Siavash Saadlou
Tomorrow
On the first morning of my new life in Boston, I spotted a mouse in my studio apartment. I was reaching for the kettle when a blur of movement in the corner of my eye made me stop—a small, gray thing that slipped behind the fridge. I took a step back and stood frozen outside the mini kitchen with heart palpitations, my eyes fixed on the spot behind which the mouse had scurried. Hamino kam dashtam, I whispered to myself. This is the last thing I needed. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that thirty-two years of life in Iran, with its insane inflation and internet filtering and crippling sanctions and morality police, hadn’t prepared me for a tiny mouse.
Questions swirled in my head: how long had the mouse been living here? Was it alone? Did it have a family tucked away in the walls? Soon enough, my imagination was running wild, and I pictured a mischief of mice creeping up into my bed when I would be fast asleep later at night. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I recalled Mohsen’s words during the ride from Boston Logan: “People who look like us will never be considered Bostonian.” When I had asked him what he meant, he just smiled conspiratorially. “You’ll see for yourself,” he said.
It had always been my dream to go to America, a dream fed by bootleg movies, stories from distant relatives abroad, and the late-night fantasy that maybe, one day, I could start over somewhere normal, where daily life didn’t feel like a constant struggle. And yet, on my very first day, I found myself dealing with something I’d never had to handle back home. Sure, I’d seen mice in Tehran’s gutters, especially whenever getting myself a sandwich from one of those so-called kasif food trucks. Inside my own home, though, I’d only ever seen cockroaches on occasion at which point I’d crush them with a flip-flop in hand. I couldn’t, of course, crush a mouse because of its fleshiness.
I grabbed my phone and googled “best exterminator in Boston,” then called one place after another and explained the situation in a distinctly desperate and polite tone each time. “Please, I’m new here,” I said, or “you don’t know how much your help would mean to me.” But each time, the response—I’m fully booked for today—struck me as a subtle censure for my fecklessness.
I wasn’t used to being told no. As a child, whenever I encountered a problem, my mom would say in a gentle voice, Don’t worry, my darling. We’ll take care of it. Whenever the sink was clogged or a fuse blew, my dad would handle it, or a handyman would immediately show up. It wasn’t that my parents were wealthy—they weren’t—but they had always cushioned me from life’s small nuisances. My only responsibility, they said, was to “study hard.” Which is how I got a one-year fellowship from Boston University to further my studies in TEFL or, as I was often forced to remind people, Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
Elnaz would have handled the mouse situation in a heartbeat. If she were in Boston witnessing my trepidation, she probably would have said what she always said to me with good-natured humor in times like this: “You’re such a prince.” She had an innate resourcefulness that went beyond practicality; it was as if she thrived in spite of life’s upheavals, which was one of the reasons I had fallen in love with her. When we were getting married, she handled our wedding despite the chaos of planning and the interference of our families. She kept everything together and did so with an unfading smile.
The morning after the wedding party, we had sat in our apartment, surrounded by leftover kebabs and lavish bouquets, laughing hysterically like two starry-eyed romantics. I had wrapped my arms around her, feeling like the luckiest man in the world. When I left Tehran for Boston, I told her I was doing this for both of us. She wanted to go with me, but the visa stipulated that I couldn’t bring any family and that I was obligated to return to Iran after the completion of my fellowship.
I called Elnaz. The phone screen stuttered, distorting her features into a pixelated picture because of the choppy connection. Elnaz’s dark curls framed her careworn face—the same face I had studied alongside back in Iran when we were once classmates.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “You look tired. How’s Boston?”
I glanced around the apartment: the bare walls, the insistent hiss of the fridge, the mouse probably hiding somewhere. I couldn’t tell Elnaz how adrift I was feeling, how the city of Boston had already begun to fluster me.
“It’s…okay,” I finally said. “What time is it right now?”
“It’s 7:40 pm,” said Elnaz. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But what?”
“There was a mouse in the apartment this morning.”
“Moosh?” she said, her eyes widening in surprise.
“Yes,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck.
“That’s insane. Why would they have mice in their apartments there?”
“Apparently, it’s very common here, probably so common that Mohsen forgot to mention a thing,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s just a mouse,” she said, laughing softly.
Her voice alone reminded me of home. For a moment, I saw myself back in our spacious, two-bedroom apartment, sitting at the kitchen table as she made dinner. I could almost smell the saffron and turmeric in her cooking. But the moment passed quickly, and the transoceanic flight that separated us brought me back to reality. While I was in Boston, worrying about the mouse situation, Elnaz was in Tehran, caring for our daughter, a responsibility neither of us had expected so soon.
We hadn’t even been trying when the baby was conceived. It had come as a surprise, especially after a messy miscarriage two years prior. Elnaz was devastated. I was, too, but I never talked about it much. When we found out about the second pregnancy, there was no celebration. Instead, there was only cautious optimism, as if we didn’t want to jinx the whole thing by feeling overjoyed. But our daughter made it this time, born on the night of the winter’s solstice.
“How’s Yalda?” I asked.
“She’s at my mom’s,” said Elnaz. “She’s okay. Don’t worry about her.”
“What’s the situation like in Tehran?”
“I think there’ll be more protests later today,” Elnaz said, her voice breaking up.
“Please be very careful,” I said, steadying my voice.
“I will. I’ve got to go now and pick up Yalda,” said Elnaz. “Don’t let the mouse win.”
My apartment was on the first floor of a three-story walk-up on Charles Street. The building was old, very old—according to Mohsen, more than 100 years old. He had lived there for a couple of years, and when he received a too-good-to-be-true job offer from Silicon Valley, he’d agreed to take it and sublet the place to me for a few months.
I sat down, trying to focus on preparing an outline for my first workshop, but the image of the mouse kept eating away at me. I felt pathetic for being so scared of a mouse. It was like the little creature had become a specter inside the apartment. Every rustle, every creak of the floorboards, felt as if the mouse was watching me from some nook or cranny, mocking me for my inability to act. I wanted to make myself some French press coffee, but I didn’t dare touch a thing in the kitchen. What if, I began to think to myself, the mouse had touched all the dishes and silverware? Finally, I decided to go out and get some fresh air.
Walking down the street, I felt vaguely disoriented by the serenity of my surroundings. In Tehran, the mornings were filled with the sounds of honking cars, the chatter of people heading to work, and the bustle of street vendors setting up their stalls. Here, the quiet was too perfect, almost maddening—the kind of quiet where, unlike the topsy-turvy situation in Iran, two plus two invariably equaled four. While walking, the sound of protest videos from Tehran echoed in my head—the crowds, the tear gas, the turmoil. I had lain awake the night before, watching citizen-documented footage on my phone. In one of them, a young woman had been cornered by plainclothes agents in a narrow cul-de-sac, and the batons landed on her head and torso with surgical precision. In the background, from behind the window where the video was being recorded, a faint voice kept whispering, let her go scumbags—let her go, the plea drowned out by the woman’s blood-curdling screams.
As I passed by a café just before the intersection’s traffic light, the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans pulled me in. The walls inside were lined with ebony bookshelves populated by second-hand novels. A vintage clock ticked softly above the counter, where baristas moved swiftly, their deft hands working masterfully in the art of crafting lattes and cappuccinos. The place reminded me of countless San Francisco-esque coffeeshops in Tehran, the so-called “Third Wave Coffee” as it were. I studied the menu and eventually settled for an Americano. I don’t know why I felt so rushed to place my order, as if any level of dilly-dallying would enrage those standing behind me in line.
While waiting for my coffee, I sent Elnaz a text on WhatsApp to see if she was doing okay. Ever since the start of the protests in Tehran a few days before I had left the country, I couldn’t help feeling worried sick whenever she went out, even if only for a few minutes, even if she left the house just to buy some groceries from the market a stone’s throw from where we lived. Ekbatan, the neighborhood nearby, had become synonymous with danger ever since the first day of protests. I had seen videos of the clashes there, the government’s heavy-handed tactics, the sound grenades that rattled the buildings.
“Americano for—,” the barista shouted out, hesitant to say my name. “Americano for here.”
“That’s for me?” I asked with reservation.
“I think so,” said the young barista. “No one else is claiming it.”
I approached the back of the café to take my coffee upstairs, all the while keeping my eyes on the cup to avoid any spilling. When I looked up momentarily, a white woman, perhaps in her sixties, was standing in my way, her hand tightly gripping the banister. She was petite, with deep lines etched on her face, particularly around the mouth, which was set in a cranky, disapproving line. Her blue eyes regarded me with hostility, giving my dark complexion a quick once-over.
“Well,” she enunciated with sarcasm. “Say excuse me and go ahead.”
I froze, not knowing how to react. Back in Tehran, gestures and eye contact always sufficed. People moved out of the way with little need for words, and they did so quite apologetically. But here in Boston, a gesture or eye contact didn’t seem to cut it. I would have loved to tell the woman to “fuck off,” or better yet, tell her that I came from the Middle East—or perhaps even add a touch of drama to the exchange by yelling at her, like I’d seen in American TV series many a time, if you think I’d be intimidated by the likes of you, you’ve got another thing coming. Instead, I watched her stay right where she was without moving her arm away from the banister; eventually, she gestured to me with a passive-aggressive movement of her hand that I was allowed to go now. “You can only claim to have mastered English,” Mohsen had told me, “if you can come up with a good retort against angry white folks.”
I climbed the stairs as fast as I could, the woman’s unsparing glare clinging to me like a bad smell. I tried to shake it off, but the anger and embarrassment dug in deeper with every step. I could still feel her eyes on me, like she was daring me to say or do something wrong, to prove I didn’t deserve to be where I was. At the top of the stairs, I hesitated, scanning for an empty table. My body felt hot, my skin prickling. Why hadn’t I said anything? Why had I let her look at me like that and get away with it? I hated how my silence made me feel small, like I’d given her power over me. The words I wanted to say came too late, tumbling around uselessly in my head now.
When I finally sat down, my hands were still shaking. I set the cup down, spilling a little on the table, and wiped it up quickly with a napkin. I focused on taking slow sips of the coffee, hoping it would calm me down, but it didn’t help. My mind kept replaying the moment, trying to rewrite it. I hated that she’d gotten to me, that her expression of displeasure had wormed its way under my skin. To distract myself, I began skimming through a journal article on language acquisition on my phone. All along, my thoughts oscillated between the mouse and Elnaz. The mouse was manageable—at least, that’s what I kept telling myself. But Elnaz, her well-being, and Yalda’s, were niggling at the back of my mind. I felt out of my depth and questioned my decision to have come to the US in the first place.
My phone vibrated, and a CNN notification popped up on the screen: “BREAKING: Protests Turn Deadly in Tehran, Multiple Arrests Reported.” I tapped on the notification. The article hadn’t been updated yet—just a placeholder line: This news is developing. Below it, a few familiar images appeared from past protests: smoke rising between buildings, a woman clutching a scarf over her mouth, young men sprinting past burning trash bins, their faces pixelated. I had seen many of these photos before, maybe last year, or maybe even back in 2009.
I glanced at the teaching materials on my phone, trying to center myself. But then I imagined Elnaz getting caught in the protests. A tear gas canister could land nearby, or a baton could swing at the wrong moment. The streets would be filled with armed security forces who didn’t think twice before shooting people. All of this was happening, and I wasn’t there. And even if I was, I thought, I couldn’t do anything about it.
I checked my WhatsApp again, hoping that the message check marks had gone from gray to green. I dialed Elnaz’s number, then my mother-in-law’s. Each time, the call wouldn’t go through. I tried again, but the result was the same—a hollow beep and the call dropping before it even began. I tried one last time, the screen flashing “Call Failed.” I set the phone down on the table but kept it within arm’s reach, my fingers twitching every few minutes to wake the screen, hoping for a message from Elnaz for her name to appear. It never did. The rest of my coffee sat untouched, its heat long dissipated. I felt like I was protesting the situation by staying put at the café. I told myself I wouldn’t leave until I heard back from Elnaz.
The café’s main floor got busier at noon as more patrons walked in, their conversations blending into a dissonant din. I felt alienated from it all, like watching them through the glass. They were moving forward while my mind kept traveling back to Tehran with Elnaz and our daughter. Every time the phone buzzed in my hand I scrambled to check it. But there was nothing from Elnaz, just another news alert: “BREAKING: Protests Escalate in Tehran, Internet Disruptions Reported.” I quickly scanned the article, but there were no specific details. I opened my Telegram and checked out a few news channels there, hoping to find out more. Still, there was nothing to find.
I sent Elnaz another message: Please text me as soon as you see this. I’m dying here, not knowing how you are.
Every sound in the café—the scraping of chairs, the soft chatter of other customers, the whirr of the espresso machine—began to get on my nerves. What am I doing here, I thought to myself, while my wife and daughter are back in Iran? My foot tapped nervously against the floor as I looked down at my phone again, wishing for it to light up with some sign from Elnaz. What if the internet had been cut off completely, and she was okay but couldn’t respond? Or worse, what if she wasn’t okay, and I would never know what had happened to her? What if she was caught in the middle of something she couldn’t get out of? Elnaz always told me I should stop catastrophizing things, but I couldn’t stop the onslaught of pernicious thoughts.
Suddenly, I began to hear some muffled noise slithering its way into the café from the outside. The upstairs seating area had no windows, and I couldn’t quite locate where exactly the noise was coming from. I finished my coffee and rushed out. The sign across the street read Boston Common, but it might as well have said You don’t belong here. Mohsen had told me everything about the place: the famous Good Will Hunting chair where Robin Williams had delivered his all-time classic lines, the white swans, the variegated trees. He had even told me about the statues of the ducklings and how they had, once upon a time, made local news headlines because one of them had somehow been stolen.
I arrived at the park and kept walking in the direction of the noise. At first, it was just a low, pulsing sound—like a heartbeat stretched across the open space. Voices layered over one another, hard to separate from the wind rustling the trees. The rhythm drew me in, steady and insistent. As I got closer, the words started to take shape, syllables pressing through the air with urgency. Zan, Zendegi, Azaadi, the voices called out in unison—Woman, Life, Freedom.
Hundreds of people held signs aloft, their slogans written in both English and Persian. Banners fluttered in the September breeze, one of them hand-painted, bearing a photo of Mahsa Amini lying unconscious on a hospital bed, surrounded by a grid of tubes and wires, her face swollen and bruised. A woman held a sign that read, For My Sister.
A few uniformed officers stood at the park’s perimeter, arms crossed or hands resting near their belts, watching but not intervening. They kept a measured distance, letting the protest unfold as long as it stayed peaceful. Every now and then, one of them murmured into a radio.
The steady clapping of hands and chanting voices produced a rhythm that echoed through the park. Young boys and girls shouted slogans, their fists punching the air as they added their voices to the collective roar: Death to the Dictator—From Khuzestan to Kurdistan/I’d Give My Life for Iran—Justice, Freedom, Humane Governance.
A group of young women stood on a makeshift stage in the center of the gathering. One of them stepped forward with a pair of scissors. She grasped a lock of her hair and cut it off, letting the strands fall to the stage. A couple of women in the group followed her lead, lifting scissors to sever their own locks. Right away, a fierce wave of cheers from the crowd followed.
I edged closer to the heart of the crowd. My eyes surveyed everything—signs, faces, and fists consolidating in determined defiance. In the midst of it all, I spotted a man dressed in a black hoodie and a nondescript mask. While others chanted and waved their banners, he held his phone close to his chest, the screen angled upward in a way that betrayed his pretense of nonchalance. I weaved through the crowd to get a glimpse of the screen over his shoulder and found the Telegram app being open, with images and videos uploaded to a contact. He works for the government, I told myself.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, the words leaving my mouth before I could stop them. Something inside me snapped. It wasn’t bravery, exactly, but something closer to insanity. How many times had I stayed silent when I should have spoken? How many times had I chosen safety over action? If I were to vent my pent-up frustration and anger, this was the perfect time to do it.
The man flinched but didn’t turn to face me. Instead, he lowered his phone slightly. For a moment, I thought he might ignore me altogether. Then, slowly, he turned his head just enough for his masked face to meet my gaze.
“Who? Me?” he said.
“Baleh, you. What are you doing?”
“I’m just filming,” he mumbled.
“Filming for who?” I shot back.
The man took a small step back, clutching his phone tighter to his chest.
“For myself. It’s for—”
“It’s for who?” I interrupted. My voice rose, drawing more attention from others in the crowd.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered, his free hand trembling slightly as he tried to shove the phone into his pocket. But I wasn’t letting this go.
“How come no one else is filming?” I said.
He looked away, pretending not to hear me.
“Show me your phone,” I demanded. “If you’re not lying, show me.”
His eyes bounced around, looking for an escape route. The crowd, now alerted to the altercation, began to close in, a circle forming around us. Murmurs rippled through the group, and everyone’s curiosity turned to suspicion.
“He’s with the government,” someone said.
The masked man’s head snapped toward the voice, panic flashing in his eyes.
“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m the same as you.”
“Show us your phone then,” I responded.
“Why?”
“Show the phone,” I said. “Show us the damn phone.”
I lunged forward, my hand grasping for the man’s mask. He twisted away, but I caught the edge of the fabric and yanked. It didn’t come off completely, but it slipped enough to reveal the corner of his jaw, slick with sweat. He immediately tried to pull the mask back into place. He tried to turn away from me but was stuck.
“Stop,” he shouted, his voice cracking.
“Spy,” someone shouted from the crowd.
The man held up his free hand, palm out. “No, no, you don’t understand—”
I felt hands grasping and pushing as the pandemonium found its way into the entire crowd. The space became a whirl of shoving and cacophony. “Don’t let him get away,” someone shouted. My mind reached back to the screams from the video I had watched the night before, the wailing of batons, and the whisper of velesh kon echoing in the background. I thought of Elnaz and Yalda—the potential danger they faced back home—and I felt a strong rage creeping up within me. My pulse thudded in my ears as I felt the bodies around me unified. The masked man stumbled, half-turning to flee, but my foot lashed out instinctively, connecting with his leg.
He lost his balance, his phone slipping from his grip and hitting the ground. He struggled to get back on his feet as the protestors closed in even further. My hands trembled with fear but also with an ineffable exhilaration, a rush of excitement I had never felt before. I was caught in the wave, my own anger driving me forward even as a part of me screamed to stop and consider the consequences.
Someone shoved the masked man hard, and he fell to the ground, curling into himself as the protesters closed in around him. He writhed, but the protestors held him in place, a wall of bodies standing over him. I stood at the center of it all, adrenaline still coursing through my veins. The officers who had been watching from the perimeter began to move, slowly at first, then with purpose. A few protesters noticed and started backing away.
A voice crackled through one of their radios, as the chants wavered a notch.
“Step back. Step back, now,” an officer called, his voice sharp, practiced.
A few protesters near me started stepping back reluctantly, parting just enough to let the officers reach the man crumpled on the ground. I felt the press of the crowd behind me loosen, but my feet were rooted in place. My eyes stayed locked on the masked man, his chest rising and falling in shallow, frantic breaths. Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth, pooling in the dirt beneath his cheek.
“Everybody, back up.” one of the officers shouted. “This is your last warning.”
Behind him, the masked man began to stir, groaning as the officer tried to lift him to his feet. The man’s mask had been torn away completely now, leaving his sweat-beaded face exposed. His lips moved, but whatever he was trying to say was swallowed by the chants and murmurs around us.
“Officer,” someone in the crowd shouted. “You’re letting him go? What about his phone? Check it—he’s been filming us.”
“It’ll be reviewed,” the office replied. “For now, just back up.”
“He could be working for the regime,” another voice yelled. “You don’t understand.”
“We’ll investigate,” one of the officers said, “but right now, everyone needs to back up.”
The masked man sagged against the officer holding him upright, his legs barely supporting his weight. Blood trickled from his nose, staining the front of his hoodie. His eyes avoided the faces around him, and for a moment, they landed on me.
“I need you to step back,” the officer said again.
I obeyed, my feet moving without thought, retreating to the edge of the dispersing crowd. The officers maneuvered the masked man toward a police car.
The sky was slate-gray, and the streets glistened with a sheen of moisture from the drizzle that had started as I walked back from Boston Common. When I finally went into the apartment in the afternoon, the creak of my steps made me think of the mouse again. I inspected the cabinet under the sink, crouched down, and opened the door. I knew my fear had nothing to do with the mouse itself but what it represented in my mind: the small things I couldn’t control and the gnawing sense that I didn’t belong.
The quiet inside the apartment was jarring. I dropped my backpack on the couch and kicked off my shoes, thinking of how the day had spiraled—from the unsettling mouse encounter in the morning to the protest at the Common. My emotions were a tangled mess of guilt, anger, and helplessness. I had acted on instinct at the protest, and now I couldn’t stop replaying the confrontation with the masked man in my head.
I checked my phone again, but there were no messages from Elnaz, nor were there any further updates on the protests. While seated on the edge of my bed, I went over what had happened earlier. My mind wandered to Tehran, and I checked my phone again. I lay down and stared at the ceiling, remembering Elnaz and our last night together before I had left for Boston. We had stayed up late, sitting on the balcony of our apartment, watching the city lights in the distance. She had rested her head on my shoulder, and we didn’t talk much. That night, I had promised her that this was just the beginning and that everything would be better when I returned.
I scrolled through the photos of our life together: Elnaz smiling at the camera, the two of us at my parents’ house, and our friends gathering around the table for one of our Friday night dinners. I looked at the images, trying to hold onto the feeling of home. I sent Elnaz a message: I miss you.
Minutes later, she replied: I miss you too. Everything’s okay? The internet wasn’t working here for a few hours. I just saw all your messages now.
I made a video-call right away.
After the call connected, Elnaz’s face appeared on my screen, blurry from the weak connection. Still, I could see the indefatigable spirit in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Did you pick up Yalda from your mom’s? I was so worried because I saw the news.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Elnaz said. “Nothing will ever happen to me. Tell me about your day.”
I exhaled, rubbing my face. “I went to a protest today here.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “An Iran protest?”
“Yeah. A big one. Hundreds of people chanting ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.’ It felt like being back home for a minute.”
She nodded, waiting. “And?”
“There was this guy in a hoodie,” I said, leaning forward. “He was filming, but something about it felt off. He wasn’t like the others.”
Elnaz frowned. “You think he was one of them?”
“I knew it. You should have seen him—he was trying too hard to blend in, but I could tell. I confronted him, Elnaz.”
“What happened then?”
“I called him out, and then the crowd noticed. It was like they were waiting for someone to act. People surrounded him, and he tried to run but couldn’t.” I leaned back, gloating. “I didn’t let him get away—I mean we didn’t let him get away.”
Elnaz let out a breath. “And then?”
“He was bleeding, and the cops dragged him away. But I did something, Elnaz. I didn’t just stand by. I made sure he couldn’t get away.” I sounded like a child, bragging to his mom.
She studied me for a moment. “Thank God nothing happened to you.”
“I’m just glad that for once, I wasn’t a mere bystander.”
“Okay, but please be more careful,” Elnaz said. “Promise me that you will.”
“I promise,” I said.
Elnaz glanced at something off-screen. “Yalda’s stirring. I should go check on her.”
“I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you too. Try to get some rest, okay?”
I lay back on the couch, trying to get some rest. Tomorrow, I told myself—tomorrow, I will figure it all out; tomorrow, I will take care of the mouse; tomorrow, I will try harder to blend in with the Bostonians.
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose short stories, essays, and works of translation have appeared in Ploughshares, The Margins, Massachusetts Review, and New England Review, among many other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. His writing has received support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center.