Fiction: Selections From Sarp Sozdinler

DOWNWINDER

 

In the diner, I take one of the doorside booths and watch an orange plastic bag flit about in the parking lot. I watch it dance graciously in the muted wind, flap its handles like a wayward bird. So dramatic, so freeform. The bag’s erratic movement reminds me of Mrs. Medina, our downstairs neighbor from Valparaiso who draped plastic bags around her arms as a fashion choice every day and fed on expired canned food for dare. I loved everything about her, how nonchalant she looked, how fuck-you she was to the rest of the world. Back then, I often thought about all the upset women in history and recited their names to myself like a mantra when no one was looking. I found comfort in the mental image of Joan of Arc as if she were my avatar, my spirit animal. I lip-synced to Madonna on my way to school every morning and cried over how much beauty there was out there in the world. My big sister used to tell me I didn’t have a strong sense of self, but I think what she meant was that I had low self-esteem. These days, I feel like I’m not even human, that I drive these roads back and forth just to maintain a livelihood that doesn’t really amount to much. That I’m thinking these thoughts just because I’m made of plastic. That I don’t even own these opinions, own this body. There’s not a day that goes by without me worrying over the things I eat, or the microplastics in them, alongside global warming and race inequality and 5G. Like when I tell the waitress I’m here just for the drinks and she tells me they’re out of it, all sorts of it, I worry that we are doomed to drought as a society. Watching her stride toward the register, my fingers drum along the table and mimic the now-quickening movement of the plastic bag, and I imagine looking back at myself from the other side of the glass, or through the eyes of the patrons sitting at the bar, or of the pedestrians who stride by the diner in a metronomic precision and choose to deal with life’s problems day in and day out, or worse, creating them, like me.

 

 

 

MINUTE MAN

 

Shoutout to my grandma’s third husband, Pete—a man of few words but many clocks. Last I counted, his house held over eighty of them. They were tucked into corners, hanging above doorframes, mounted on bookshelves, lined up on windowsills—some dusty, some gleaming, all ticking to their own rhythm, each one slightly out of sync like they were arguing about what time it actually was.

 

Once, I asked Pete why they were all off by a few minutes, and he shrugged with the quiet certainty of someone who’d considered the question for years, then said, in his low, gravelly Midwestern drawl, “Time owes me.”

 

We all pretended not to notice that none of his clocks ever struck midnight.

 

Pete was the kind of man who wore suspenders without irony, always carried a single AA battery in his pocket, and kept a flip phone with no contact list or service “for emergencies that haven’t happened yet.” When I was little, my mom used to warn me about him, saying he believed his dreams were coded government transmissions and he’d been prepping for something called The Great Turning since 2004. I remember the time he pulled me aside at my half-sister’s wedding to whisper, “If the cake’s too sweet, it’s already begun.” I didn’t take a bite from the dessert that night.

 

Last Christmas, he gave everyone in the family the same gift: a Casio World Time wristwatch. Plain, silver, a little heavy in the hand. All of them were missing their second hands. When I pointed it out during our cigarette break, Pete looked at the sky like he was waiting for it to blink, and said, “The Great Turning,” like it was supposed to mean something.

 

Pete never drives but somehow shows up to family gatherings a few hours early, sitting on the porch with his hands folded like he’s been there a while, waiting for us. Sometimes I think Pete knows something the rest of us don’t. Other times, I think he forgot something the rest of us never knew.

 

Yesterday, I opened my mailbox and found a postcard. It had no return address, no name—just one sentence scrawled in careful, blocky penmanship across the back: “Don’t trust mirrors after dusk.”

 

It wasn’t signed, but the postmark was from a town that no longer exists.

 

 

 

GRAND THEFT HAMLET

 

I filled myself a bowl of popcorn and slumped on the couch to pirate a movie. The movie I picked was called Grand Theft Hamlet. It was a reenactment of Shakespeare’s famous play set entirely on GTA Online. In this video-game world, Claudius was acted by a sexless thug and some of the medieval robes were replaced by attires that looked like something out of Kanye’s fall/winter collection. Halfway through the movie, I drifted off to sleep but when I woke up, I couldn’t tell how much of what I thought I’d been watching in between was made-up or part of the actual footage. I remembered watching a scene in which the two protagonists meet up with other players that volunteer for some of the side roles, but there was a huge disconnect between that picture and what I saw upon opening my eyes. In my post-sleep stupor I swam in and out of other scenes where the characters kept on doing all sorts of stuff. I could only discern the irregularities after I woke up into a glassy sharpness, followed by an immerse bout of confusion. I tried to put the bits and pieces in my mind in a meaningful order, but the ergodic nature of the movie didn’t help. No matter how much I strained to put things together, I didn’t want to pause and rewind to find out the truth. Besides feeling like a couch potato, I enjoyed having a version of the film only I could claim, as if I’d just gotten a private screening. I decided that the version in my mind was the version I was interested in. The version I’ll keep with me forever. When I looked down, my cat Tab was licking at what little kernels of popcorn left at the bottom of the bowl. I got up and cleaned the couch after me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.