Achaemenid Gold Earring

4

I hear something outside in the balcony.

Two doves, as white as snow, and beautiful, have perched on our railing. Doves often make me smile. They remind me of my childhood, and the long nights when my great aunt was visiting. Ezy, as we called her, was a great storyteller with a thousand tales. With her around we felt like the king in the  1001 nights. She was our own Shahrzad.

“Tell us another one”, we would plead.

Ezy never refused, never complained that she was too tired. We stayed up well past midnight while she told us story after story. Many of her stories included doves as part of the cast. The great white doves in her stories could speak, but only to each other. It was as if they were the storyteller’s special helper. It seemed the doves had a specific mission; they would offer us bits of information that the hero and heroines didn’t have access to, but were going to learn later in the story. A clever invention of the old storytellers, which made us feel smarter than the cast. The story doves always came in twos, and they were always sisters. Smart, clever, and intelligent sisters.