The Incompletes by Mohammad Saleh Sahragard

“I had my other arm back then, but it didn’t help,” the one-armed girl said during the morning meeting. Members were supposed to introduce themselves before speaking. She didn’t. “My previous caregiver used to rape me.” Her voice was stripped of emotion.

She stared at her empty sleeve as if her hand might suddenly grow back to confirm her story. “When I begged him to stop, he said, ‘You’re lucky I’m doing this because it was going to happen anyway.’” 

With her good hand, she traced her fingers along the side seams of her pants. After hearing her, I began to grapple with the fact that none of my caregivers had ever abused me and that I lacked the traits that could be molded to meet their expectations. 

By then, the other members could no longer meet her eyes. They studied each other. I caught a glimpse of Noor. She sat on a plastic chair, her body folded inward, knees and elbows sharp. She wore oversized high heels. Cinnamon-colored hair slipped from her hijab and curled around the edges of her white, brittle mask. Her hands were freckled with burns.

Even through the small slits in her mask, I could see her eyes roll. “At least you’re not a virgin anymore,” she said to the one-armed girl. 

Esma`il snapped, “Enough!” and then clarified for everyone that Noor’s comment was an example of dark humor. 

Mahdi, my roommate, leaned in and murmured, “I need a cigarette.” 

Esma`il had been the head caregiver here for the past ten years. He was sixty-five, but despite his age, he moved quickly, his hairy arms visible under a short-sleeved shirt. He often frowned while yelling on the phone, asking for money, insurance, or even complaining about the lack of naan for breakfast. His most frequent request was always for more time. The best part about him was when he secretly got drunk at night, forgetting he was a man, and cried out loud.

After the morning meeting, he asked me to see him in his office. In front of me, dozens of identical stopped clocks decorated the wall behind his desk, each showing a different time. They served as reminders of when previous members had left. When I first joined, he had given me one like them—a round clock made of brown maple wood. 

“You still hadn’t chosen a sister,” Esma`il said.

He handed me a paper outlining the Islamic court’s mission. The court believed that having a family was essential for orphans, and its closest understanding of family was having a brother or a sister. Only then could orphans get a passport. As with most Islamic laws, men had the choice; women waited. 

“It’s not that hard. You have already survived this much,” Esma`il said, making air quotes with his fingers. By this much, he meant my left ear. At the previous orphanage, another boy had bitten it off after I crossed God during the Quran prayer. When I said, Allah is selfish.

He had decided I no longer needed my ears to hear God. What I remembered most was the weak streams of blood trickling down my cheek and the fragments of Quran verses spilling from the speakers. If the caregivers hadn’t stopped him, he might have taken the other one, too. 

After that, I failed three rounds of selection. I was sent here to improve my chances of finding a sister among people like me—orphans with disabilities. 

“Can you hear me, son?” Esma`il`s head tilted forward. His eyes were fixed on the large scar of stitches that held layers of skin over the hole in my left ear. 

“I can hear you just fine, sir,” I said.

“What do you want?” His lower lip was torn by his teeth, pressed against them. That was all he did during the one-armed girl’s sharing.

“A passport,” I said, stressing the P.

“Then pick a sister.” 

The dining hall was arranged with rows of tables and small, rounded steel chairs bolted to the floor. The air carried a tense blend of cheap deodorant and burnt broccoli. Above the entrance, a crooked sign read: Celebrate your sibling and future!

Two rows away, the one-armed girl was staring at me. She turned eighteen last week, and no boy had asked her to be his sister. Her look was a silent challenge. I tried to keep my face steady. I wanted to hide my fear of becoming any kind of savior. It sickened me to think that even among people with disabilities, there were hierarchies—ways of being too disabled.

Eventually, she dropped her gaze to the plate on her lap and looked at the pile of rice. Mahdi wrapped his arm around my shoulder and looked up with a what`s-with-you expression. The first thing everyone noticed about Mahdi was his mouth. He had survived lip cancer and had his lips removed. 

“Where does she go?” I asked, pointing my spoon at her. 

“Seasonal hawkers,” Mahdi said. “Clean windshields near intersections, or something.”

“But she doesn’t have a passport.” 

“I don’t think you need one to clean windshields.” 

“You think she has a chance out there?” I asked. 

He pinched the frail bridge of his nose and said, “She’s never stood a chance.”

I noticed Noor watching us. She never ate in the dining hall. She would show up, grab a banana, smear butter on naan, then leave. Eating here meant taking off her mask. Mahdi sat up straight in his chair to watch her leave.

“Why don’t you pick Noor?” I asked. 

“Oh, she’s trouble,” he said. His knee jittered beneath the table.

“It’s better than leaving without a passport.”

“You value a passport a lot, huh?” he asked. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Be recognized. Have a future. A wife. A minimum-wage job with insurance.”

I pushed my plate aside.

“Allah knows, I don’t need a passport to exist,” he said. “All I need is a set of lips and my brother. I mean, look at me. Who’s going to marry me?” He drew an invisible circle around his mouth with his forefinger.

Mahdi told me that his brother had fought lip cancer before him. “Charity covered all the costs of his prosthetic lip surgery. I’m next, insha’Allah!” he explained. He was waiting for funds to become available again. 

One day, Esma`il asked what makes a good brother. Mahdi stood up and said in a rehearsed voice, “I don’t need anyone because one of these days, my brother will return.” Esma`il paused to digest his thoughts. “It’s been five years since your brother’s last visit, my dear,” he said to Mahdi. After that, he stopped talking to me about his brother.

On Mahdi’s side of the room, there was a poster of a man standing on tall cliffs. His back was to the viewer, collar up, short hair blowing in the wind, gazing at distant mountains. Mahdi told me it was his brother. Next to his brother’s poster, he had mini posters of actors with their faces cut out. Only their lips were visible. He called it the wall of a thousand kisses. 

“So, Mahdi, what kind of lips do you want?” he imitated the doctor’s voice before going to bed. “Well, doctor, I wanted to go with Hephry Buggart or Clark Gabele, but then you know what? I figured, why not have them both? So, if you have enough skills, doc, I want Buggart’s upper lip and Gabele’s lower lip,” he said, nodding in confirmation. I considered correcting his pronunciation, but I hesitated when I saw him reveling in the artificial euphoria of a perfect mouth, wiping away the saliva that had escaped in his joy. 

My last memory of the one-armed girl was of her leaving. She pressed her hand to her eyes, trying to block out everyone. I watched her loose sleeve wiggle back and forth. Esma`il hovered nearby, shouting into his phone for more time. The cord wrapped around his neck and wrist like a bird caught in razor wire. 

After catching his breath, he hung up, stepped out of his office, walked into the yard, and draped a blanket over her shoulders. I raised my hand to wave goodbye, but halfway there, Noor grabbed my wrist and pushed it down. 

“She doesn’t need your fake empathy,” Noor said. 

Three caregivers escorted her through the yard, dry leaves rustling under their feet. I studied their faces, trying to decide which might be capable of rape. Was it the one with the sharp nose and a loose T-shirt, the short man with a pockmarked face, or the one with the full black beard?

Whenever a girl turned 18 and left without a brother, Esma`il’s heavy drinking began. In my room, I could hear him shouting, his voice fading, “You bastards! Stop the ship! Someone stop the ship!” His teeth were clenched around the sh.

That night smelled of sandalwood and cherries. I knew Noor had lit her candles. The scent drifted through the hallways and slipped into rooms like a sharp tongue, licking our faces.

I looked out the window. The moon shimmered over the rooftops, and white fumes curled from the chimneys. The radio towers dotted the skyline. I tried to open my right ear to listen for God again, hoping to hear him amid the constant hum of power lines and the rattling of wooden doors in the hallway. I tried to distinguish him from the echo of Esma`il’s screams.

I wanted his angels to come for me as they had for the prophets. I imagined them sneaking up on me in the darkness, examining me, and, with a wink, choosing me. I longed for them to speak into my good ear, but I still heard nothing. 

In the evenings, I watched Casablanca with Noor. I had seen that movie a hundred times. In the basement, there was a projector, two brown leather chairs, and a small white screen nailed to the wall. Everything was mostly black and white, except for the blue glow and the buttery light that scattered through the room. I could see the worn plastic on Noor`s mask giving her a fake look of wrinkles.

She liked to stand between the projector and the screen, casting her shadow over Ingrid Bergman whenever Ilsa appeared. Light flared in Noor’s eyes, like sparks trapped in a firefly’s gut. 

“Kiss me! Kiss me as if it were the last time. I can’t fight it anymore. You have to think for all of us!” Noor recited Ilsa’s lines with a broken English accent. 

“Do you want to watch another movie?” I asked.

“I watched Casablanca the first three times, hoping the director would change his mind and add a scene by the ocean,” she said. “Imagine if they had kissed by the shore instead of at the airport.” Then she realized she didn’t know me well enough to show that much interest. “Have you ever seen an ocean?” 

“In a poster,” I said.

“I don’t think I’ll ever see an ocean,” she said. 

“Why is that?”

“Because I look scary.”

“You’re only scary if I’m scared,” I said.

“Are you scared?” 

I wanted to say it depended on her face, but instead I lowered my voice and asked, “Is that why you think no boy ever asked you to be his sister?” 

“How can you like someone if you can’t see their face?” she asked. On the screen behind her, Bogart told Bergman, “Do you have any idea what you’d have to look forward to if you stayed here?”

After watching Casablanca again, she told me she had asked Mahdi to play Rick before, but when they reached the kissing scene, he covered his mouth and ran out.

“Do you like Mahdi?” I asked her.

“He’s an idiot,” she said. “He just can’t see anything I –” She stopped herself and left the basement. She was right, though. I didn’t like the airport scene either. 

Esma’il shared that he once worked as a jashoo, a ship’s servant. When the sea was rough and the hull leaked, it was his job to bail water faster than it came in. Members stared at the floor, ankles crossed, legs tracing invisible circles, mouths humming. Everyone except Noor, who sat in a trance of boredom, looking down. I noticed how she angled her shoulders toward the group. 

Esma`il looked at the boys and said, “Pick your sister, get your documents, and start your future.” He then asked, “Tell me, do you want children someday?” 

“Oh! I want lots,” said a popular girl, touching the shiny silver of her rims. Though she was in a wheelchair, she had the classic features of northern beauty: pale skin, a smudge of broken eyeshadow, bow-shaped lips, pancake makeup pooling in the folds of her wide cheeks, and a mole on her chin. Every boy in the group wanted her to be his sister. 

“I would like to have kids—one boy and one girl,” said a blind boy sitting in a corner.

The tall boy with below-the-knee prosthetics took a piece of paper from his pocket. He had written a poem for his future wife. “I imagine slowly marrying her. She comes to me, and I come to her. Every morning, I would gaze at her feet peeking out from the white sheets on our bed beside my useless legs. Slowly, she would turn to me, and in my dreams, she always kisses me,” he read. 

Esma’il clapped for him. Mahdi stood abruptly. “I don’t want to be a father, but I think I can land the cool-uncle role for my brother’s kids. My brother has his lips now, and I’m sure he’s out there getting it on with a lot of ladies.” 

There was a collective gasp of joy from the whole group. They loved how his gums curved when he talked. I’ve heard them call it the skeleton talk behind his back.  

“Bunch of cheerful nonsense,” Noor smirked. She signaled for Mahdi to sit. He lowered his head and sat, eyes fixed on her, pretending to fuss with his shoelaces. She locked her gaze on him. “Between you and me,” she said, “the problem isn’t here.” She curled her forefinger around her mask’s lips.

“Then why don’t you like your own face?” the popular girl interrupted. 

“You think?” Noor laughed and raised the backs of her hands. “See the dots? It’s called acid. Do you know what that is?” She turned to Esma`il. “Aren’t you tired of saying the same shit over and over?” she asked, raising her voice.

Esma`il narrowed his eyes. “A group meeting is a good setting to raise topics like this,” he said. “Why don’t you tell us more about yourself?”

“I am an idealistic Norwegian woman torn between my rekindled love for my former lover and my duty to my husband.”

“Noor!” Esmail exclaimed.

“Fine. Here’s the truth,” she added after a dramatic pause. “If I’m so deserving and lucky, I might find a brother here, so that the next time someone says, ‘If I can’t have you, then nobody can,’ and throws acid in my face, one of you white knights may shield me.” Then she sat, leaving silence in her wake.

Mahdi always smoked after meetings. He sat on the toilet with the fan on, holding a cigarette between his teeth. “Noor was brought here after her acid attack. I heard she refused a marriage proposal from a man in his forties, and he threw acid on her face. She was twelve when it happened,” he said. I saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, how his gums curved more when he was sad. He stubbed out the cigarette and lay on his bed. “Everyone thinks she’s mean. But I think she’s just angry.” Then he paused. “I would be, too.” 

It was the first time he didn’t talk to his imaginary doctor or to the poster of his brother. 

On the day of the decision, I overslept. I didn’t want to watch members leave with their official approvals to start a new life out there. I pulled the blanket over my head the night before and stayed in bed until noon. 

When I woke up, Mahdi wasn’t in the room. His clothes were gone. Noor stood in the hallway, looking inside. “Everyone’s gone?” I asked.

“Most of them,” she said, “the ones who didn’t get picked are afraid to come out.” 

“Where is Mahdi?”

“He’s gone too.” 

Earlier that day, she told me that Esma`il had told Mahdi they couldn’t raise the money for his lip surgery. “Mahdi cried in Esma`il’s arms for a while,” Noor said. “Then he left.” She looked at the wall of a thousand kisses. 

“He and his stupid posters!” she pointed at them. “I wear my high heels for him, you know?” She pointed at her dusty shoes. “I wear the mask because I was scared that if I took it off, my face would disgust him. What if he doesn’t like my lips? And he didn’t even say goodbye-” Her voice cracked, and then she left. 

On his bed, Mahdi had left a piece of paper. His handwriting was as tangled as his cheap shoelaces. It read:

Thanks for sharing this room with me and for not telling people that I smoked! Could you do me a favor and choose Noor? She seems mean and sad, but she is thoughtful in her heart. I am sure of that with my soul. Like, I know I have a brother out there, and I need to find him. One more thing: I’ve never had the chance to tell you this, but your lips are as perfect as Hephry Buggart’s. One day, I’ll have a set just like yours!

Mahdi

I stood before the bathroom mirror, holding his letter. Fear and rage tightened my throat. When I punched the mirror, it cracked into thin lines. My face blurred and faded, leaving only my lips visible through the fractures—much like Mahdi’s mini posters.

In the cracks, I saw the one-armed girl cleaning windshields at an intersection, Esmail’s blanket draped over her shoulders. I saw Mahdi, covering his mouth with one hand, wandering through choking streets, dead ends, and endless bus stations in search of his brother. I crumpled his letter and gazed at his brother’s poster. When I touched the dark figure of his brother, I saw his name was engraved on the rocks beneath his feet. I ran my finger along his name: Wanderer above the sea of fog.

In the hallway, all I could hear was my slippers dragging across the ceramic tiles. Through the partially open door of Esma`il`s office, I saw him slump into his folding chair as if a sour fruit had burst in his throat. The veins on his forehead bulged against his skin.

Noor was sitting in the middle of the yard. I sat down next to her. She was staring at the yard door. After a brief moment, she turned her head toward me.

She unfastened the straps of her mask behind her hijab and pulled it away. Her features were marked by stitches above her lips, and her nose was nearly gone. The skin around it was creased like soil on a fresh grave. After making sure I saw her fully, she wrapped her hijab around her hair, her brown eyes crinkling like a gentle wave.

Mohammad Saleh Sahragard is a Persian writer. He was awarded the Summer Prize in Fiction by Cream City Review in 2025. Additionally, he received an honorable mention for the JF Powers Prize in Fiction in 2025. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Literature at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

28 August 2026