Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back writer Kiyoshi Hirawa with “Fatima Firoozi’s Final At-Bat,” a story of women’s baseball and an abusive marriage set in Afghanistan after American forces left the country.
“Baseballs. Husbands. The road. Three things that Afghan women are never allowed to hit, no matter the circumstances. But Fatima Firoozi was as unconventional as she was unlucky, and before the month of Safar ended, she’d be forced to take a swing at the last two because she’d crushed the first.”
Fatima and her friends meet in secret on the charred grounds of a former pomegranate orchard—its walls still standing, its trees long claimed by fire—to play baseball, a sport forbidden to women. For a brief window, before the Americans left, they had played openly in women’s leagues, and Fatima’s pitching was nothing short of astonishing. Now they tell their husbands they are attending a sewing circle, stitching together a cover story while tending the glowing ember of a passion they refuse to let die.
No one risks more than Fatima, trapped in a marriage arranged after her parents’ deaths. Her husband, Haroon, is a man whose temper burns so hot even his own family avoids him. His treatment of her is degrading; he calls her fāhisha—whore. When he discovers an old baseball jersey given to her by an American years ago, he becomes convinced she has a foreign lover. His rage flares, and although the story spares us the explicit details of his violence, we witness its aftermath. In a final act of audacity, Fatima turns her pain into action, taking revenge on Haroon before fleeing into an uncertain future.
Kiyoshi populates the story with vivid, compelling characters: Fatima; her steadfast friend Roya; Homa and her husband Naveed, who quietly makes room for the women to pursue their forbidden joy; and Haroon, a bully whose own dark form of audacity scorches everything around him. These women stand not only against him but against a society that insists they are property. The details are rich and meticulously researched, and the narrative glows with a realism that reveals Kiyoshi’s gifts at full flame—power and delicacy interwoven with an audacious respect for women who have been undervalued and underestimated.
Read “Fatima Firoozi’s Final At-Bat” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet, writer, and former police officer who was wrongfully terminated after reporting sexual misconduct and rape committed by fellow police officers. Most of Hirawa’s work focuses on trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. The remainder drops a net deep into the ocean of humor, and every once in a while, hauls in a joke (catch and release, of course).