by Sheema Kalbasi
The girl had been watching The Little Mermaid when the first sound came. It was not thunder. It was the shriek of metal tearing through the air. The television flickered, then the electricity vanished. The room sank into silence. The cartoon ocean froze mid-motion, and Ariel’s song ended just before she reached the surface.
For a moment, the girl only stared at the blank screen, waiting for it to come back to life. When nothing changed, she realized the world outside had gone still as well. Then another sound came, lower and closer. The floor trembled beneath her bare feet, and her heart thudded against her ribs.
Her mother called her name. The girl wanted to answer, but her mouth filled with air she could not swallow. Her body would not obey. The shaking rose through the tiles and into her legs. Fear did not stay in one place. It traveled through her veins, a current of sparks beneath her skin. She thought this must be how the Little Mermaid felt when she gave up her tail for legs, when every step cut like knives. Except she had not chosen this pain. She had not wished to walk on a land that quaked beneath her.
Another explosion split the air. Her mother lifted her and pressed her close. The hallway was darker than the room. Her cheek brushed the coarse fabric of her mother’s coat, and she caught the faint trace of Dior’s Diorella, the scent she loved most, the one she had once asked her mother about when she first smelled it on her. The world outside howled again. They stumbled down the stairs, their uneven steps mingling with the sound of falling things and the harsh rhythm of their breath.
The cellar was cold and damp. The air smelled of concrete and fear. Her mother told her to stay near and cover her ears. The girl tried, but the noise had already entered her body. Every nerve remembered its violence.
She sat on the floor, clutching the blanket she had brought with her, the one with cartoon fish still smiling in their bright blue sea. She pressed it to her face, as if she could hide inside that color, as if she could breathe underwater like them.
Time began to stretch. Minutes became hours. Each silence seemed long enough for her to believe it was over, until another blast shattered it. She began to count the seconds between explosions, as if by counting she could keep the world from breaking apart.
She thought of the mermaid’s pain, how she had longed for a soul and had to suffer for it. Perhaps fear was the soul’s way of learning the body’s weakness. The girl felt her legs again, cold and trembling, and thought of knives and waves and how both could wound.
After a while, the noise grew distant. Her mother’s breathing slowed beside her. The girl touched her face and found tears she had not felt fall.
When they finally went upstairs, the air was thick with dust and dread. The television stood dark and lifeless. She placed her palm on the screen. It reflected her small, pale face, the face of someone who had learned something she did not yet have words for.
Outside, the sky was bruised with smoke. The street lay empty of life. She could not tell whether the silence meant safety or loss. She wanted to ask why the bombs had come, but she knew there was no answer that could fit inside a child’s world.
That night, as she lay awake, she tried to remember where Ariel’s story had stopped, what note she had been singing when the light disappeared. The girl imagined the mermaid suspended in the dark, her mouth open, her eyes lifted toward a surface she could not see. She wondered if there was a bridge between the world she had known and this one, between sound and sea and sky, a bridge between innocence and war, memory and survival.
That was how the girl felt now, in this new silence. Not dead, only waiting. Waiting for the song to begin again, though she no longer believed it ever would
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian American poet, humanitarian, and historian. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, is a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and has received grants from the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006) and Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, been featured by PEN America and NPR, translated into more than twenty languages, adapted into film and music, and presented in venues such as the Smithsonian National Museum, the Tribute World Trade Center in New York, and the Canadian Parliament.