Ghost town

By: Evan Sahraeian

Memories can be influenced by your surrounding stories for that I will not be writing about the first two houses, I don�t quite remember the whole story of them just some vague pictures. Our journey starts from the third house that I can recall perfectly I was about 5 years old because I know that fall I went to first grade and here in my country children of age 6 will start their first year in school. Anyway, this new place was about one hour and a half drive from where I was born, of course now is legally its city on the map.

This place once was the home of great writers and poets but exactly five years before we moved there as in the same year I was born it had one of the biggest tragedies in the world, in one day 5000 people were killed and 7000 were injured in that horrific massacre by a chemical weapon attack. When we moved,  there were many abandoned homes not claimed by anyone, so we settled in, in one of those abandoned houses, there was nothing inside, and we did not have that much everything. We owned what we could carry. By this time our family of 8 has become a family of 5. As a child this place was full of joy now that I think about it, it was scary, I am not sure if you as a reader have seen these types of houses but it was very common for poor people back then. They do build the walls with stone or cement blocks but everything else is made and covered with thatch, it was only one room and porch, with the whole neighborhood as our yard, there was a well in front of the house but the scary part about it was the mouth of well which was flat with the ground. One time my mother removed the iron cover that was on it and all the children started to gather around it she became so scared that someone might fall into it she never opened it again. At night the sky was the best part, there were countless stars in the clear sky. I would fall asleep trying to count all of them which was one of my sister�s tricks to make me stop talking, she would say ��let us see who can count more stars.��  these were the nights that we could sleep.

Nevertheless, some nights we would all stay awake and fight the scorpions since the floor was only covered with solid mud and it was no hardwood floor, there were cracks in the floor and scorpions were coming out of it so my mom would stay up to kill them, it�s amazing as people grow up fear grows up with them, If see a scorpion now I might freeze in my place as a five-year-old I was killing them with no fear, the war with the scorpions lasted until the end of our time in that house.

Although I said there were abandoned houses, yet there were still people living there, who stayed back like farmers and some other people who were as unfortunate as owers, those places were their own but not even once they told us you should leave or that house is not yours, they were the nicest people I have met in my life, always helping each other if they had 2 pieces of bread they would share one with their neighbor. 

All the kids were playing with each other, I don’t even remember one time fighting with another kid. There was spring water nearby which had fish in it, we would catch fishies and take them home they were tiny one so not edible, with my two older siblings we would make a hole in the ground put plastic bags in the whole then we would put water in it and put the fish,  doing that was the happiest moments of my childhood life that would last for a very short time and the fishies were dead, then I was doing the same thing over the very next day. 

Life in that den for a child was full of joy because I still see most of the parts from my childhood eyes not from my mother�s side how scared she must have been just a single mother in an abandoned house in a ghost city with those people who were more heartbroken than her in some sad way it might have been a perfect place for us at that time, You couldn�t find someone who didn�t lose a loved one, or even wore if they were not the only survivor in their family. After few months we left to be closer to the city and the struggle to find a house there begins.