The first time she heard of the Aal was from her grandmother. The story itself wasn’t particularly frightening, but the stench of scorched frankincense and stale opium rasping out of her withered throat with every word gave it a suffocating dread. “The Aal can smell a woman who’s just given birth,” her grandmother would say. “Its arms are long. Its nails are like sickles. It wants fresh liver—the liver of a fetus, or a newborn.” 

Later, when Bita was seven, she secretly watched the film The Twenty-Ninth Night through the crack of the living-room door. Her mother caught her and shouted, “You little pest—snooping again? Didn’t I tell you to stay upstairs?” But the images had already burrowed into her mind. In the film, the Aal wore a chador and prowled along rooftops, pacing the edge of the house like a restless animal. For weeks afterward, dark rooms and shifting shadows on the wall left her pulse thrumming with terror. She wasn’t exactly a coward, but women in chadors unnerved her in a strange way. It felt as though something ravenous and monstrous lurked beneath that endless black shroud. 

The fear eventually turned into a smirk. The Aal was just a ghost story born of women’s desperation for children. For Bita, who wished her womb could remain forever like a desolate catacomb, it was nothing more than ridiculous superstition. 

Until that unwanted, viscous mass took root in her gut.

She still didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe that night she and Mahdi had been too happy, too careless. But even that seemed unlikely. She had always been careful. It was as if the embryo had found its own way in, determined to crucify her from the inside. Simin had said, “Your wedding’s almost here anyway. Who sits around counting the days? God’s will. It’d be a sin otherwise.” But Bita had long since begun to doubt God’s existence, let alone His will. The timing of the wedding wasn’t the problem. More than once she had come close to going to those dim, basement clinics, swallowing pills with names like misoprostol. But fear stopped her. The thought of her water breaking, of septic hemorrhaging, of dying on some unlicensed midwife’s rusted table paralyzed her just as much as the thought of motherhood. She still loved life.

She remembered the night of her engagement—the night meant to be her life’s most memorable. Yet beneath the navy dress and the heavy makeup that aged her, a strange cold had seeped deep into her bones. She loved Mahdi. She knew that much. But as the music grew louder and ululations rose higher, doubt settled deeper inside her chest. What if, a few years later, they became like thousands of other couples—living beside each other out of habit? Having a child simply to drown the suffocating silence of the house with its crying? Grinding their teeth through the years, playing happy family just to stifle the gossip of others?

She had rejected that nightmare from the very beginning. With every fiber of her being, she knew she would never make a good mother. The thought horrified her: that you could spit a piece of flesh from your own body, cast it into the world, and sooner or later, lose all control over what it might become. The question bored into her mind like a drill. When the parents of serial killers, rapists, or bloodthirsty dictators first held their babies—what had they felt? Had they known what kind of parasite they were raising? What selfish right did anyone have to drag a being into the world without even asking whether it wanted to exist?

And now, a parasite was rooting itself inside her.

Had she stayed in her hometown, and her father caught even a whiff of the truth, he would have spilled her blood on the courtyard stones by now. Moving to this distant city for university and living with Simin had been her escape, but now, something was growing inside her. Slowly. Inevitably. A secret that could no longer be kept. Mahdi promised to protect her, whispering that they would find a way together, but what did he truly understand? Lately, he had changed; Bita imagined that the moment he realized she might actually keep it, he would vanish without a backward glance.

At night, sleep eluded her. She said nothing of the madness gnawing at her mind. When Mahdi asked, she made excuses—said her migraines had returned. In the darkness, she stared at the shadows pooling in the corners of the ceiling and wished her grandmother had been telling the truth. She wished the Aal were real.

***

Getting to Gharqirab was like climbing the spine of a long, shattered rock. The stones along the path were slippery, and the mountain air carried the sour stench of manure and wet earth. Simin walked ahead like someone who knew the trail by heart, huffing and muttering about the biting cold. But Bita barely felt it at all. The thing inside her belly burned like a furnace of flesh.

It took nearly an hour to reach the top. Robabeh’s shack looked nothing like the fortune-tellers’ dens she had imagined. There were no strings of charms hanging from the walls, no smell of incense or medicinal herbs. Instead, the place reeked of rust, clotted blood, and damp chicken feathers. The walls were mud and straw, the ceiling hanging so low they had to hunch to stand inside. Robabeh was old, but there was nothing frail about her. Her thick, heavy body was hidden beneath layers of gray, grimy clothing, and her eyes, two dull pieces of glass.

Simin fell strangely silent. Robabeh gave her a small nod, but her gaze latched onto Bita’s belly. Her voice scraped like pumice dragged across tile. “You smell like rotten fear, girl. But not the fear of shame. You’re afraid that once that lump of meat falls into your arms… you won’t have the stomach to choke the life out of it.”

Bita flinched, but she didn’t step back. Her mouth had gone dry. “I need a way,” she said quietly. “I want the Aal to come for me. I want this damn thing out of me.”

Robabeh snorted. The flesh in her cheeks quivered. 

“The Aal? You think it’s your trained mutt, that you whistle and it comes running? The Aal eats liver first. When it comes for you, it might not settle for the child. It might suck the jelly out of your eyes, too.”

“I’ve thought it through. There is no other way.”

Her voice was so cold, so empty of life, that the heavy woman paused. For a moment, it seemed she recognized something inside the girl. Robabeh stepped forward, reeking of sweat and dirt. Without warning, she reached between her sagging breasts and drew a dull, black-handled knife, slick with the warmth of her skin. Before Simin could scream—before Bita could jerk away—Robabeh seized the hair at the nape of Bita’s neck, the dull blade sawing brutally through the fistful. Strands tore out from the root. Pain flared across her scalp.

The old woman rummaged through a worn satchel, pulled out a shriveled black lump of flesh, and tied Bita’s hair tightly around it. “Iron wards off the Aal, so don’t you forget it,” she muttered, shoving the charm into Bita’s hand. “Take this. Keep it under your pillow tonight. Your hair carries the smell of your blood. And this here… is the navel of a dead dog. It clears the path for it.” Robabeh leaned closer, lowering her voice to a coarse whisper. “The Aal comes through water. Anywhere blood can find a way—wells, gutters, pipes. It’s all doors to it.”

When they stepped out of the shack, the sky had opened up. Mountain rain was nothing like city rain. The drops were thick and heavy, almost sticky, as though the sky were spitting on them. Mud sucked at their ankles. They walked without speaking, except for Simin muttering some half-formed prayer under her breath as she hurried along the path.

Bita remembered the days they used to run through the rain between the university buildings and the bus stop, laughing breathlessly. How happy they were, how carefree. Even back then, Simin had been obsessed with charms and fortune-telling—coffee grounds, tarot cards, anything mystical. She had been desperate for her ex-boyfriend to come back to her. What was his name again? Behrouz? Or maybe Behnam? That day, Bita held her tight and scoffed, “To hell with him. Let him go. It’s not the end of the world.” But a few weeks later, Simin announced he was back, their relationship suddenly, inexplicably perfect. Bita had only shrugged then, preferring not to ask what twisted rituals Simin had resorted to. She never imagined her own desperation would one day run that deep, driving her up a mountain to buy a curse.

Fog thickened around the rocks. They hadn’t gone far from the shack when Bita felt the impact. A stone flew from the darkness and struck the back of her calf. A sharp ache bit down to the bone. She stopped and turned. Beyond the shack, deep inside the shifting fog, something moved. She couldn’t see it clearly, only a shape crawling low to the ground, pulling itself forward on long, jointed arms. Bita grabbed Simin’s arm and pointed. Simin turned, squinting into the mist. She saw nothing. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Simin snapped. “Don’t start scaring me.”

They hurried toward the car. But beneath the howl of the wind and the hiss of the rain, Bita kept hearing it. A faint scraping—long nails dragging slowly across wet stone.

***

She had grown ravenous. No matter how much she ate, the hunger never quite faded. At work, she slipped into the company kitchen and ate pickles straight from the jar, bought armfuls of cheap snacks from corner stores, and devoured them without thinking. One of her coworkers laughed and asked, “What’s going on with you? You used to struggle to finish a single meal.”

Since the night they returned from Robabeh’s shack, sleep had become a fevered battleground.

The dreams began. In the first, she held a newborn against her chest. But the child had no face—only a smooth slab of flesh, blank as a peeled egg. A gaping gash had opened across Bita’s own stomach, its raw edges rimmed with rows of tiny milk teeth. The baby pushed its head into the wound and began sucking, tugging insatiably at her organs. Bita tried to pull away, but the baby’s hands were wrong. Not human. They were a goat’s cloven hooves, tipped with sickle-shaped claws that raked between her ribs, searching for her liver.

The next night, she sat at her wedding spread. The veil draped over her face wasn’t cloth, but a wet, sticky membrane—a translucent amniotic sac that reeked of putrid meat. Across from her sat her father and Mahdi. They were eating. Bita looked down. Her belly had been ripped open. Her womb and coils of intestine lay across the table, and the two men were stuffing fistfuls of raw flesh into bread, chewing greedily. Mahdi smiled at her through teeth stained black with blood. “See?” he said softly. “I told you I’d take care of you. We’ll solve it together.”

But the worst dream came on the third night. She stood in the grimy, shared bathroom of their apartment. From the showerhead poured a thick, tarry stream of hot sludge, splashing over her hair and shoulders. She looked down. The skin of her belly had turned thin and glassy. There was no fetus inside. Instead, the head of a woman floated there—hair matted with blood, mouth opening and closing in frantic gasps. The woman’s skull slammed again and again against Bita’s navel. “Let me out,” the voice rasped. “I’m suffocating.”

Bita woke with a violent gasp. The room was the same. The dim streetlight still spilled through the window. Her sheets were soaked with sweat, and a knot of pain writhed deep in her belly like a living snake.

***

It was the sixth or seventh night. She had spent the evening talking to Mahdi on the phone, saying nothing about her visit to the old woman. Past three in the morning, Bita lay awake, staring at the bathroom door. Every night she waited for a woman like the one from her grandmother’s stories—or at least like the figure from that childhood horror film.

But nothing came.

Then, she heard it. A sound from inside the bathroom. A whispering, scraping sound.

Simin had finally fallen asleep, and Bita didn’t want to wake her. Besides, no one could know about this strange, mad ritual. She threw off the sheets, her fist closing tightly around the rotting charm she had hidden under her pillow. Her legs wouldn’t carry her. On all fours, like a wounded animal, she crawled across the icy ceramic toward the bathroom.

She closed the door behind her and locked it. She didn’t turn on the light; darkness felt safer. The floor was still wet. She sat there, hugging her knees next to the metal drain cover, waiting. Soon, she felt it—a warm, viscous liquid oozing from between her legs onto the floor.

It was over. Robabeh’s charm had taken hold. The dog’s navel and the tangled hair had done their work. The fleshy mass would leave her body forever. A faint, brittle smile settled across her cracked lips.

Then came a muffled, gurgling sound. From below. From the darkness of the drain.

A scraping, like long nails dragged across metal. The wet, rhythmic squelch of something heavy pulling itself up through the narrow drainpipes. Bita held her breath. The Aal had come. It wanted liver. She crawled backward until her spine hit the cold tiles of the wall. She opened her mouth to say, “Come… take it!”

But in that instant, something moved inside her.

Not in her belly. Higher.

The slimy, barbed mass had changed direction. Instead of leaving, it was moving upward. Bita froze. She felt tiny, centipede-like legs clawing at the soft tissue of her stomach, forcing their way up. The alien creature was shredding through her ribs from the inside, clearing a path. The mass surged toward her chest. Her heart pounded relentlessly. It climbed higher, reaching her throat.

Her airway closed. Bita opened her mouth as wide as she could, but no air entered her lungs. It was tearing her esophagus apart, forcing its way up to her mouth.

TAP… TAP…

A pounding at the bathroom door.

But Bita can no longer respond. Her eyes bulge from their sockets. Something is pushing from inside her throat. She claws at her own neck with both hands, her nails sinking deep into the soft flesh. She has to choke it. She has to kill it before the monster tears her mouth open from within, even if it means ripping through her own jugular.

She is thrown back to being ten years old. The afternoon stretches endlessly in her grandfather’s courtyard. Her cousin has turned on the garden hose, and she runs through the water in her floral cotton dress. The wet fabric clings to her small, thin body. There are no parasites writhing inside her. Her body is hers alone—light, hollow, free. She laughs, and the summer wind twists through her soaked hair.