The Last Living Slut by Roxana Shirazi Read Free Book Online Page B

to have any more responsibility for her. I won’t be seeing her again. You can officially be the dad.” Then he turned and left as hurriedly as he’d come. I looked down at my bike, at the Pink Panther stickers on the plastic between the handlebars, at the glitter-sprinkled dancing dolls in the basket, and I felt like nothing. I knew that I was damaged goods.
    It was around this time that my stepfather first beat me. I remember standing in the shower where a bright, fresh pool of blood gushed from my nose and stained the water. My face was all puffed up and ugly and I fucking hated looking ugly. I thought I deserved it because I’d been a smart-ass, and getting smacked in the face was part of the deal for a cheeky kid who answered back. No one stood up for me, not even my mother; after all, he was her husband now, and Iranians don’t discuss such things. It brings shame on the family.
    By now my brother was a toddler. He would wiggle his wobbly jelly bottom whenever a war anthem played on TV, which seemed to be every five minutes. There was practically a funeral a day in the neighborhood. Shrines dedicated to the local martyrs sprouted up all over town; gorgeous colored lights bathed the dead soldiers’ photos. At night, while the lizards slithered near the lamps in our yard, bombs destroyed the smaller southern cities, and even Tehran endured the occasional blast. When the sirens sounded, we swarmed into our block’s underground parking garage for shelter.
    Despite the terror, I thought life was still grand. I loved my friends and was the top student at school. I studied the Qur’an and devoured my textbooks, hungrily lapping up lessons in science and history. Religion was different, however, because religion made me feel peaceful and at one with God—especially since it was everywhere: on TV, blaring from the mosque’s loudspeakers, and at school, where heaven and hell were constantly drummed into our brains. If I was a good girl and said my prayers every day and loved God, I would go to heaven. If I was a naughty girl, flaunting my sexuality and flirting with boys, I was destined for hell.
    God, I tried to be virtuous and pure. I tried so hard. But I was tainted by my dirty thoughts. I just couldn’t help myself. They became real every day when I played with my boy cousins and neighbors in private, hidden from the eyes of adults. I would get naked and rub my eight-year-old chest against my cousin’s bare torso. Then in the afternoon I’d find my nine-year-old neighbor, a boy named Hamid, and get him to play doctor-and-patient with me. I would undress, climb in bed, make him examine me down there, and lie silently, letting him explore. I would bring Soraya and Zari to my room and ask them to look at my body and touch my private parts, relishing every sigh, every touch, every finger. In the midst of it, I could still feel God looking down upon me with loathing.
    One night I decided to try it with two boys. I had exploding feelings in my tummy but no logic in my head. While my parents and family friends gathered in the living room to talk politics and war songs blared from the TV calling everyone to sacrifice their sons, I brought my younger boy cousin, Kian, to my room and asked Hamid to join us.
    “We’re playing servants and housekeepers,” Hamid told Kian, somehow reading my mind. “She’s going to lie down on the bed like she’s asleep. You have to pretend you are a servant and do as you are told.”
    Hamid’s imagination is just like mine, I thought gleefully.
    I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Hamid ordered Kian to touch me. I pretended to doze like Sleeping Beauty. Hamid was harsh with Kian, commanding him to kiss my feet and thighs. I felt like I was floating. I felt like a queen. The game made my tummy tumble with frenzy. I worried that we were too cruel to my cousin, who, bewildered and meek, went along with whatever we told him to do.
    I knew I had power—a real power—over boys. And I