Category Archives: Great Stories Online

Said Sayrafiezadeh: “Forbidden Fruit”


In this excerpt from his forthcoming memoir about growing up Communist in America, Iranian-American essayist Said Sayrafiezadeh turns a childhood memory of his mother’s grape boycott into a darkly comic, profound meditation on how desire is whetted by prohibition:


In 1973, when I was four years old, César Chávez, president and co-founder of the United Farm Workers, called for a national boycott of iceberg lettuce and table grapes. The Socialist Workers Party, which my mother was a member of, honored the boycott immediately. Under no circumstances, my mother informed me, were iceberg lettuce and grapes permitted in our household any longer….

Even though my mother never once relinquished and allowed grapes to cross the threshold of our apartment, they became a constant, unyielding presence in my life, following me like a shadow. There were political posters about not eating grapes, fliers about not eating grapes, T-shirts about not eating grapes, conversations about not eating grapes. There is a very real possibility that I did not even know what the fruit was until the very moment that it became unavailable to me. I existed in a state of infinite longing that intertwined so tightly with my desire that it was impossible to distinguish one feeling from the other and which set a terrible precedent for me. I was acutely aware that there was something out there in the world that still existed—that was still being enjoyed by other people, even—and that had once belonged to me, but was now forever out of my reach. Desire = longing. All of this culminated in the horrific button my mother made me pin to my jacket, which featured the logo of the United Farm Workers—a stark black eagle with wings spread wide against a blood red background—along with the unequivocal imperative, “Don’t Eat Grapes.” It was not a declaration to the outside world, but a scarlet letter that constantly reminded me of my own sinful desires, which, if I ever managed to quench, would be quenched only through the immiseration of others….

I had become the fox in Aesop’s fable who jumps again and again without success at the dangling bunch of grapes hanging on the branch above him. The rationalization that the fox eventually concocts in order to soothe himself and allay his disappointment is that the grapes themselves are most likely sour and not, in the end, worth his trouble. The conclusion I drew, however, was of a different nature. As the boycott progressed, I began to see what my mother saw: the flaw existed within me. Desire under capitalism—all desire—was a shameful, unwanted condition, and one should never attempt to satisfy their desire, but instead, through heightened consciousness of the world, transcend it, and by so doing rid themselves of it forever.

Read the whole essay on the New York Foundation for the Arts website.

Visit Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s website here.

Erin McKnight: “Absolution”


Erin McKnight, assistant editor at the literary e-zine The Rose & Thorn, has a beautiful essay in their Spring 2007 issue about her coal-mining ancestors:


I have greedy eyes. They scan photographs hungrily, brown irises flaring while trying to determine whether an unusual color or angle is new. When they realize that what they have found is something they’ve seen before, something that belongs in the picture, they drop back into shallow pools. These eyes don’t look; these eyes search.

When they move across the photo taken on the day of my Christening, they hunt for what they can’t see. They register the flush of youth on my parents’ cheeks, the creased gown shrouding my new body, and the cake with buttery layers promising to announce my entry into the world, but they aren’t finding what matters. Tucked into corners, and folded behind furniture are people in shadow. I suppose it doesn’t matter that I can’t see their faces, because I wouldn’t recognize them if I could. I like to imagine there would be a fuzzy sense of familiarity, but I know better than to believe we’d look alike. For the visitors in this photo all that matters is their sense of purpose, which I know is to claim me.

On this day, they pressed a stain of black into the soft skin on my forehead. I know it now to be an ‘x,’ because there’s nothing else this mark can be. It reminds me of the greasy cross I received each year as a child on Ash Wednesday. This sign transformed me for the duration of its wear and even now, privilege and responsibility smell to me like heavy incense and palm ashes.

The ‘x’ is thick and heavy in its certainty. No delicate lines form my obligation to them. Perhaps the shape lies so deep because its outline was traced numerous times by their dirty fingers. I choose to believe, however, that in death they no longer feared their own hands, and found the confidence to push into my flesh.

They made this ‘x’ with coal––the ink that has stained generations of Scottish bodies––when they smeared their signatures across my head….

Read the whole essay here.

Fiction Online: “Breaking Bottles” by Gary Ferrar

This story from the new online journal New York Review takes a witty yet heartbreaking look at growing older, the search for “authenticity,” and the burden of living up to our literary heroes. This line in particular won me over: “‘Do or die’ is the way that people live these days.  As if extreme emotions are insurance against not really being alive.”