Atash Shakarami, the aunt of sixteen-year-old Nika Shakarami — arrested and killed during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising — was flogged thirty-eight times in Tehran in November 2025. (Atash means “Fire” in Farsi.)
One,
Two,
Three,
Four,
seven days before the flogging
Fire began to practice
leaving her body.
We are not only our bodies,
She told herself.
If I stay aware,
It is harder for them
to shame me through it.
She cooked for the coming days,
stacked meals in the fridge—
food for the woman
who would be flogged.
She bought two tubes
of numbing cream.
The night before,
She could not sleep.
She played with her cat,
trimmed and watered the flowers,
showered and stood
The night before, she couldn’t sleep:
played with the cat, watered the flowers,
showered, stared at Nika’s face on the wall—
almond eyes, thick brows, a long, fine nose,
a girl the world had already seen
dancing hip-hop, burning her scarf,
before the night the batons
changed her face
to something a mother
could not recognize.
In the morning, Atash
coiled her orange hair.
Resistance is beautiful,
she told the mirror.
Two hours before the sentence
She spread the cream
from shoulders to lower back,
wrapped plastic around her waist,
pulled on a tight shirt —
Two hours of numbness.
In the car, she peeled off the plastic,
wiped the cream away.
Outside the prosecutor’s office
she swallowed strong codeine—
three 300-milligram tablets.
On November 3, in Tehran,
They flogged the Fire —
a flame of justice.
At 10:00 a.m.
Fire entered the courthouse.
An officer was finishing
another woman.
“How severe?”
The lawyer asked.
“We are obliged,” The judge said, “It is our duty.”
Fire stepped into
The execution room:
an ordinary office —
desk, chairs, rows of files.
The enforcer was a woman
in her forties.
No black chador,
just mantou, trousers, scarf —
a clerk you might pass
on a bus.
In her right hand,
a fine brown leather whip,
its strands precisely braided,
a wooden handle
two palms long.
“Face the wall.”
“Hands on the wall.”
“Count, so I don’t strike
more than ordered.”
On November 3
They pinned Fire to a wall
and flogged her.
But Atash did not count.
My mother is counting at home,
she told herself,
as the whip rose
and fell on her back—
One,
Two,
Three,
…
Thirty-eight.
Thirty-eight lashes,
thirty months of Nika’s murder.
Fire stepped out.
A stylish clerk
with shaped brows
slid a paper forward.
Fire certified that after
the flogging
She had left
“in good health.”
At 12:20 p.m.
she walked out —
calm, a smile
set against pain.
“We couldn’t stop the sentence.”
Her lawyer told the women
who had come
to stand with Fire.
She reached home,
took painkillers,
and slept.
Her heart,
her mind —
this woman is a mountain,
and deep inside that mountain
Lives Nika,
The girl who burned her scarf is still alive,
Dances inside, Fire, inside Atash.