by Sarp Sozdinler
The house at the rear of the woods is nearing its first decade when the kid falls from the roof. Through the dense slits of rain, the red-tiled faΓ§ade resembles a waterfall of blood gushing out of a fresh wound. The wound in the back of the kidβs head is opening and closing like a spare mouth, spouting clots of blood and bad thoughts. His mother is a doctor of restoring the soul, a master of comfort who performs the narcotic magic of Valium, Xanax, and Ambien on her patients during the night shift. Tonight, itβs the doors and windows in their house that moan with the wind, as if on behalf of her kid.
An oak tree is grazing the porch roof the day the kid graduates from high school; it was planted by the mother when they first moved in, now competing heights with the kid. The house is long past its first quarter of a century, smelling at once of everything itβs composed of, minus the kid. The kid is busy being a nineteen-year-older, weaving between his past and present. Against his expectations, his future is now stretching out in front of his eyes in the shape of godlike buildings and sickly palm trees. The city smells of everything that is not home, and itβs nowhere near as green.
Like his body, the house, too, is in decline when the kid comes back home to give his mother the news firsthand. Before his words resolve to an end, the branches outside their kitchen window begin to shudder as if to mimic the old womanβs confused mind. Until today, he made sure to bring her a pot of plant every time he returned from the city; by now, all four corners of their house are touched by a mark of greenery, mapping the distances between the mother and a part of her that had long gone missing. After he leaves, she plows through the rooms like a queen bee dutifully pollinating the corners, unsatisfied of the answers she finds in each of them.
When the son returns home for the last time, he doesnβt look nowhere near how she remembers him: inside the marble urn, he is back to the size he was born, now looking more like a memory of a person than a person in flesh and bones. A low echo hums in the heart of the oak tree as the mother presses her ear against where her son hit his head as a kid. On and on the dried leaves dance around her in a divine hail, honoring one morbid family reunion. The house at the rear of the woods falls silent for the first time in half a century, now looking as blue and lifeless as the ghosts that walk it.
A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for 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.
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