Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

And I want to be good. I want to give you something you treasure. I want you to like me, as if I was a person in your life. That doesn’t make me beautiful. But wanting to please you is important too. That’s what you want, after ...

you ...

FARHAD AND MARYAM WERE conveniently dead, leaving Khosrou and Shirin to their love. Except it was poison love now. They had both murdered someone for it.

And if you thought this ended happily, then you haven’t been paying attention. These stories are epic, so by this time, Khosrou had a son with Maryam (before Shirin killed her obviously). The son was a teenager and into girls. Uh-oh, you might be thinking.

And “uh-oh” is right, because the kid kills Khosrou so he could be with Shirin (the lady who killed his mom (but ...

But before he could force her to marry him, Shirin went to the grave of Khosrou and drank poison. The end. There is a love story for...

The lesson here is that love is a many-parted thing. There is the part when you see someone beautiful (naked in a bath or not naked), and you want to be near them. There is the part when you decide not to marry anyone else (which Khosrou didn’t do). There is the part that makes you im...

is the part where you choose every action so that it doesn’t hurt the one you love, even indirectly. There’s a ...

People are also many-part...

In one telling she’s a mazloom finigonzon who suffers. When she dies, it’s because she was too pure for this world, and too sad. That one doesn’t mention her poison stash.

In the other telling, she’s the jealous maniac who murders Maryam and decides to kill herself when the son insults her pride with a proposal.

In the version I tell, she’s a mix, like Mithridates who drank all that poison so it wouldn’t hurt him while he was exiled, and then returned and killed everyone. She’s half defending herself, half burning the world down. Sometimes I add to Shirin’s story by having her do the same thing. She was paranoid that someone would poison her like she did to Maryam, so little by little she made herself immune...

you have to nod and agree with them that cancer and heart disease are totally normal and respectable ways to eat it. But if you say, “Poisoned by the town doctor in a blood feud,” then you get looks. Courteous looks. Like, “Isn’t he precious” looks.

And only then would you regret being agreeable when they said theirs. Why should you believe them? How would they know that their great-grandpa died of cancer? It’s just a story someone told them. They weren’t there. They just expect everyone to take their word for it. And people do, because the story is boring. Nobody cares the second after they hear it. It goes: “Cancer.” “Oh.” “Yeah. He was young too, only forty-seven.” “Wow. Wanna get tacos for lunch?” Don’t be fooled by the “wow.” That was an “I don’t care” wow. People are like that. They’re immune to the sadness of others.

in the shadow of every mountain, there is at least one lover who looks up and sighs and wonders if the world could be so easy as to give him love, if he just climbed to the top.

There are no mountains in Oklahoma. This is why people like the myths of Hercules and Rostam. The clarity that if they just completed their challenges, they could get what they wanted. But love stories are never so easy. You might climb the whole mountain and return only to find out that mountain climbers aren’t your crush’s type.

My great-grandmother, Aziz, who was fifteen, loved Hassan, who was in his twenties, and the best thing I can say about it was that their love was clear. It was clear that Hassa...

Hassan owned the only auto parts shop in town. It was clear that Aziz liked this about him, because she always called him a businessman, even after he met with the Karaji physician one day in the winter, and he called Hass...

They were in love—that muc...

Hassan kissed Aziz quickly, so the greengrocer across the street and his wife—who spoke to their individual cats more than to each other—would not spread rumors that the young couple were indecent.

Hassan and the physician had a misunderstanding that led to a bitter feud.

“Doktor,” says the doctor. “Oh. Very sorry. How can I help you, Doktor?” Wait. No. This isn’t working. He’s the only doctor in the neighborhood, so it would be unlikely that Hassan wouldn’t know him.

straight-to-your-face rudeness isn’t a very Persian thing. It would be more subtle.

Can you imagine something that rude? That his hurry was somehow more important than a person offering tea. And even worse, his wife’s tea, while his wife is standing right there.

The doctor may as well have spit in Hassan’s face.

He just pushed past the part of the conversation where they would honor each other as humans, and started making requ...

Aziz would have found something to do in the back of the shop, since it was getting heated and her presence would have made it worse.

“So you’re like a hospital without an ambulance?” “I’m like a grocer who doesn’t make you dinner.” “You just sell the ingredients.” “Yup.” “Well, I have some advice if you’d like to improve your business.” “Oh? Does it need an X-ray for a hangnail?” The doctor would suck his teeth and narrow his eyes at Hassan. To say the doctor pushed for expensive tests was like calling him a thief. Worse than a thief, a liar. He turned and walked away. And from that moment,

Hassan and the doctor were sworn enemies.

The way the doctor would tell it, when he described the fight to anyone who’d listen, was that Hassan was a lazy mechanic who didn’t want to work on his lunchtime. The way Hassan would remember it, the doctor made impossible de...

Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open the...

The cat and dog make some kind of boundary and stick to their territory, so they can pretend they won a kingdom the size of half a town, when really they lost a limb the size of the other half.

This was Hassan and the physician, who would not even share a butcher between them.

then he might say, “A man can hold two hearts in the same hand and not let them touch.”

if you asked him what that meant, he would just tell you he needed to get back to work.

The many-hearted butcher was right, of course. Hassan and the physician’s feud wasn’t good for anyone. And so most of the town ignored it.

Like Mithridates the town became—little by little—immune to the bickering. And so it never solved itself. No one ever said, “Akh, Doktor, please!” or “Akh, Hassan, enough with this madness.” And so the bitterness fermented in its jar in the dark cellars of their minds.

Love and lives are complicated, so I will tell you only two things that happened over the next few years, though you can imagine a thousand little ...

First, Hassan and Aziz had a baby girl—my grandmother, my mother’s mother—and the only person who didn’t visit was the physician. He left it to...

She was not yet twenty and her daughter was not yet two when the love of her life collapsed. She found him behind a row of timing belts when she brought a lunch of scallion pancakes. There are moments in your life where you are alone with two cups and you have to pick one to drink.

There are moments when the decision will change everything.

For now, there is this one, Aziz with a fallen husband. To let him die was unthinkable. But to beg the physician to save him was equally so, since Hassan would only wake up to hate her forever.

In the short minutes, Aziz decided it was better for him to be alive, to love Ellie, if not to love her. She ran across town, knowing the physician would relish every moment of Hassan’s wife begging for his life.

The story of Aziz and Hassan is a love story with poison in it. When the physician came to their tiny house, he saw his opportunity. He gave Hassan a bottle ...

For three days, Aziz fed Hassan the medicine, and for three days, he got worse and worse,...

In the morgue they discovered that Hassan did not die of disease or from the collapse in his shop. Aziz realized

it was the medicine that killed Hassan. Can you imagine what that felt like? Like your heart is an engine flooded with black acid, drowned and clenched and clotted.

Maybe the lesson is that you never know the damage you might do, when you’re trying to help. Or that a feud is a profoundly stupid thing. There is no lesson maybe.

At church potlucks they play a secret game of dumping random cans of food in casserole dishes and pretending their grandmothers gave them the recipe.

Jonboy was a refrigerator-size man wearing a silk Hawaiian shirt that would fit me like a tent. Wes was a wiry hillbilly.