​THE ARCHIPELAGO OF DISTANCES

By Sarp Sozdinler

​Yes and no we can or cannot dip in the water. Our words are all too fluid, do or don’t, good or bad, all possibilities melding into one big twoness, like this white-black glint on the surface of the lake. The scene before our eyes looks ominously pleasant, this place, right this moment. The lake doesn’t look like the kind of place where anything can happen to people, good or bad. Good and bad.
 
Yes, we can dip in the water. No, we don’t.
 
In the cup of your hand, some patches of dried sand. A crab pushing away another crab on the rim of the lake, out and up, out and up. An island stands at the boy’s feet, this archipelago of pebbles. A united, vegetal beauty all around. And then, the dip of a toe in the water, its dry instantly turning into mud, as sticky and transient as what has become of you and me.
 
Yes, we can jump in the water. No, we probably won’t.
 
When you ferried the boy out of the water, his chest was still heaving up and down, up and down, unlike his filiform arms hanging limply on both sides. The lake looked inert and innocent behind you, farther ahead down the field, as if it weren’t the one that swallowed the boy whole just a couple of minutes earlier. The boy’s hunger for life was long pronounced dead through his emaciated ribs, his thirst having already inflated to a suffocating, drowning degree. The stories of the dead had been lingering all around the lake since I myself was a kid, their arms grimly open, lips widened to a grin, luring you and me to greet the boy, our boy, on the other side of it all.

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ANGELS OF CONOCO

By Sarp Sozdinler

​Half of the bus crowd would barely know the kid was there, he just sat by his mother’s side in the back and made little mice sounds when he talked, if he talked, his mother was a recent PhD candidate in a nearby university, a university that had a somewhat bad reputation in town, a university that I myself had also happened to enroll in another life.
 
The kid wouldn’t know but I hadn’t been hearing such nice things about her mother, neither from the campus people nor the townsfolk, Clinton was such a small place after all, all it would take for you to catch up with the local gossip is to sit at one of those windowside booths at Applebee’s and do nothing but pretend to look out and open your ears wide like a secondhand antenna. That would be the moment you would start hearing things about everyone, about how this or that got in or out of prison, about who killed whom, things like how this kid’s mother had been doing some questionable things to get noticed since she was a kid, more so at her new job, more particularly at her PhD program, but also at night, when no one was around and when no one was looking, not even the cops, how the rumor had it that she had to side-hustle with those girls milling around by the Conoco just off the turnpikes after midnight, hoping to run into a driver on his night break to make ends meet, and how she had this killer hand move that some men of Clinton chose to call the Shocker Tanker, how it made them feel as if they’d gone to some truck drivers’ heaven, minus the expenses.
 
I remember the house she was living in as a kid, how straggly and yellowed their front yard looked, how the house mimicked the outlook of its residents, how she would almost never come out to play with us, how she would start acting up in school, how all the kids in the neighborhood decided to stay away from her at one point or the other, but also the adults, all probably because of the rumors, rumors that her family was supposed to have two daughters instead of one, that how she once had a sister who, for some reason, no longer seemed to be around, a twin sister for whom the people said she’d burned with jealousy all her life, a twin sister whose disappearance the family had covered up without effort, without regrets, but maybe it too was a lie, Clinton was not the most credible place on earth after all, everyone said all sorts of things for attention.
 
All I recalled was how it was said that her family was missing one of its core members like how some bands would replace their original drummer with a glorious pretender, and that the other girl, the sensitive one, was now flat-out dead, that she was probably buried somewhere around the house, her bones browned and softened like bananas, her eyeholes eaten away by maggots amid all those pebbles and dirt in the backyard. I was fascinated even then by not necessarily death but by the whole idea of being just a body in this world, of lying under the ground for extensive periods of time, of closing my eyes and holding my breath, of standing like that until my mind went completely blank, until there was nothing to think or remember anymore—not the house, not the girl, not the other girl who would swallow up her sister and pump out a kid in her place, not the kid whose mother was seen as an angel by some and a ghoul by others, and most certainly not this town where everyone has a place to live and a place to die, until all eternity.
 
That’s all I have in mind when I get up from my seat to get off at the next stop, which is also when the kid and his mother spring up from their seats too, rushing toward the doors in the middle, and as we all take one simultaneous step down the stoop and share a cursory smile, I think for a second that I have glimpsed something close to a recognition on her face, a faint curve that could very well be a glimmer, the ghost of a ghost with no traceable contours.

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A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Hobart, Maudlin House, and American Literary Review, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: sarpsozdinler.com