The Black Bug

That is what my step-brother used to call me: "Sooskèsia" - the black bug... his cousin, Yasmine, was "Sooskèsèfeed" - the white bug - a nicer version of a bug I suppose. I hate bugs, honestly, i am scared of them. Especially cockroaches...and when we moved to Tehran, i was a timid little girl that was afraid of most things not least of which were bugs. Coming from Ottawa, where the bugs fly and are around only 6 months of the year, i was especially vulnerable to what a much older and much warmer national capital had to offer in terms of crawling insects. So it might have been that i was maligned by this new nickname ...But the few years i lived in Iran, and the fewer years (might have been months) spent in my step-brother's company were enough to turn the apparent misnomer into somewhat of a badge of honor. I was going to live up to this curious nickname...