Excerpt from The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery
It’s not every day a sock puppet visits a maternity ward.
Minoo and I fly down the hall, the anticipated squeak of hospital vinyl absent from under our feet. We are weightless, shoes barely touching the ground. A reflection of Minoo’s form glides beneath us. Wraith-like, we are darkly mirrored in the freshly-waxed floor.
And Minoo—she stares ahead, unseeing. Not seeing me, I mean. As conspicuous as I am to everyone else, my existence is as natural to her as the weight of her tongue in her mouth, or the air filling the lungs in her chest. She doesn’t see the nurse who jumps out of our way either, flattening her body to the wall, blue eyes large with shock.
I know Minoo would rather cut off her arm than look at me. I can feel it. Her hand—her hand with the soft palm and short nails—is less of a hand now and more of a fist. Its metacarpal tension curls in my body. Minoo. I try to say her name, but she won’t let me open my mouth.
Minoo. Listen to me.
Ahead, the elevator doors slide open, and a boy emerges with a bouquet of balloons. He looks at us as we pass, then turns to look again, a smile tickling the corner of his mouth. The boy’s cola-coloured eyes sparkle, registering my absurdity: my static-grey skin and yellow pipe-cleaner curls bursting wildly from the top of my head. My lolling red felt tongue. My eyes, one round, flat, and green and placed half an inch lower than the left, which is smaller and black and not flat but domed, like half a gumdrop. Me, a handmade toy perched dumbly on the hand of a frazzled and frizzy-haired middle-aged woman—a woman who would look a lot more pulled together, even pretty, if she’d put on a little lip gloss and massaged some serum through her hair like I suggested. She had been going to meet her grandbaby for the first time, and while the baby wouldn’t have cared how she looked, her daughter did. Roya would have cared if she made the effort. And Roya had cared, a lot.
I see me as the boy must: a crudely made toy. I admit my appearance is more primitive than Minoo’s later creations,but my simplicity has served me well: out of all of us, I’m the only one still here. The boy stands under his rainbow balloon umbrella, smiling. He’s the last thing I see before the elevator doors close and Minoo slams me into the steel panel. Slams me again and again until our bodies vibrate with the force of her pain. Our sadness. Because I may be the stuff of stuffing and nonsense, but I can feel as much as Minoo. And of course, I’m the reason Roya shouted at us to leave.
“Leave now and take that thing with you!”
She called me a thing, but Roya knows my name. She could recognize my face before she recognized her own. She’s known it almost as long as she’s known Minoo’s, though I don’t claim she’s studied mine with as much devotion. Mothers are gods. First true loves.
Minoo falls forward, chest heaving. She rests her head beside mine on the panel. The cool shock of steel is calming, and her breathing slows. My body relaxes. She rolls her forehead so her eyes meet mine.
“It’s okay, Minoo.” My voice, which has always been high, is tight now too. I clear my throat and try to relax my pitch. “It’ll be okay. Let’s talk.”
Excerpt from The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery, published by Palimpsest Press, 2026. Republished here with permission. Copyright: Hollay Ghadery.
About The Unravelling of Ou:
Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.