SARP SOZDINLER / FISTLIKE MOUTH AND ROTATING THOUGHTS
She goes over the list of men she’s hooked up with over the past nine months:
The guy who worked the ice-cream truck in Elmhurst Park.
The redheaded Subway cashier who had a constellation of pimples for face tattoos.
Her half-Russian stalker who looked like Mr. Meeseeks from Rick and Morty.
The German bodyguard who worked the front gate on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“Cornball Crawford,” that ducktail-wearing crackhead from Florida.
Eli McSomething, the only other person she knew who sported separate eye colors.
That pretentious NYU sophomore who bore a striking resemblance in his childhood photos to Heath Ledger.
The twenty-three-year-old Republican who studied law and digested cases.
The thirty-seven-year-old Dutchman who never voted.
The ageless lumbersexual with the kind of carpet beard you can grow only in Montana.
The twenty-something Virgo whose neatness was his standout feature.
The Asian chiropractor from Astoria whose shadeless skin she found unspeakably sexy.
The high-school teacher whose quiz sheets she considered selling in the black market.
The Star Trek fan who still lived with his uncle.
The fifty-something photographer from Alphabet City, the oldest man she’s ever been with, who dreamed of recording the landscapes of Mars.
The tall, babyfaced Californian she met near the turnpikes in Newark whose better half of the genetics she’d admittedly love to see on her baby’s face.
So little she can recall, most with no names.
cc: (soft ambient music)
Fifty-thousand hours of video footage are uploaded online every day, wrote @weezer89, the only man she, if it could be called that, hooked up with online and has yet to meet face to face, and who keep sending her a bullet list of links for her to peruse every day. In this ocean of content it’s possible for her to find anything from random cake recipes and Photoshop tutorials to movie reviews and viral videos that have nothing but mundane weirdness in their thumbnails.
Like this video of a middle-aged man who inconsolably cries over a bowl of soup in the presence of two men wearing giant cartoon masks.
The video of a Canadian student who behaves erratically in a hotel elevator in downtown Los Angeles and would later be found dead in the rooftop water tower.
A mannequin singing I Feel Fantastic.
A cult leader explaining how the souls of his disciples would be transferred to this spaceship after martyrdom.
A drone spotting a clown in the middle of a cornfield.
A man dancing and cooking mushrooms with a horse mask on.
A woman who claims to be a reincarnated squirrel while she massages a possum onscreen.
The music video of a Malaysian singer, which accidentally captured a suicide attempt in the background.
Dogs and cats seeing things their owners cannot.
A ghost whose thermal energy is captured on Xbox Kinect.
A shopping cart drifting in the parking lot as if in the pull of an invisible force.
Every day for two weeks, from four-thirty to ten a.m., one video after another.
cc: (soft mysterious music)
Binge-watching continues on the road, across the heartland of America, like a southbound diet. On @weezer89’s bundle this morning is what she’s tried to avoid all this time: mass suicides.
Here goes the video about the citizens of Astapa, who allegedly burned themselves right after they burned down their homeland.
The video of the women of Souli who threw their children off the precipice, then jumped off to avoid capture by the Ottomans.
Kamikaze pilots of Japan flying their aircrafts into Allied warships in WWII.
The wave of suicides that rampaged Germany in the final weeks of the Third Reich.
The thousand residents of Demmin who disappeared overnight.
Seventy-nine people who died alongside their leader David Koresh after a fifty-one-day siege of Waco, Texas.
Forty-eight followers of Luc Jouret who committed suicide in the Swiss Alps, followed by another five in Canada.
Solar Temple. Adam House. Jonestown. So many dead people, most with no names.
Later, she zooms into the pixelated faces of the convinced people, then into the eyes of their convincers. What those influential men have in common are their words and whiskers, though the manipulative men of today entertain clean shaves in their profile pictures. Beard or no beard, each seems to be a doctor of twisting the soul, a master of purpose who’s supposed to be trusted by their people with all their hearts, like a priest or a shaman who performs the visionary magic of Valium, Xanax, and Ambien on the masses.
She can see it more clearly now: none of those victims were mentally deranged; they were sentimentally misunderstood. Much as @weezer89 is no Weezer; he’s a wizard. It’s the men like her father, her ex-husband, who are the real manipulators. Or maybe even her baby, with his fistlike mouth and rotating thoughts.
She’s been surrounded by them all her life, dead or alive.
cc: (soft country music)
Not the links but the kicks in her belly wake her up this morning as she crosses the state line. She stops the car at the gates of a large compound and looks back at the nation she’s about to escape. She turns her face skyward and slides her tongue out to taste the wet miracle that has just started performing its magic. But like most miracles, the rain doesn’t live up to her expectations. It’s plain, steady. Harmless. Though for ants, she knows it would be a disaster. For birds: a burden. For her baby, it would prove peaceful and caress his eyes and ears like a river of white noise flowing backward, that first sight and sound of an upside-down sea. A sea with its own moves, its own purpose. It wouldn’t listen. It wouldn’t abide. It would just keep sloshing at the shore and have her friends and cousins and aunts and mom and dad and everyone else she knows and loves in the world soaked up.
The rain would only spare her baby. Then it would go away.
cc: (soft ambiguous music)
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.