A Wound in the Heart S. Rouzbeh ۱۲ خرداد ۱۴۰۵ After their son's death, a mother and father carry on with the smallest rituals of daily life, each one revealing an absence that time cannot heal. ‘A Wound in the Heart’ S. Rouzbeh When they heard the news, neither of them cried. His mother stood in the doorway. Her eyes stayed on the handle: the very place where, every evening, a turn would bring the sound of her son's footsteps into the house. His father slowly sat down on the sofa. He clasped his rough fingers together and stared at his palms, the palms that had once held a little boy's fingers as he took his first steps. Days passed. People came, offered their condolences, and left. But the wound remained. Every morning, his mother took three cups from the shelf, poured the tea, then paused over the tray. Steam rose from the third cup, and without a sound she put it back. At every ring of the telephone, his father would suddenly lift his head. For a few seconds he held the receiver, as though a miracle might be hidden between that brief sound and the silence that followed. The nights were hardest of all. The house fell silent, but the light in their son's room stayed on late into the night. His mother would take his photograph in her hands and trace his frozen smile with a fingertip. Sometimes her hand rested on the glass, longer than it needed to. In the dark, his father stared at the ceiling. Every few minutes he drew a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut, as though trying to drive something from his mind, and failing. Years pass, but some sorrows do not grow old. The death of a child does more than take one life; it carries away a part of the parents' souls as well. They remain alive. They walk, breathe, and smile. Yet in a corner of their souls, a wound stays open: a wound that time cannot heal, that forgetting cannot soothe. No smile can fill the space left by a heartbeat that has vanished from their lives for ever. Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/archive-630fd874-53e0-6c9c-0c1c-a246a9cf7a7d Please credit the author and link to this edition.