure of light.
But that night, I sat on the roof and watched the aurora borealis lick the peaks of the Zagros Mountains. I knew what it meant. It wasn’t a miracle. It was ionization. It was a magnetic storm caused by what had happened up there, in the north, in Fordow. The sky was bleeding electrons.
And then the rain came.
For the first time in the three years of drought that had turned the village into a dust bowl. The drops were heavy, oily, warm. They fell onto the dry earth with a hiss, like the devil’s spit on a red-hot skillet. People ran out of their houses, turning their faces, palms, and buckets to the sky. They laughed and cried. “Rahmat! Allah’s mercy!” they shouted. Aunt Nilu brought out basins.
But I stood under the canopy and shivered. Because I am the daughter of a physicist. And the granddaughter of a theologian. And I know that rain following the Northern Lights in the desert is not Allah’s mercy. It is a sentence. It is the atmosphere vomiting up what was pumped into it.
But I don’t know whether to rejoice at this rain or not. Does it water our crops or kill them? Does it wash away sins or saturate the earth with poison that will glow in the dark in a thousand years?
There has been no connection for two weeks. Mobiles are silent—dead bricks. The Internet vanished like Atlantis. Even the Starlink, that white briefcase of hope brought by General Alavi, is silent. The diode is dark. Musk’s satellites have gone blind, or burned up, or simply turned away from us, deciding that Iran no longer deserves to be online.
General Alavi. The kind grandfather with the eyes of a wolfhound. He left us this terminal and the folders. Several stacks of documents stamped “Top Secret.” He probably thought this was our insurance. Or our legacy.
I read them over the noise of the generator, while the rain drums on the roof, beating out the rhythm of decay.
I am reading the dossier on my own mother.
“Vulnerability Type L-F (Latent Resource).”
What a delight. These bastards in black suits, these architects of shadows, speak of my mother as if she were a bug in the code, a compilation error to be exploited. They deconstructed her soul into bytes, classified her fears, indexed her love. To them, she is not a person. She is a function. A variable in an equation they have been solving for thirty years.
I wonder, did they classify my father’s jealousy as “Vulnerability Type J-H (Jealous Husband)”? Or as a “critical failure in the security system”?
They turned our family into a set of acronyms. L-F. HUMINT. OSINT. And now, sitting in this clay hut, listening to the radioactive rain knock at the window, I am reading the obituary for our childhood, written in the dry, soulless bureaucratese of intelligence agencies.
We don’t even know if they are alive. Mom, Dad. Adil. They stayed there, at the epicenter.
Maybe they have already become shadows on the wall, like in Hiroshima, as Mom used to tell us. Maybe they turned into light, into that very light I saw early that morning in the still-night sky. Green and violet. Red… Dad and Mom, dancing in the ionosphere, freed at last from lies, from duty, from the gravity of guilt.
The rain is getting heavier. It smells not of ozone or dust. It smells of metal. Rusty, old iron. Like the taste of blood in your mouth.
Aunt Nilu calls me to drink tea. Tea made with rainwater.
“Coming, Aunt Nilu,” I shout.
I close the folder. “Vulnerability Type L-F.”
No, Mom. You weren’t a vulnerability. You were the only thing keeping this world from falling apart. You were the Strong Interaction that held the nucleus together. And now you are gone, and we are decaying. The half-life of the Mousavi family is coming to an end.
I go to drink tea. If this is the end of the world, let it taste of cardamom.