Babak Lakghomi sits on a veranda with his hands clasped together. He is wearing a forest green shirt and glasses with big round frames. — Babak Lakghomi

Assistant Editor Andy Sia: Babak Lakghomi’s “Fight” considers the reverberations of violence across space and time. In the taut recounting of a childhood memory, Lakghomi offers a snapshot of a family under duress from the threat of political violence. By the end, memory is itself diffuse, not unlike a dream, yet certain details impress and cut through: a butcher’s knife, the red smear of blood.

Listen to Lakghomi read the piece:

Fight

My mother held a big butcher’s knife in her hand. With her other hand, she held me close. “If you leave now, I’ll kill us both,” she said.

My father pushed me aside, twisted my mother’s hand, and tried to take the knife.

Then they were running around the room, like they were playing, the room shaking and spinning.

“Stop it,” my father said. “It’s enough.”

I saw a smear of blood. The tint of red on his shirt. On hers.

Then he had her pinned. “I won’t go,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll stay. Stop!”

Then she was sobbing, and he was holding her.

I don’t remember any other fights between them.

Later, they learned that the meeting my father had been planning to attend that day was a trap. If he had gone, he might have been executed. As it was, most of his political contacts had already been arrested.

The scene in my head is like a dream. I once asked if they remembered such a fight.

“We’ve never had a fight,” my father said.

Babak Lakghomi is the author of South (Dundurn Press, 2023) and Floating Notes (Tyrant Books, 2018). His writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Electric Literature, Fence, Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others.