MONSOON — SARP SOZDINLER
/Mama in the lake, singing. Knee-deep, she’s floating 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 carves open by her side for the ceremony. He pours saltwater on the baby’s forehead from the tip of an empty shell, baptizes her amid bawls. The train of Mama’s wedding gown disturbs a butterfly nest on her way out, the ship of my half-sister’s 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 sister, too, will probably try and wash this blood off her, off her now-milky skin, feasted on by mosquitoes and healed 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 their words, my heart becomes an infinite sponge, growing bigger as I soak it with all the rain and fire.
Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Normal School, Hobart, Maudlin House, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere. Some of their pieces have been anthologized and received a mention at literary events, including the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery.
