Fiction
Snail Day
by Zahra Abdi
The story is created by two narrators. The two women who have been living next door to each other, commence a bitter and end-less story in which each stand on both sides of the story. Afsoun, in the middle of the 80s, is “the girl next door" whom Khorso is in love with. In hesitation of letting himself to lose his heart to Afsoun, or leaving to go to the battlefield, he chooses the harder. He is missing after 11 days of being sent to the front-end. The other side of the narration is left to Shirin, Khosro’s sister. Afsoun describes the sudden absence of Khosro, and Shirin, who observed the formation of a half-done love story, recounts this painful loss from her own perspective. The novel is not limited to the 80s and reflects Tehran today, and except for limited situations, it doesn’t travel to the past. The whole story is not grounded on an "absence". Khosro is absent, and this absence has brought about two new women from his beloved sister and his love. Women who, while maintaining their vulnerabilities and their pains, still thrive to answer their unanswered questions. Although SNAIL DAY is caused by the absence of Khosro, it is not the story of Khosro. The third important woman in the story is Khosro’s mother. She aims to takes Shirin’s life under her control, similar to what she had been doing to Khosro’s life. She represents the dominant social behavior; she intrudes into the most personal matters of her children, and tires to oversee those matters. She represents the dominant ideology of the society (today and in the past). She has such a long and dominant presence whereby Shirin is obliged to shelter, not only in a fictitious love but in an imaginary life on the internet, out of sight of the ruling power. Shirin, through the internet, is in a relationship with a young man, a randomly taped movie salesclerk, who sees her, in the real world, only every couple of days. As the wall between Afsoun and Khosro in the 80s, there is now an iron curtain between the two souls which works similarly. The tick wall in the past, the present love in an unreal world, a mother who restlessly aims to control her grown-up children are all the fundamental metaphors of the story. The story also hints at a psychological melodrama. We can not believe that the absence of Khosro, if caused by any other reason, would have had a similar effect on Afsoun and Shirin. Hence, SNAIL DAY doesn’t ignore the source of the psychological effect on the two main narrators; even though the story doesn’t spend even half of the focus on the reason of the “absence”, but still doesn’t ignore it. SNAIL DAY is and isn’t the narration of a passionate love story. This state of suspense is accompanied by the uncertainty of the two main characters of the story. SNAIL DAY has certain questions – similar to those of Afsoun, Shirin, and Kosro – that it hasn’t found an answer to.
