Do we need a man? I want to ask her, but her eyes are bright like poppies in summer heat.

January 24, 2025
Spring
“You’re a daughter of a five-hundred-year-old eucalyptus tree, planted by the ancient ruins of Persepolis,” my grandmother tells me. “Your mother was a winged seed from an ash tree in the Alborz Mountains. You can’t hang onto winged seeds for long.” Sparrows chirp on the blossoming persimmon tree near us. Kneeling on the dirt, my grandmother drops beet seeds into the ground, two at a time.
“Why two?” I ask.
“Because lonely seeds don’t stand a chance under the dark dirt.”
Flapping my arms around my grandmother’s garden, I become a winged seed too. I don’t remember my mother’s scent. I imagine her smelling like smoke, a tree on fire, ash ready for flight.
Summer
My grandmother has buried three husbands already. She has carved an X for each on the wooden entrance door with a letter under each mark: Meem, Alef, Be. I give vegetable names to each of her husbands. She gardens so much that I think she must have fallen in love with Prince Mung Bean or King Alfalfa, crawling right out of the dirt.
Be, the third husband, was my grandfather. His heart attacked him in his sleep a year before I was born. In his photo on the mantle, his bald head looks capable of making anyone cry. I name him the Onion Monarch.
“All three men were bad seeds,” I overhear my grandmother whisper to the neighbor lady. Both are perched near the garden, cracking sunflower seeds in between teeth yellow as corn kernels.
I offer drops of water in a bottle cap to a sparrow that flies into our kitchen window. His black eyes, two seeds ready to drop. I splash droplets on his face, watering his eyes. His beak moves slowly, like he’s trying to tell me a secret. “Don’t lose your seeds,” I hear him whisper before his eyes close shut.
Fall
“Our eyes are seeds,” my grandmother says, playing tug-of-war with the ground over a fat beet.
With my shirt lifted, I rub my belly skin on the cool dirt.
“If you water your eyes with your tears, they will blossom after you die,” my grandmother says. I pluck the petals off two pink roses and press the fuzzy yellow hearts into the dirt so that the ground can have eyes and see the magic inside her own belly.
My grandmother winds every beet out of the ground, a pile growing tall behind her. When she’s done, the ground looks defeated, a body riddled with holes.
I sink my teeth into the ripe flesh of a persimmon as ants and spiders crawl over my legs. The persimmon’s belly spills on my hands, down my chin. When I feel the seeds inside my mouth, I spit them out and hold them up to my grandmother. “These seeds look like cat eyes,” I say.
“Not cat eyes, but the eyes of a winged paree. She married her love but only after giving up her eyes to the evil queen. The jealous queen cursed her into a persimmon wife full of seeds. That’s why persimmons have four bellies, each with a sweet baby.”
I draw spirals with my sticky fingertips on my own belly. I let a brown ant crawl up my arm. I imagine the fruit I will one day birth. I hope the price will never be my eyes.
Winter
When I tell the kids in my second-grade class that tomato seeds are baby fish, they laugh at me, their mouths wide open with their half-chewed sandwiches. Labyrinth is the word of the day. I write it with my pencil, but the tip breaks, leaving lead smeared on the page like ash. I rub it on my fingers and draw lines down my arms. I’m an ash child.
“I’ve found another husband. He has good seeds. We’ll marry in two months,” my grandmother told me last night. We are persimmons, our bellies sticky sweet. Do we need a man? I want to ask her, but her eyes are bright like poppies in summer heat. I try to imagine the seeds this new husband must have—gold, diamond, moon rock.
When I meet the new man today after school, I will ask him if he too is a seed from the eucalyptus tree by Persepolis. Does he too feel battles and spears churning in his belly? Most importantly, he must promise not to have been mothered by an evil queen.
I imagine all the kids getting lost in the belly of a labyrinth, along with the new husband. But parees pregnant with persimmons bat their wings only around my grandmother and me, our bellies full of seeds.