Last updated on August 28, 2025
Part I of V
At the edge of the village, the gallows stood abandoned, ropes idling in the desert breeze like tired sentinels. The air smelled of dust and rust, as if even the memory of their past depredations had dried and cracked. Doctor Muhammad Hosseini watched the ropes and pondered whether they would ever be used again. Since the rest of the world had vanished, crime had faded into a mere background hum—still present, but far less noticeable—an edge of unresolved fear replacing it with an implacable weight.
He remembered the fear in the first few days, men hiding in the shadows like whipped dogs, women pulling their veils tighter, as if to protect themselves from djinn, children quietly moving from house to house without play, or the regular raucous laughter that used to characterise the ambience of what was a happy village. The laughter was all gone, and even now the atmosphere lay heavy like a blanket of unrealised expectation, a terror ready to pounce.
Importantly for him, since the lynching of the local platoon of Revolutionary Guards, many crimes had ceased to matter or even exist. Just like the world outside: gone and gradually forgotten.
Picking up a wet sponge from the red plastic bucket—red like the car he washed, like the stains in the dirt covering the floor of the guardhouse, and like the peppers his wife picked in the endless morning—he wiped the brown, gritty, and tasteless dust from the screen in long, careful sweeps.
The village elders declared, “The Event”, the disappearance of everything, an Act of God. They had been spared, kept safe from whatever ravaged the rest of the world. That made this place—this thin village, no more than a line in the soil flanked by ramshackle houses—a safe place, a sanctuary they could remain in, protected by God. The wind dropped, and Muhammed raised his head to follow a sound, laughing hollowly as he watched two cats fight out a ceaseless territorial battle on the flat roof of a house near the village’s edge, their cries echoing through the still, musky air, thinking, “That’s us. Cats fighting over a scrap of land.”
When the elders called The Event an Act of God, Muhammad had bitten his tongue. He thought of the anatomy textbooks in his youth; they had never shown a place for divine intervention, and he realised that his village was not unique among many others.
“So, why had they been saved?” he pondered
His return, motivated by his mother’s death and solidified by his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, was a concession to his sense of duty. Although he was committed to serving his village, his thoughts remained uninhibited by their restrictive beliefs. His eyes flashed as he recalled the first Covid case. The elders had suggested bathing the patient in the village well’s still waters to calm her fever, but he knew from American scientists’ bulletins that medical care was her only sanctuary. He trusted a science they did not understand. It was always that way.
So it was, in his unbound mind, that his thoughts drifted towards questions about the nature of their circumstances. And as steady as the sun climbing its daily arc, his thoughts moved towards those questions: perhaps the world really did end just beyond the low hills ringing the town. Everything he knew about physical reality told him this could not be the case. Although a few weeks ago, he would not have believed that the world would simply disappear.
His hands moved automatically over the car’s bonnet while his mind wandered past the scrub and sand, searching for what lay hidden. Curiosity tugged at him like thirst. If he could crest the ridge—if he could see—perhaps the world would make sense again.
Yet here, in Yasuk, sense came with chains. He was the town’s only doctor, and the sick still sought him out with their coughs and wounds. The elders often reminded him that without his skills, more would perish.
Then there was his collection of classic cars: each polished like a jewel, relics of another age. Abandoning them felt like leaving behind his truest self. Yet what use was a gleaming machine in a village cut off from the world, where even time itself seemed to have stalled?
At night, lying awake beside his wife, he tried to weigh duty against survival. If they remained here, what would become of his sons? Would they grow old never knowing what lay beyond the dust? Would the whole village slowly wither, like a tree cut off from water?
And what, truly, had happened? Had the rest of the world disappeared—or had their village been uprooted, transplanted whole into some other barren land, some other reality? Perhaps the world was still there, just unseen. He needed to find out. How though? Then it struck him: he could not see beyond the horizons imposed by the hills and mountains surrounding the village, but the sky had no horizons. The heavens would tell him.
He remembered a man in the village with a battered telescope, an amateur stargazer of sorts, and resolved to seek him out. Sleep came with that resolution, and he woke with a new purpose the next day.
After an afternoon of tending to the sicknesses and minor injuries that came down the village conveyor belt, Muhammad found Karim, the telescope-keeper, in the narrow courtyard behind his house, smoking bitter tobacco and staring at the slowly darkening sky with naked eyes.
“You still watch the skies, Karim?” Muhammad asked, ducking his head under the folded blanket hanging over the gate frame
Karim shrugged. Since returning from Tehran University, he had withdrawn into himself, the story behind his fall from grace untold. “What else is there to do? The heavens don’t vanish just because the radios fall silent. Although I admit, I haven’t brought my telescope out in many months. It’s too heavy for me these days, and my sight… let’s say it’s not as good as it used to be.”
Karim exhaled smoke through his nose, watching it curl upward as if to prove his point.
“I think they might have—disappeared, that is.” Muhammad’s hand brushed the wall, fingers restless, betraying the urgency he tried to keep from his voice. “Do you have your telescope handy? I would like to see the heavens.”
Karim hesitated, then fetched the telescope, its tripod legs scarred and uneven. Together they carried it up to the roof. The air was cool, the stars hard and bright, and far more numerous than he remembered. Muhammad bent to the eyepiece.
“What do you see?” Karim asked. He leaned forward, his palms pressed against his knees, eyes narrowed at Muhammad’s expression.
“Nothing. That’s the trouble.” Muhammad kept one hand braced on the eyepiece, his breath clouding the glass as he shifted it back and forth. He adjusted the focus, scanned the heavens again. “No Jupiter. No Venus. No red eye of Mars. Only stars, scattered like dust. And the moon…” He drew back sharply. “It’s wrong.”
Karim looked, then cursed softly. The craters were shifted, their familiar pattern distorted. Karim pulled the pipe from his lips and let it dangle, forgotten. “As if it were… another moon.”
“Or we are not where we think we are,” Muhammad murmured. He felt a coldness in his stomach that had nothing to do with the desert night.
“I can see trouble in your eyes, Muhammed. What are you going to do?”
“What I can. Tell the elders. Try to persuade them,” Muhammed said. He pressed his lips into a tight line, thinking about the blank wall of certainty that elders put before anything new. Then he put a hand on Karim’s shoulder. “And tomorrow, you must call into the surgery. I will look at your eyes.”
“If it’s God’s will,” the older man intoned.
The next morning, Muhammed went to the council of elders. They sat cross-legged in the shade of the mosque wall, listening with heavy eyes as he described what he had seen.
“Perhaps God swept them away,” one elder muttered, stroking his beard with slow, deliberate fingers, as if the gesture itself was a verdict. “Planets are nothing to us, if He wills them gone.”
Another elder jabbed a knotted finger in the air, his voice roughened by dust and age. “The desert beyond the road is death. You would send men to their graves for a dream? And you? You are our doctor. Without you, who will heal our children?”
Muhammad bowed his head, though his jaw tightened. “If we stay, we will wither. You see the supplies dwindling. You feel the air. It is as if the world itself has shrunk to this village. Should we not test the horizon at least once?”
The men drew their robes tighter against the heat, as though the very thought of leaving chilled them. They shook their heads. “Your duty is here. Do not let curiosity lead you astray. God assesses us, and we must endure.”
That night, Muhammad told his wife, Mahsa, what the elders said. She sat silent, grinding peppercorns with a pestle, her hands moving fast, betraying her anger.
“They will not risk themselves, so they forbid you to risk anything,” she said finally, pulling a lock of dark hair from her face as she ground the corns.
“I am sworn to heal them,” Muhammad answered. “But if we remain here, we will all sicken in time. Even the healthy. The air itself feels empty of life.”
“It will mean leaving your mother behind,” she said, looking up at him, momentarily fearful.
“My mother is beyond our help. She is at peace,” he declared, willing the pain in his chest at her memory to subside.
His younger son, Zohan, leaned forward eagerly, gripping the edge of the low table with white-knuckled hands and his dark eyes aflame with purpose. “Then let’s go, Father. We could be the first to see what lies beyond the hills.”
His elder boy, Jawad, frowned. “Or the first to die in the sand.”
Jawad’s arms folded across his chest, his gaze fixed on the floorboards, his face frozen in an ungenerous expression that belied his given name.
Their grandfather hacked in the corner, eyes glinting.
“The desert swallows men whole,” he rasped. The old man’s cough rattled in his throat, followed by a thin smile that vanished almost as soon as it appeared. “But perhaps it spits them out again, in another place.”
Muhammad looked at each of them, his family gathered in the lamp’s pale light. His heart was a pendulum, swinging between fear and resolve.
He thought to himself, “Even when I have nowhere to go, it’s become obvious that there is a time to leave.”
“We go,” he said at last. Muhammad’s hand rested on the table, steady now, as though the decision had anchored him. “Quietly. While the village still sleeps.”
He began to prepare. Working by lantern in the garage, long after the rest of the town fell to slumber, he coaxed one car, a thirty-year-old Mercedes SUV, into its finest condition, checking belts, tightening bolts, polishing glass until it gleamed in the dark. The Mercedes smelled faintly of oil and old leather, a perfume of the vanished world. Sitting behind its wheel was like slipping into a skin more real than his own.
“Yes,” he told himself as he patted the flank of the car, “you’re a good choice, old girl. Reliable and plenty of spares.”
Over the next few days, he siphoned and stored every drop of petrol he could scavenge, hiding the cans beneath tarpaulin. Each night he worked, sweat stinging his eyes, hope burning brighter than caution.
And when the time came, when the road lay silver under the moon, he loaded his family into the car, started the engine with a shuddering roar, and steered them out of the village. Behind them, the gallows swayed, the ropes creaking ominously in the moonlight. Ahead, the desert waited like an unopened book.
Be First to Comment