The Alphabet Soup

by Sarp Sozdinler

Hans Isaacson

WHO:

The girl, eight going on nine, half-Assyrian, half-blind, born in the north bend of Southeastern Anatolia, a daughter to Aisha Maria Rohan, by way of Raqqa, by way of her father’s motherland, formerly a struggling second-grader, now a farmhand to her grandparents, lies sidelong on the side of a dirt road, her arms scissored backward, her head a porcelain doll lolling in a puddle of rainwater slowly reddening around the edges, the rivulets of a dark brown liquid oozing out of her cleft-open belly. Even in the face of death she looks impossibly alive, her eyes suspended at half-mast, her blonde hair forked into clumps of wet spaghetti. Where her bad eye should be is now gorged out by a black hole, yet another mouth ready to swallow her bodily universe whole.

WHAT:

One of the aunties broke into a wail in the early hours of a new day. She was on her way back from the tundra overlooking the towers to the north, busy carrying buckets of hay for the day’s preparations ahead. What first seemed to her like a boulder on the side of the road gradually gave way to the broken shell of a girl, her arms and legs rooted in the earth like the leafless trees in the vicinity. She would later recount to the gendarme that the girl’s five-foot frame looked pink from afar, blue from nearby, and contained all possible shades of yellow up close. Her face looked pale and almost embalmed under the magnifying sun, her hands buckled upward as if caught in mid-prayer, which moved the auntie a little. The old woman noticed one of her shoes was missing. The girl’s dog, half-Kangal, half-deaf, was nowhere to be seen, his leash tied to a nearby fig tree like a rumor floating in the world of hard truths.

WHEN:

It’s the morning after the Nowruz, the Persian new year. The solstice, heralding a new season with a shock of periwinkle and honeysuckle. The Rohans, with their warm blanket of ghazals and prayers, always prepared for the spring. Their arched lips, their thorny hair. Their deserty cheekbones. On such hectic days as the Nowruz, the mother would task the girl and the dog with keeping an eye on the kitchen like a pair of footlong detectives, to safeguard the meat from coyotes and busybodies prowling the perimeter of their shanty house. The girl, knowing her mother, lets her dog run free so at least one of them could escape the old woman’s wrath. But the dog stands pat, his eyes suspended in loyal protest. The girl’s face beams up, her chest filled with the warm liquid of affection. If only the animal were with her the night of Kandil, when her uncle’s son, her biggest cousin, took her out on a ride to the towers to the north and touched her in places he shouldn’t, including her bad eye, nine months prior.

WHERE:

Dakhme, the locals call it. The towers of silence. She’d heard of the name from their grandparents many times before, this clump of syllables that made no sense until today. Today, past a bend of black rocks, the tundra gives way to this manmade beauty stretching before her and the dog like a set of pearly teeth. The clouds, fair and crisp, a platter of little edible things. Nature, gray and ominous, shifts places around them as if rearranging itself into a new plot; it sprawls its tendrils toward where the sun sets, leading the way for these two figures that may seem, with their earth-toned getup and hunched builds, inseparable from the surrounding fig trees to a passerby.

“I think it’s going to rain tonight,” the girl says, tying the leash to the nearest trunk.

The dog launches into a bark, as if at an invisible menace nearby.

WHY:

Because no one likes unfathered children.

Because her mother named her after a weather god thanks to that raincloud chasing her all day as if it were the forecast of a lifelong burden.

Because men take what they can in this land, rain or high water.

Because she, when the day is wrong and wet, rages against men with the heat of a thousand suns.

Because she found out the wrong way that for some men it’s more important than anything to preserve the honor of their families, to the extent of culling one of their own.

Because the Rohans believe all bastard souls should go to hell, next to their whore of a mother.

Because the Rohans believe that burying the dead will pollute the soil; burning them, the air.

HOW:

Birds, perched atop the towers, will start eating the dead from the eyes. Probably because it’s a desert, and the eye is the wateriest organ. The imam will watch the developments of the day through a hole in the wall to see which eye is eaten first. He fears that if it’s the good one, the deceased would transition to a more peaceful place; if bad, a place full of torment.

Not that the girl would mind. Nor the raindrops, which, for the first time in so long, taste like something they shouldn’t, like sour plums in spring, or like a hopeful word in a sinner’s mouth. They’re unobtrusive, stable. Wholesome, almost. Though for ants, she knows it would be a disaster. For birds: a burden. For her baby, it would probably prove peaceful and caress his eyes and ears like a sizzle of white noise streaming backward, that first sight and sound of an upside-down sea. A sea with its own moves, its own motive. A sea that wouldn’t listen, that wouldn’t abide. A sea that would just start sluicing down on earth in the shape of a blade and have her and her dog and parents and cousins and nephews and nieces and the Rohans and towners and everyone and everything else soaked in blood.

It would only spare her baby. Then it would go away.

---

A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for numerous anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: www.sarpsozdinler.com