از طرفِ
شهریار حنیفه

The story is a description of what the boy saw that night. The night when snow came and went, and the boy walked from home toward the bridge at the village’s end. A night where all that remained of houses and streets was a whiteness: everything uniform and undistinguished. It was the night of his sister’s engagement, his sole sister. Someone from the household had to go to guide the strangers so they wouldn’t lose their way; who better than the boy for this task?
The beginning of the story is this, but this isn’t the story. The story is a description of what the boy saw, and it was what he saw that prevented him from reaching the end, from reaching the bridge; the boy died before getting to the bridge. While he was tracing a trail, a trail of blood, drop by drop, starting from somewhere unknown and leading to somewhere unknown; as he pursued it, suddenly, due to ill fate, the ground beneath him vanished, and he fell into the deepest layer of snow that had risen above something unidentifiable. Now, everything, whether important or not, is just the village, the low and high, but the boy who mattered, who was important, but not anymore… the boy died. He fell hard, severely injured. Perhaps if the owner of the blood, which was the cause of this, had been passing by close, he could have saved the boy; perhaps; perhaps not, the owner of the blood was far, and he didn’t pass by anyone else, and probably, he didn’t make it through the night either… perhaps if the boy had reached him, he would have survived; perhaps; but let’s move on… because that’s not the story. These are mere occurrences, ordinary due to their repetition, familiar in all worlds, and not significant enough to be retold. In this place, an event is unfolding, strange; here, it’s the night, the snow, the boy, and his eyes; as he walked and walked to reach the bridge at the village’s end.
He stood in one of the alleys. For a moment, it seemed the snow paused. The sound of the wind ceased. The moon cast its brightness onto the street. And the boy stared: a specter, undefined and grotesque, appeared like a shadow… it quivered and seemed to moan, snow resting on its shoulders, and its hands… it had no hands. Standing a few steps ahead of the boy, back turned to the narrative, instilling fear into the narrative.
Was it human? An animal? Or something else entirely? A creation of the boy’s imagination? Did it even matter? It was more real to him than all realities. Everything else was fading into ambiguity, leaving only what had become everything. It had seized the boy’s perspective, blocked his path.
What was it? What did it want? How long would it stay? The boy turned off his flashlight and slowly moved alongside, pressing himself against a wooden door, clenching in a bit of solitude in his fear; why? He didn’t know. Not very important either because this isn’t the story; the story isn’t about that thing, and that thing isn’t significant at all. It speaks of another incident… that the boy saw with his own eyes… as he pressed his head against the wooden door and unintentionally listened to the soft thuds from behind the door, thuds from within a tall, white door that turned into images of that night for the boy. The description, spoken by a woman on the other side of the door:

Waves / Marching in rows / Underneath my gaze, they stare at me / Waiting for the final roar /
But I have ascended / I’ve passed through the sky / And I’m seated in the crow’s nest /
I find an empty space / There I hide it: [with a gesture] an upright ear /
So I call out its voice / My voice doesn’t come out / I scream / My voice doesn’t come out /
By the way, if I were to fly, what would happen? / I fly / No, I don’t fly /
My hair is tangled in a tree / I cannot fly /
I touch my hair: wet, turned white. / This isn’t my hair… /
I’ll sleep in the crow’s nest for a century until my hair dries and turns black /
Silence, silence, silence, silence, silence…

The woman, screaming from the depths of her soul, concluded the whispers; as if she had seen a dream… The boy trembles, his hands clenched, his head spinning, and he falls backward onto the snow. Shortly after, he remembers his sister’s hair.
Slowly, without taking his eyes off that thing, the boy backs away.