A suspenseful short story that bemoans the loss of a beloved sibling, an overseer who stood guard through all of life’s horrors…
by: Miaad Banki
The night air was a solid, unbreathable thing. Sahel stood at the edge of the roof. She’d hung the laundry ten minutes ago, and now she gazed into the maze of squat houses and narrow alleys. In that forest of concrete and steel, where night wrestled with the yellow glow of street lamps, she saw it. Movement at the far end of the dead-end alley.
From half-open windows came muffled laughter, the murmur of televisions, and the clatter of silverware. Behind thin walls, people were eating, arguing, or drifting off to sleep. Farther away, the streets glimmered with passing cars, life moving in its usual rhythm. But Sahel’s world had narrowed to a single patch of shadow. At first, she thought it was a stray cat or a trash bag nudged by a scavenging rat. Then the darkness shifted. A shape took form in the gloom.
A dwarf.
It barely reached the waist of an adult, yet its shoulders were heavy and its arms disproportionately long.
Sahel’s breath caught. The ridiculous self-help book Roya had forced on her advised blowing on your thumb for anxiety. She blew on it. It didn’t help. Her hands trembled. She wanted to turn away, but fear held her pinned.
The creature moved. Beneath the flickering streetlight, it lifted a thick-haired head. Sahel didn’t think she could see so clearly from three stories up, but the eyes were too bright — two gleaming orbs staring without blinking. The weight of that gaze began to close around her throat when a noise from below startled her. She jerked her head toward the sound. When she looked back, the dwarf was gone.
She leaned against the brick wall of the rooftop shed, heart hammering. Suddenly, Samandoon was there — that horned thing with the frizzy hair and bulging eyes, the gapped teeth bared in a fixed laugh. It had lurked in the damp of a crumbling basement, haunting the nightmares of generations. Why was it ever on? Why scare children at all? Six-year-old Sahel could never sleep, afraid the knee-high monster would crawl out of the closet. Back then, she’d never even go to the bathroom without Sina standing guard right outside the door.
If only Sina were still alive.
It was curious. She could recall every hideous fissure in that latex face, the staged, unblinking malice, yet Sina’s laughter was receding into a fading echo. What had been done to them that these manufactured, pathetic nightmares of childhood proved more resilient than the people they loved? Or maybe people were simply meant to be forgotten.
The open expanse of the roof suddenly felt like a trap. She needed her apartment. She turned the metal handle and stepped into the stairwell. At that exact moment, the mechanical pulse of electric motors died out, the hollow symphony of that summer. Blackout. Again. Almost every day, at random hours, the grid collapsed. Night blackouts were at least a small mercy. It was the August noons that were unbearable, the suffocating heat and the clothes plastered to the skin like a second, sweat-soaked layer.
Darkness fell, absolute and heavy. The city’s murmur dissolved into a heavy hush. Sahel froze. The air in the stairwell felt like a sealed lung. She’d left her phone; there was no light. She gripped the hot railing and stepped forward. One. Two. Three. The silence of a blackout is deceptive. When the machines go quiet, the building begins to speak.
A scrape. A soft knock.
The sound drifted up, sending a shiver through her. Pipes, she told herself, or perhaps the solitary old woman on the first floor. The second floor had been empty, at least for the few months since Sahel had moved in. Then came a dull thud from the landing below. Something soft and heavy dragged across the tiles like a wet sack.
That sodden mass clawed its way up the steps, its weight vibrating through the dark. Sahel’s fingers fumbled in her pocket, closing around her keys — the only fragile comfort she had left. By the time she reached her door, the dragging was on the landing just below. Her mouth tasted of iron and silt. The key scraped uselessly against the metal plate, its shriek announcing her presence. She held her breath and forced the key into the slot, but it wouldn’t turn. It was stuck.
A dry rustle came from the first step of the third floor. It was coming up. Sahel clenched her teeth and twisted the key with everything she had. CRACK. The latch snapped back. She slammed into the room, pushed the door shut, and threw the chain. She collapsed against the wood. Her heart wasn’t racing. It had gone still. Only her breath remained — shallow, wheezing gasps borrowed from a stranger.
The apartment smelled of fried cutlets. Usually, the scent of lingering oil irritated her; now, it smelled like a sanctuary. Her mind drifted to a story: a woman waking in the dark, realizing her breathing was synced with something rasping in the corner. In that story, the creature didn’t scream. It just existed, its poisoned presence devouring the safety of the room. Now, something was on her stairs. How much distance was left?
If only Sina were alive.
When the nightmares preyed on her as a child, he used to sit by her bedroom door. “Who’d dare mess with my little sister?” he’d say, a protective edge to his soft voice. “I’ll break his damn jaw.”
That was before.
The last time he called, the line was a thrum of chaos: distant shouts, the crystalline shatter of glass, and short, jagged breaths hammering against the mouthpiece. “Sahel.” His voice was trembling, though he fought to anchor it. A dry, hacking cough broke his rhythm. “Don’t be scared. It’s nothing. Just the smoke.” The guttural roar of revving motorbikes swelled in the background, vibrating through the receiver. “Are you listening? We went into a dead-end alley. It’s safe. We’re coming soon.”
Sahel couldn’t remember what she’d said in response. She only knew she had let him hang up.
Later, there had been a room that smelled faintly of disinfectant and cold metal. Rows of black plastic lay scattered across the cold tiles — sealed, identical, tagged with numbers. She had walked among them slowly, pulling down zippers one by one in the dark. When she finally found his face, she stood there for a long time.
After that, there was no one left to stand between her and the horrors.
Now, frozen in the dark, she listened to the crushing void of the apartment. The dead didn’t have footsteps. The dragging on the stairs had suddenly stopped. The stillness was somehow worse. She leaned her ear against the wood, waiting for a scratch, a sniff, or anything at all. Only the rhythmic thud of her pulse in her temples remained.
As her eyes adjusted, she reached for her phone on the sofa. The screen was a lighthouse in a black ocean. She found a half-burned candle in a kitchen drawer and struck a match. The flame flickered, sending shadows dancing. She killed the phone light to save the battery.
Holding the candle, she moved to the window. She drew the sheer curtain. The alley was black. She scanned the end. Nothing. Then she looked down.
Under the faint moonlight, she saw it: a shock of tangled red hair.
The humped figure stood below, staring straight up. Its teeth gleamed in the heart of the darkness. A stretched smile sat on a pale face, wrinkled like sun-dried leather, and etched with the staged malice of a cheap prosthetic. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Its matted red hair hung like a knotted clump, and the thick, moth-eaten coat dragged on the ground, swallowing any trace of a human frame. Fingers crooked as if the joints bent backward. With a quick, creeping motion, it lunged toward the building and vanished into the blind spot beneath her window.
Sahel felt her pulse drumming in her throat. She stepped back. A few hollow seconds passed before she forced herself back to the glass, pulling the curtain just a fraction. No one. Had it already slipped back into the building? She knew the front door was bolted, but the thought offered no sanctuary. She retreated to the sofa. The candle tilted in her shaking hand, and a thick stream of hot wax spilled over her knuckles, pooling in the creases of her skin. She didn’t feel the burn.
She called her aunt. No answer. Maybe that was better. Her aunt would only ask about her pills, asking why she was doing this to herself again. She thought of Roya, but didn’t dare call. It was sad how quickly she’d driven everyone away since her brother’s death.
In the stillness, every sound was amplified. A distant car. A neighbor’s window. Then, it came.
A hollow, dry thud — the sharp crack of a stone hitting pavement. It was the echo she had replayed a thousand times in the silence of her mind: her brother’s skull meeting the asphalt that January evening. After the screams and the sting of tear gas, the street had fallen into this same eternal quietude; the cold pavement surrendering to the warmth of dark blood creeping into the grooves of the tiles.
Then another sound came. Not from the hallway, but from the outside wall. Thick, hardened nails scraping against brick and mortar. Scrape. Scrape. Accompanied by the wet, animal suction of breath that rose with every movement. How had this fleshy, heavy thing scaled three floors like a predatory lizard? What did it want?
If only…
A misshapen shadow stretched across the thin curtain. Two elongated hands with twisted, gnarled fingers gripped the concrete ledge. A tuft of frizzy, henna-dyed hair, wet with old grease, rose slowly over the sill. That shriveled, pale face pressed against the glass. The steam of its hot, foul breath clouded the pane. Through its gapped teeth, a wide, unwavering grin appeared.
Only a thin, brittle layer of glass remained between them.
For a moment, she waited for someone to step in front of her, to threaten to break its jaw. But the room behind her was just a dark, hollow shell. Sina wasn’t there. He was only the sound of a stone striking asphalt, echoing forever in the silent house.
She squeezed her eyes shut, praying that when she opened them, the shadow would be gone.
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Miaad Banki is a writer, literary translator, and academic holding a PhD in English Literature. A University Lecturer based in Tehran, his work focuses on visceral and subversive voices and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Short Story Project, Asymptote, Full Stop, Public Books, and Latin American Literature Today. He is the authorized Persian translator for contemporary authors including Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Navarro, and Fernanda Trías. Discover more of his work at miaadbanki.carrd.co/.
