from Realm of the Occult
The Holy City, Dream & the Traveler
Manifestation of the Blue Village and the Town of Only Widowed Men
I walked for a long time. Along with the baby I came across pastures and streams and villages as well. These were ordinary in architecture: mud houses built into the sides of hills, olive trees beside them, wells. The villages were silent, and I did not enter them. The baby had begun to mumble vowels, no words yet, and I did not want to curse her with lack of language limp as she had been. The silence was too thick in the villages.
I walked passed the villages, through the open lands. My mind too, so that internal and external space cohered, was silent now. The voice of the second and third generations had subsided again. In their absence I hoped to cross paths with a dervish, so that he could speak to me in poems. Verses, I thought, to sing through the vast landscape. But no such man appeared, only the curved line of the horizon, crisp and delineated, thin as air.
The baby was no longer limp, and I needed a new name for her. It is not good to call a person by a name that no longer suits her, as this will only burden her with a psyche that is ancient history to her. I thought about all the baby had experienced, and concluded that her name should be Amulet baby, since she was strong and mysteriously unharmed by the elements of hunger and sickness. I sang her name a few times: “Amulet baby,” I said, and in my mind retired the name of limp baby, and she smiled at me so that I knew she liked her name.
We walked unencumbered for a long time. A strange wind whistled in the night. A flat, wide wind darted across the plains and made the noise of a thousand arrows across an expanse. The baby repositioned herself in my arms. I felt my fear and loneliness begin to grow. I wished for the wind to break against something natural or unnatural, a mountain or a large house, but instead the wind traveled across the valley. I could sense its glory. It was content with itself, ridiculing the emotions stirred in us.
Every night was the same: the wind traveled above our heads as arrows would, and we shifted beneath it inch by inch, tiny as we were in the vast expanse. The days passed without event. We rested briefly by streams, took some water and ate fruit, mainly mulberries, since there were plenty of these scattered on the ground beneath the trees. The voice of the second and third generations had still not fully returned to me, so that my passage was not continuously interrupted by their suggestions and commands. In this way the space of my mind was uneventful. I merely perceived the scenery.
Some time into our journey, we came across a very strange man who was squatting beneath a tree. A moment later he kneeled on the ground. He was searching for something in the blades of grass. A very small thing it must have been, for he inspected the ground with his fingers, and his eyes were close to his hands. When I asked what was wrong he did not look up, and did not stop searching, but said his wife had been bitten by a jackal and his rosary beads had broken and that without them he could not consult the higher realms. I thought for a moment that he was speaking to the ground, for he did not lift his eyes to look at me. But eventually his language took the form of story, so that I knew he was not complaining to the earth, but rather revealing facts to me.
He said he had left his wife in the neighbor’s house, and that they were rubbing some ointments on her, a concoction of egg yolk and clay. “We are very poor,” he said, “and can only afford a second-rate doctor or a street-side druggist,” but his town was too far away from any central mosques or markets and no healers or doctors traveled there. As he said this he searched even more desperately on the ground, and soon his tears clouded his vision. He was crying to god and cursing him to pieces as well, saying, “May your spirit shatter as my beads shattered, you have cast me into hell.” Upon saying this he began to speak in nonsense, so that only he could understand what he was saying.
I asked, “Which limb of your wife has the jackal bitten?” but he made no answer. Then, remembering some stories told to me by the second and third generations, I asked whether or not they had a town barber. I explained to him that the barber could draw blood with his razor from another place on his wife’s body, to distract her from the pain where the jackal had bitten her. Again he did not respond, only cried and cursed god some more, saying as he addressed the higher realms, “May the dust you created be thrown onto your head as it is thrown onto ours when we are dead.” Seeing that I could not reason with the man, and that he was not in a place to reason with me, I left, and with Amulet baby in my arms continued walking through the vast expanse.
I turned around a few times, expecting the man to come after me with some request, but he remained kneeled beneath the tree and soon became the size of a small rock in the distance. I was sorry to see him without relief. I prayed for his wife, and thought I should collect some mulberries the next morning to give as alms to the poor on her behalf so that she may recover and not leave him alone searching through the grass and cursing everything above and below him. “We are not in the habit of cursing god,” I remembered the voice of the second and third generations say. Surely, I thought, the curses the poor man delivered must have caused the pain of a thousand arrows darting through his heart.
That night, the wind did not blow as it had the whole time of our journey. Strange, I thought, for the wind to break its own custom in these vast lands. The more carefully I listened for the wind, the more clearly I could hear other sounds: the howl of jackals, owls fleeing from branch to branch. They touched upon my fear, and my fear grew and took the place of my loneliness. I hoped again for a dervish or a roadside healer, someone to whom I could give my fear in exchange for a less paralyzing emotion. In small amounts fear can be used to plant forbearance in the heart of the exceedingly fearless, and I had no doubt that a healer could make some use of it. But no healer or dervish appeared. Truly this is the land of the forsaken, I thought, since all I had seen was the kneeling man and the silent villages. I was beginning to doubt the direction of my footsteps, and thought to myself, these cannot be the elements that mark the road to the Holy City. As I turned this thought over in my mind, daylight appeared. The song of birds intervened as well, and soon I could see along the horizon a blue village, its magnificent color glowing under the rising sun.
There were mules and people gathered in the village center. The mules had heavy loads on their backs. They carried wool, copper pots and hand-woven carpets. The people were wearing necklaces made of blue glass amulets. Azure tassels hung between the eyes of the mules and the cows. The animals were neatly groomed, and as I walked closer, I heard their owners praise them continuously. I thought to myself that I had again walked into the world of similitudes, and that all those wearing amulets had suffered by the hand of satan, and now wore the great stones to protect themselves from the forces of evil. But this thought quickly shattered, since in the world of similitudes rules of ordinary society do not apply; no inhabitant would need to trade goods in order to bring upon his table food and over his table a roof, to eat unharmed and untouched by the elements.
Inside the Blue Village, the streets curved alongside houses, lead down to streams, poplar trees, other houses. Strings of garlic hung from doorways. The streams were more blue in color than any blue I had seen. Many people passed us, mass after mass, as though they were taking part in a parade. They stopped near the largest of the village streams. There, they organized themselves in rows, one on either side of the stream. They sang a strange song and gestured as they sang across the stream to each other. I thought to myself, they do not have the mannerisms of ordinary people, and again began to fear that the zones of the dead were composed of an infinite network of valleys I had never exited. “Wail heavily to keep with the living,” I heard the voices of the women of my family repeat. I thought, perhaps the people of the procession are singing to keep with the living as they proceed toward the dead. Just as I thought this, one of the children of the procession took notice of me. She detached herself from the other people and came near.
“What baby is this you are carrying?” she asked, to which I answered with the name of the baby and nothing else. She then asked if the town could borrow the baby to bless with new life a person who would otherwise soon be dead, and said that if I refused, the baby would be cursed and not have a better destiny than the lady who would soon be dead. She then handed me a piece of paper with instructions in a language I could not read. As though she were in the habit of having her commands automatically delivered, she extended her arms to take the baby. “Are these instructions for how to bless the dying?” I asked, leaning away from her. She replied by nodding. Seeing that I was not prepared to hand over the baby, in an impatient tone she explained to me that they would be placing the baby near the dying woman’s head, and feeding them from the same piece of bread, soaking the bread in the baby’s mouth first and then withdrawing the bread to give to the woman. “Do you not have your own babies to do this with?” I asked. “No,” she replied arrogantly, “we have reached our perfect population and for five years in our town no babies have been bred.”
Suddenly, a male person seized me by the neck and the girl reached out and took Amulet baby from me. The person who had seized me cast a fishnet over me, all the way down to my knees. He insisted that I follow him wherever he went. Through the fishnet, I kept my eye on the girl who had taken Amulet baby. She walked to the head of the procession and passed Amulet baby to an elderly woman who looked like a human lizard. The man pulled me along with him and we followed the procession. We were far inland, so there were no great bodies of water, no lakes or seas, only streams. It was unreasonable, I thought, for these people to have such a large fish net readily available to them. Then I saw that the people of the procession were walking from house to house and touching the head of Amulet baby to each door, as though they did not understand that the head of a baby is a very soft thing and should not be treated like that. What they were doing seemed to me very inhumane, and I felt a deep rage take root in my heart. I thought the people of the Blue Village were incorrigible.
Every few minutes the people of the procession thanked god for Amulet baby and sang her praises, saying, “May the baby cure our dying person with the trick of bread we are about to do on her.” They continued to touch the baby’s head to the doors of the houses as though they were lightly knocking on the doors with the baby’s head.
The man too continued to pull me, fast and slow in turns. He did not care at all that there were very pebbly roads and that the streams had to be jumped over, and that it was very difficult for me to keep up with him at the pace of the procession. I was beginning to feel unbearably angry with the man for dragging me about in a fish net, but I did not want to curse or annoy him, since the people of the village seemed altogether unpredictable, and I did not want to be separated from Amulet baby or further endanger her. The man had some amulet bracelets on his wrists and an amulet pendant as well, and it seemed inverted for him and all the people of the village to be protecting themselves against evil when they did not possess good themselves.
Soon the voice of the second and third generations appeared in my mind in the form of a very slender finger. They were pointing at me and saying, “You see now what has happened,” and it saddened me to be mocked from all sides, inside and outside the space of my mind. Finally the procession stopped at the front of a large, wooden door and the eldest lady with the lizard face pushed the door open. She pressed her hand against the door and against Amulet baby’s forehead. The people of the procession entered one by one and the man dragged me along, but I was kept at the doorway.
I could see a dying woman inside. She was lying on the floor, feverish. She thrashed her head desperately from side to side. The people of the procession took their places around her and imitated her in a very serious manner. It was clear they thought they were curing her by pretending to join her in her fever. When they were done with their gestures, the elderly lady placed Amulet baby near the head of the dying woman so the crowns of their heads were touching. Then they began their ritual with the bread. They cut the bread into small pieces and placed one piece at a time in Amulet baby’s mouth. After the bread had soaked a while in Amulet baby’s palate they withdrew the bread and placed it in the dying woman’s mouth. This was not an easy task, since the dying woman was thrashing her head about. The people of the procession held her head still and forced her mouth open and pushed the bread in. I was beginning to think they were a mad people to be treating their sick in that manner, and holding me hostage as well. But just as I was thinking this, their dying person rose to her feet as though she had never been physically ill. She turned herself toward mecca, said some prayers and lay back down again.
The people of the procession then uttered the prayers one prays for a dead person. None of what they were doing made sense, for they were performing the prayer before she was dead, as though they were wishing death onto her even though everything they had done so far was to wish her into life again. After they said their prayers, the people of the procession took Amulet baby and me to the edge of a well. They pushed me in. Then, carefully, by way of a large bucket, they lowered Amulet baby into the well, singing her praises all the while, though it remained unclear to me what they felt the baby had accomplished.
I untangled myself from the fish net and looked around. The well water was blue in color, as were the walls of the well and the amulets in the Blue Village. I was soothed to have Amulet baby in my arms again, and kissed her forehead. Clutching her tightly to my chest, I waded through the water until we came to an underground passage where I found many other women who had been trapped in fishnets as well. I asked the women how they had come to be there, but they did not answer, and when I approached them I could see that they had turned to stone and were no longer living, breathing persons. Again, I thought, I have entered the network of the dead and the dying.
Quickly, I ran through the underground passages, holding Amulet baby in my arms. Now my left foot started to turn to stone. No matter how fast I ran away from the stone women I could not stop my left limb from transforming. I ran as fast as I could, dragging my left foot behind me and limping with my right, taking longer strides to make up for the weight of my hardened foot. I did not want the stone to reach my hip, for then it would be altogether impossible to move.
I ran and ran with her in my arms, until the underground passage opened into the wide, circular space of another well. I realized I had been wading through an underground waterway, which generally connect towns to villages so that water can be transported among them. The water in the well had also ceased to be blue, so that I deduced I had ran a great distance from the Blue Village and its people, and that I would, at any moment, come up against another town. Just as I was thinking these thoughts, I saw a shadow some one hundred meters away. It was a person digging.
I walked up to the man and asked him if he could help me emerge from the underground waterway, but he only looked at me as though I were a strange specimen and did not answer. It was the same man whom I had seen in the fields crying to god for his wife and searching for his prayer beads as well, but he did not recognize me. A great deal of time must have past since I was thrown in the well, I thought. Again I asked the man if he would help me emerge from the underground waterway. Without looking at me he replied that the people of his town would no longer trust him if he were to help me emerge from the well. “What town is this that no person can lift me into it?” I asked, and he answered that it was the Town of Only Widowed Men and that entrance was restricted to anyone else.
Now my stone leg was turning into flesh again, a very painful process. With two flesh legs, I thought, I can lift myself out of the well without the help of any person. I raised Amulet baby and placed her gently onto the ground above, then pulled myself up to join her. Now the man whose wife had been bitten by a jackal lifted himself out of the well and came screaming after me, saying terrible transformations would occur to me there. As he spoke I saw that my outer form had transformed into that of a man, though I still felt like a woman inside. Soon my clothing transformed as well. “What law is this?” I asked the man who was now standing beside me with his hands atop his head, cursing again. “No woman above the age of nine can exist here, and if one shall trespass she will be converted into a man and we do not know what trickery to use to undo the transformation.” He then said, “You cannot stay in our town for you are not a genuinely widowed man.”
As I walked away from the town a lazy emptiness foreign to my natural gender occupied the space of my chest. Thoughts I could not have had before began to take root in my mind. Such are the advantages of the male gender, I thought: liberty of travel, observation, growth. With a sudden confidence, I decided to rent mules with which to travel to the Garden City, Shiraz. I wanted to look at its ageless splendors before resuming my travels to the Holy City, the image of which, despite my new form, continued to palpate as a vision before me. Four legs are better than two in these vast lands, I thought. With a levity of spirit I had not felt before, I set off with Amulet baby in search of mules with which to travel south to the Garden City.
*
Manifestation of the Drunken Infants in the Village of Rock and Pebble
Accompanied by three mules, one on which I rode, the second on which the muleteer rode and the third which he kept for company—as the muleteer informed me that he had a habit of renting them in threes—I headed south in the form of a man. I did very much like my new form as it permitted me liberties I did not have before. But I felt distant from Amulet baby in a way I had not felt before, since she was female and I was male, and we no longer coincided in our form.
The muleteer directed our travel south, and after some days and nights we entered a stony valley flanked by mountains on both sides. Pointing at the mountains, he informed me that we were only three days passage from Shiraz, the Garden City, and that we had to stop to take rest in the Village of Rock and Pebble to unload, eat and replenish before continuing our journey.
The road leading to the Village of Rock and Pebble was steep, and the force of the mules’ hooves caused some rocks to detach and flow down the road in large clusters. The sun was very bright, so that with our hands we made a hood over our eyes to see into the village. We saw a pile of rocks amassed near the entrance gates, and beyond the gates a goat scurrying about in the dirt. We heard a man yelling after the goat, but when we searched for the man to whom the voice belonged, we saw no one. Amulet baby made noises in my arms, a small giggle. Her voice mingled with the sounds made by the goat and the voice of the unseen man who was desperately trying to capture the un-tame animal.
As we approached the gates, the muleteer’s aspect changed. He looked sallow and his eyes became very sunken in. The people of the Village of Rock and Pebble have sour faces, he began to explain. “Sour faces are their most basic village characteristic,” he said. For a moment he became very quiet. Then he added, “The people of the region are a sun-baked people,” and nodded his head as he said the word sun-baked, and made a devastated look with his eyes, moving them around like a pair of marbles. “They are an unreasonable people,” he said. “Moreover,” he continued, “constant sun plagues their region. And it seems,” he added, and he was speaking very seriously now, “that their babies are being born that way as well, very unreasonable,” he repeated. Then, he said, “Out of pure ignorance the people of the village leave their bread out to dry in the sun and then soak it in water to make it edible. Ungodly,” he said, leaning over to whisper in my ear, “to do things that are senseless with one’s food.”
Since he had loosened his tongue, and was revealing negative things, I suggested we rest somewhere other than the Village of Rock and Pebble. But the muleteer said that if we did not go there we would invite terrible luck upon ourselves. He listed the many ways in which our luck would become rotten if we were to turn our faces away from the sour-faced people: we would be cursed by god for our ungraciousness and would become like them, unreasonable in our manners and unappealing in our figure too. Just as he said this, we entered the village. The goat we had seen earlier trotted between the mules. The man we had heard yelling appeared. He was holding a stick and cursing the goat, saying to it “I will catch you, you whose mother is a whore!”
The houses in the village looked washed out under the sun’s yellow glare; they absorbed the light and reflected it back even more strongly. The muleteer unloaded the mules, then took rest beneath the shade of a tree. He drank tea and smoked from his pipe, and was soon fast asleep, his head resting upon a stone in the manner of a dervish. I sat next to him, and covered Amulet baby with a sheet to protect her from the sun which came down on us harshly. For a moment, looking at her, I wanted desperately to turn back into a woman, for all the ordinary difficulties of being in a female body had been removed. The voice of the second and third generations no longer reached me in the male form, and the freedom I gained from the lack of their voice was more confounding than their constant language which had beared down on me all along.
I noticed the man who had been chasing his goat was now sitting under a leafless tree. He was busy soaking his bread and eating it in the manner the muleteer had described. Indeed, I thought, the inhabitants of the village are strange. Just then an elderly woman appeared before me, and spoke in motherly whispers to Amulet baby. I felt the space of the village transform into an unreal thing. I did not know if my form would suddenly reveal its true nature and again trap me. But the woman was relentless in her need to engage in conversation, so that finally I spoke to her. My voice emerged in the male form consistent with my body, and the village settled again and ceased to threaten me.
The woman continued to speak, saying cordial things in a ritual manner, “You are generous,” which is the proper response to what I had said to her: “Thank you for your graciousness toward Amulet baby.” She then pointed her finger north, as though all the while this was what she had intended to arrive at in our interaction. Looking at me, she repeated the word “up” several times and made a commanding gesture with her eyes so as to direct me to the place she pointed to with her finger.
The woman left and her departing figure grew more and more faint. She was caught in a net of light. Soon she vanished, and in the place of her absence I caught sight of a series of stone steps enclosed by an iron gate. Again, I thought, I have entered the network of the dead and the dying, for all that manifested around me seemed timeless and strange. I walked up to the gate. It was engraved with tremendous figures of peacocks and lions. The peacocks emerged in full relief, resting on the backs of the lions with their feathers fanned open. The lions’ faces were turned toward the onlooker, very sheepish eyes, and between their legs were hermits, shrunken in size, sitting in meditation. If I looked directly at the hermits, the lions’ legs blurred in the peripheries, a strange effect, and took on the shape of temple pillars. But if I stood back looking at the whole picture, the lions emerged in full form, and from this view it was the image of the hermits that retreated instead, and appeared in the background as nothing but rock or pebble.
I pushed the gate open with one arm as I held Amulet baby with the other, and ascended the steps. At the top of the steps the land flattened into a stony terrace. Again I had the feeling of being very high up and in an unreal place. Suddenly, a mass of people emerged from the landscape and came to the fore. They stood in rows and columns so that with their bodies they created the shape of a square. They were all very slim people so that when they were standing still, with their palms facing the heavens, they appeared to be poplar trees wavering slightly in the wind. They were a hung-faced people. The edges of their eyes and lips, and the tips of their noses were drawn down. With perfect coordination they folded their skin-and-bone bodies down to the ground, then rose up to greet the sky in consecutive motions.
A man, more hung-faced than the others, detached himself from the other bodies and walked toward me. I gazed at his hollow eyes and fragile neck, from which hung a bony body he dragged across the surface of the earth. He placed a thin arm on my shoulder. With his other hand he pointed north and repeated the word “up” several times. Low, black clouds congealed in the sky and cast a heavy shadow over the landscape.
Desperate, the hung-faced man repeated the word “up,” and with his long, bony arm nudged me along the stony terrace. I thought, he has mistaken me for a horse or a donkey, and was very annoyed with him so that I refused to stir. But then he began with new words, saying, “Please sir, please sir,” and was crying as well. I walked alongside him. Now the clouds shifted and I could see he was pointing across the precipice to a narrow slit of rock, an island of sorts crowded with houses and connected to the rest of the stony valley by way of a drawbridge. For a moment I wondered whether or not the man, in collaboration with the muleteer, had plans to push me off the cliff, and if so for what reason? But he only withdrew in silence and returned to his position in the prayer square. I thought, what creatures are these that they point north with their finger and say little else? I crossed by way of the drawbridge onto the island. The clouds cleared.
In the light of the sun, I could see the houses on the island were built very close to the edge of the cliff. Some had collapsed and were hanging down the side of the ravine. All along the precipice, the houses were built in pairs: in each pair one house had collapsed, so that as a whole the houses looked like disturbed human faces—one side hanging down while the other was intact and uplifted. The roads and alleys between the houses were unevenly paved and slanted in one direction or another. Everywhere on the island there was the smell of wine and liquor. Repelled by the sour smell, I wanted to return to the stony terrace. But just as I turned around to leave, I heard the sound of child laughter and drums in the distance.
Soon I came to an opening: a rectangular stone courtyard at the center of which was a very ornate white marble fountain carved into the shape of overlapping fish. I dipped my hand into the water and washed Amulet baby’s face. The cool touch of the water did her well; she puckered her lips, then drifted off to sleep again. A light wind blew from east to west. Then the smell I had sensed earlier returned. The sharp smell of spilled wine. I leaned over the fountain to look around the bend. There, I found a string of raucous infants rolling on the ground uncontrollably, red-faced and swollen. In the distance, at the far end of the courtyard, there was a child aimlessly riding a horse. Again I wondered, what trickery on the part of the muleteer to have brought me here? Just as I was thinking these thoughts, I caught sight of a shiny element in the drains—needles—and looking at the rolling infants I discovered they had bruised and bloodied arms.
I have entered a portion of hell—I thought to myself, covering Amulet baby’s face to avoid drawing attention to her—populated by drug-addled and drunken infants. I cursed myself for having drifted toward the stairs, and turned around to return by way of the drawbridge onto the stony terrace. But quickly the infant on the horse halted my passage. With a raised arm he appeared before me, as with the other he controlled the horse by holding onto its reins. He introduced himself as Baba Khan the Third, and proudly divulged that he had been placed on the throne and was now king of all the children and the infants. He added that he loves to indulge in drinking and photography, then in a monotone manner asked a string of insipid questions, insisting on the last: “Do you bring with you a camera?” he asked over and over, raising his eyebrows and releasing a crooked smile with his twisted lips. Seeing that I could not respond, he continued to speak. With urgency he said, “I would like to take photos of the infants who serve me as they jump over the fires and drink in the streets.”
“The camera would be for a very special occasion,” he said. “What occasion is that?” I asked. “I have banished all the people of the town to the stony terrace across the drawbridge to fast and pray,” he said. He then made very strange gestures with his eyes, slight movements from side to side, and emitted a loud laugh, which the children resounded in solidarity. “It seems you have no camera, very well then,” he said, and looked at me as one would look at a useless thing. Then, as quickly as he had appeared he departed, riding his horse away from the courtyard into a darkened alley.
Desperate, I dashed across the drawbridge and quickly descended the stairs. When I reached the village I removed the cloth that I had used to cover Amulet baby. Again, I thought, I have fallen victim to the intricate valleys of the dead. I looked behind me, but saw nothing except the steep side of the barren mountain. The stony terrace, and the gate I had gone through had vanished. Perhaps, I thought, I had descended from the heights of the village by way of a different road. I heard the muleteer call out to me. He had loaded the mules, and in the most ordinary of manners was waving an arm at me. I walked toward him, and in no time we were on the road again, traveling south to the Garden City.
After some time we entered green pastures. A wave of relief came over me. The grass, dotted with yellow flowers, sighed in the wind as it blew continuously. “You cannot believe the quantity of flowers planted in the Garden City until you see them with your own two eyes,” the muleteer said, gazing happily at the landscape. “Or with one eye,” he added, “depending on how many god has given you. And if god has made you blind,” he said, “then with your imagined eyes you can see them.” He continued to make poetic remarks, and to smile at himself, self-satisfied. I was relieved to have gathered distance from all that I had seen and heard. The scent of flowers was wafting through the valley, and one did not need to see the flowers to believe them there: rows of hyacinth and lilies emblazoned under the sun amid grassland.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novel Fra Keeler (Dorothy, a publishing project), and the chapbook Girona (New Herring Press). She is an Iranian-American writer of fiction and non-fiction, and has lived in Iran, America, Spain, Italy and the United Arab Emirates. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, and is a recipient of a Fulbright Grant to Catalonia, Spain. She is co-author of the Words Without Borders dispatch series ArtistsTalk: Israel/Palestine and is at work on a second project entitled The Catalan Literary Landscape, an exploration of notions of journey and the intersections between landscape and literature. She currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and lives in Indiana. Read more about Azareen at her website.