Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

If you’re looking at a bull collapsing to the ground and I’m beside you looking at it, we’re seeing two bulls die, two rivers of blood, two everything. That’s why there is an infini...

My grandfather was the kind of man who had goons,

bigger guys in suits that don’t fit, with sweat stains up their backs.

He was good-looking ba...

assume, because the only thing I ever heard about him was th...

Maybe in a differen...

of our story, he would be the one to give me advice about how...

In that version ...

grandfather the sophisticated charmer who wore silk jackets and taught me how ...

One

thing about being a refugee is that you lose those little lessons, and you have to tea...

Ellie was only twenty-something and had four kids to worry about, so she didn’t...

don’t take showers in their offices in the mi...

Or that governors don’t have to work...

Basically he was going out and winking at other women (and they would wink bac...

because he was p...

Ellie had a lot of sadness in her life. Sadness of the kind t...

normal people int...

After dinners, the family would sit in the open terrace with bowl...

and pistachios, sugar candies, and a big samov...

Arman would be off

somewhere, Ellie would write poems about the night air under the oil lanterns, and the children would sit

beside the cher...

Her oldest daughter, Soraya, was near...

Sima, my mom, was...

school. Both were straight-A students. The brother, Salim, would be in town with ...

out of b...

paper, glue, and hand-carved branches. And Sanaz, the youngest, the la...

years old, was t...

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ...

anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that loo...

and doesn’t c...

Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That y...

like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come...

guess I’m sayin...

something is a hopeful th...

And being hopeful in a world of pain i...

or c...

Later in her life, Ellie would go crazy. She believed...

were trying to kill her with alien sound wave machines, so she would sleep in a t...

But for now she w...

I always imagine the man she met was ...

the village—with a library so old it had a signature in one book from Esther in the ...

become a queen. But no one ever said his name or his job; it’...

The village w...

lived is a real place where the houses are carved into stones that bulge out of the g...

bubbled up the earth and hardened into ...

Maybe he lived in a differe...

Imagine colorful wooden doors in odd shapes and