Fiction

About the Story

The story begins with a simple encounter: the narrator comes across an elderly woman who has fallen in the street and asks for help. What initially appears to be an ordinary accident gradually becomes a gateway into the narrator’s past, where memories of love, loss, violence, imprisonment, childhood, and fear become intertwined.

At its core, the story explores repetition and the impossibility of erasing memory. The elderly woman’s fall, the narrator’s childhood memory of his mother falling, and the memory of his former lover falling at the same bend in the road echo one another across different moments of his life. The past seems to reproduce itself in new forms, even after many years have passed. His experience of imprisonment and enforced solitude further shapes his relationship with memory, identity, and the passage of time.

Ultimately, the story asks whether forgetting could free us from the repetition of pain. If it were ever possible to permanently erase memories, would our suffering disappear with them—or would we also lose the very experiences that make us capable of remembering, understanding, and telling stories?

About the Author

Nasser Mansourafshari, known professionally as Nasser Pooyesh, is an Iranian filmmaker, writer, and photographer with more than three decades of experience in independent cinema. Working as a writer, director, and producer, he co-wrote the screenplay Women Plus Men with the late Abbas Kiarostami, a collaboration rooted in the tradition of Iranian art cinema.

His documentary feature The Burnt City has been screened at international film festivals. He is also a published Persian-language author, with books including It’s Only One Eye (2023) and Anti-Gallows Love and Anti-Prison Lovemaking (Arzan Publications, Sweden, 2025). His forthcoming short-story collection is titled The Direction of the Cat’s Gaze. His photography has been exhibited in Iran and internationally, and he received an Honorary Diploma from the European Modern Arts Expo in 2023. His photographs are also collected in My Resemblance to Myself (Lulu, USA, 2025).

He is currently developing his next feature film, continuing a career devoted to human-centered, independent storytelling from Iran.

"A literary fiction piece about memory loss and the courage to begin again"

George Bede is a writer whose influences range from Terry Pratchett to James Joyce, with detours through jazz, punk, and manga. He writes fiction that sits somewhere between the philosophically strange and the darkly comic. When not writing, he can be found losing arguments with video games and reading books too pretentious for his own good.

Henri Moss is a writer, filmmaker, and actor based between Scituate, MA & Los Angeles, CA. He holds dual degrees in Screenwriting and Journalism from California State University Northridge, and works at Warner Bros Studios & for the Austin Film Festival. His prose work leans toward adventure and sci-fi, and is currently working on his first novella Home Planet. When not writing, he is often on the beach, chasing after his dog Winston.

Rashmi Mishra is an emerging writer from India whose work has appeared in Shabd Magazine & Luvv It. Her literary interests range from literary fiction and psychological realism to speculative fiction. Drawn to both Victorian and contemporary literature, she writes stories with a quiet emotional core that explore identity, memory, freedom, and the complexities of human relationships. The Congested Seagull is one such attempt.

Dear iExile editors,

"The Currency of Love" is a work of hybrid fiction that questions the moral mathematics of independence and dependence. It follows a woman whose public confession about love and money becomes an unintended act of intellectual exile from the very communities that shaped her. The piece attempts what iExile champions: writing that disturbs, that refuses to sit politely in a single category, and that treats literature as a living animal rather than a statement.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Barys Paulau

Barys Paulau is a Belarusian writer and cultural studies scholar. He holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Lithuania and is a member of the Memory Studies Association (Netherlands). His academic essays explore literature, theater, and cinema.

Dear Editor,

I would like to submit a short story to the Fiction section, titled ‘Hunger’.

It is about a British Bengali woman who, unhappy with her life in London and suffocated by familial expectations, moves to a remote village in Northern Scotland. Something ancient and sinister lives inside her, and wherever she goes, men begin to disappear.

Word count: 1738

Many thanks,

Triya Chakravorty

Bio: Triya Chakravorty is an Oxford graduate and a doctor training in psychiatry. She is interested in intersectional feminism, mental health and the diasporic experience.

Kofi Akan Brown is a science-fiction and horror author who has been published in Zoetic Press, Freedom Fiction Journal, Antimatter Dreams, and more.

About the Author:

Zahra Ovaisi, 42 years old, holds a Master's degree in Art Research from Iran. Her academic background in visual and cultural studies deeply informs her creative writing, particularly her interest in the intersections of psychology, spirituality, and human emotion. She writes fiction that explores mental health, family dynamics, and alternative modes of perception. This story is part of a larger body of work examining how ordinary people confront extraordinary psychological and existential challenges. She lives and writes in Iran.

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If you need a shorter version (for a small box):

Zahra Ovaisi, 42, holds an MA in Art Research from Iran. Her fiction focuses on mental health, family bonds, and spiritual consciousness. She writes from Iran.