Flash Fiction by Sarp Sozdinler
Monsoon
Mama in the lake, praying. Knee-deep, she’s wading her newborn along the moonlit surface of the water, her head crowned with twigs and bird bones. The baby looks as confused and genderless in her hands as those oysters the pastor has been carving open for the ceremony. Now, he’s busy pouring saltwater on the baby’s forehead from the lip of an oyster shell to baptize her amid bawls and tears. The train of Mama’s wedding gown disturbs a butterfly nest on her way out of the water, the ship of my half-sister’s infantile body sailing beside her. Three generations of monarchs get trapped within the layers of her tulle in the same way three generations of women got married on this land and have never left. The frames and furniture inside the house have grown old with them, with me, those bones of a family ingrained into each wall and have since become a part of the concrete. All her life, my half-sister, too, will probably try and wash this blood off her milky skin, feasted on by mosquitoes and blessed with motherly prayers. As Mama and her boyfriend hold hands in the canopy of a weeping willow to say their vows, gypsy moths start buzzing in the mason jars lined along the makeshift altar to mark the beginning of something I cannot place. Watching them smile and negotiate words with each other, my heart becomes a sponge, infinitely growing larger as I soak in all the rain and fire.
Sleepovers
It’s late, the security guard says, for you little girls. His eyes gesture at the round clock behind the desk, second oldest thing on campus after him. The clock shows twenty past ten. Dara clutches the sides of her nightgown, closes her eyes. We’re not here, I incant to myself, not in this skin and bones. We both know he’s the grandmaster of this dungeon, and we’re his prisoners. He peers down the hallway at our dorm room. The door is cracked open, its dark peeping back at us like a black hole ready to swallow us whole.
A thousand miles down east, Mama’s singlewide is asleep in overgrown grass. It’s a land for girls who can stay well past their sleeping time; for women who’re tired of men. The night sky is smudged with lozenge-shaped clouds. Lawns, riddled with rot. Doors left unlocked, their keys flung into the marsh. I know we could be free out there, at last. Untethered.
The headmistress’s room is another hell ready to claim our souls. Its dark looks blacker than that of our dorm block, all cruel and stringy. Our bodies shudder against the cold, though all the windows are shut. The guard takes off his jacket, flings it on the table. I see our bodies reflected in his eyes: a girl in need of another girl in need of another girl. A girl, in need of a crack of the window, a gust of fresh air, hope.
The guard perches on the headmistress’s chair in her absence, calls us over with a flick of his hand. He says he has to search our bodies to see if we’re smuggling anything. His hands pat my shoulders, my arms, and all the way down down down my legs. His touch is cold to the warmth of my bones. I close my eyes and dream of Mama’s house.
I close my eyes and dream of a butterfly getting trapped in the folds of my clothes. Fluttering and buzzing. Breaking free and heading eastward, the land surging under her like a stream of groundwater. Gliding over the ocean-like plateaus of the West, then the radioactive fields of the Midwest, and then from there all the way home.
In the holding room, there’s no light. No windows. Just the chirping of some sparrows that fight each other on the other side of those redbrick walls. I clutch the edges of the bed. Dara breaks into a wail. I can’t stand her voice, so I trace the cracks in the walls with my fingers. I sing a lullaby to bide our time, eager with the promise of a new day.
The new day, a smattering of blues and purples. The headmistress unlocks the door, spares us another one of her lengthy spiels. She lets the sun in, lets us out. She, another female past her sleeping time by the looks of her hair. A girl, like us, with no beginning or end. A woman of now and never was.
A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Normal School, Vestal Review, Hobart, Maudlin House, and Lost Balloon, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for numerous anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: www.sarpsozdinler.com | @sarpsozdinler
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