Kategori: Books

Here is my interview with Hilâl a.k.a. @birkitolog on Instagram. Illustrations are made by her, too.

KITOLOG TV

Hilâl: Hello, dear book lovers. Welcome to Kitolog TV. Today’s guest is Gizem Çetin, the author of the series Seven Candles and Renaissance in the Daisy Field. Welcome, Ms. Gizem. If you’re ready, let’s get started right away.

Gizem: Thank you. I’m ready, we can start.

Hilâl: Great. First, can you briefly introduce yourself? Who is Gizem Çetin?

Gizem: I am someone who tries to be both a good writer and reader. I love science fiction, am a bit of a dreamer, and an admirer of space. Also I am an electrical and electronics engineer.

Hilâl: Very nice. Let’s continue with the second question. Can you tell us a bit about your books?

Gizem: Of course. Renaissance in the Daisy Field is my first published book. It’s in the fantasy genre. Following that, there’s the science fiction series Seven Candles. Online, I started a political thriller series called “Avaria Games.” It will be four books. I’m currently writing the second one.

Hilâl: Why and how did you start writing?

Gizem: I was a child who loved to dream and create heroes and storylines in my mind. I loved reading books. But the desire to write came to me after seeing a news story on television. They were talking about a child who became an author at the age of 11. I was the same age. I thought, “If they can do it, so can I.”

Hilâl: Can you tell us a bit about Seven Candles series? What is it about and why should it be read? What does it promise the reader?

Gizem Çetin: The series is based on the number 7, as the name suggests. The number 7 is one of the most sacred numbers to humanity. It’s a symbol of completeness, wholeness, unity, celestial harmony, and perfect order. Seven colors, seven notes, seven days of the week… In the Bible and the Torah, it is mentioned that the universe was created in six days and God rested on the seventh day. However, the Quran only mentions the six days of creation because Allah never needs rest.

Gizem: In the series, we go to the year 3672. Technology has advanced so much that we have managed to go beyond Earth, even beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. However, the colonial mindset continues. The Cosmos Union, which controls a large part of the Milky Way Galaxy, wants to invade the Solar System, which at that time is a single country. Iskender, a young man from the Solar System who is forcibly conscripted into the Cosmos Union army, joins a resistance movement and goes to kill a girl named Hayat, who lives alone on a space station in a distant galaxy. But he can’t do it because he can’t reconcile it with his conscience. This is where the series begins. Iskender and Hayat fall into the “past” records stored inside a black hole. Where to? Why? What does all this have to do with Iskender’s family and beliefs? I leave the answers to the books.

Hilâl: Very intriguing. Moving on to the last question. Which character do you feel the most connected to among your books and why?

Gizem: I connect with all of them in different ways. I like Hayat’s (Seven Candles) childlike curiosity and intelligence. I appreciate Crescent’s (Renaissance in the Daisy Field) kindness, Yaz’s (Avaria Games) determination, and desire to achieve great things… Sometimes I wish I could be as talented as my characters.

Hilâl: Thank you very much for joining the interview, Ms. Gizem. It was a pleasure to have you. I wish you continued success. That’s all for our program today. Don’t forget to like our program and follow my account for new content 🙂

Gizem: Thank you.

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Kayıp Rıhtım was originally founded on fantasy and science fiction, and today it is a platform that touches every aspect of literature and life. It started broadcasting in the first month of 2008. In addition, they have been publishing a selection of short stories on a different theme every month for thirteen years.

I took part in the October 2022 selection with the theme of Kehanet (Prophecy) with my story called Gülün Şahitliği (The Testimony of the Rose). The original link is in Turkish, but you can read it in English here – thanks to Enes Talha Coşgun for the translation.

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“I think I can,” she murmured as she looked up at the sky, her head resting on the bus window. The young woman, Simge, whose golden hair shone with sunlight through the bus window, was living a two-part life. She was a student by day and a writer by night. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hold on much to the last one. She hadn’t received a positive response from publishers to the book draft she had prepared. But still, every night, Simge always sits at her desk before going to bed and writes, even if she is going to delete it later.

On a Friday, as the sun hit her hair in the afternoon, she was contemplating an idea that had never occurred to her. Why hadn’t she ever participated in literary competitions? If she wins a prize, she could make a name for herself in the world of literature. With this motivation, she took her phone and googled current competitions. 

She raised her eyebrows when she saw a story contest. The deadline for the contest was the following day. The subject of the competition was Turkish Migration from RumeliaIt was a short story contest, but the deadline was very close, and Simge had almost no knowledge of this theme. She could consult her roommate about this theme, who was studying history. Moreover, her friend’s literary style was also successful. For example, she referred to four holy books and used a rich vocabulary, including Ottoman words. However, because she wanted to trust her own labor, she passed this option and considered the others. 

Meanwhile, the car stopped at a red light. Turning her gaze to the sky, a garden appeared in Simge’s imagination. A cherry tree garden decorated with pink flowers… These flowers would never turn into crimson cherries. They were incinerated in the vandals’ attack. The young woman felt her heart ache, as the muse whispered phrases in her ear. 

“Once upon a time, the garden where large cherries shone like rubies was covered with ash, just like a shadow. The gray-haired man stared long into the burning trees through the window. Then he turned his head and continued reciting the Quran: ‘About what are they asking one another? About the great news – That over which they are in disagreement?’  (Surah An-Naba, 1-2)” 

Inspiration comes piecemeal: first images, then sentences, then the image and the fiction behind the sentences. As Simge took note of the first paragraph on her phone, she wondered why the muse did the opening with a man reading the Quran, and she pondered the verse in her mind. What was the big news that people disagreed about?

She found the interpretation of the chapter and started to read it. She saw that the great news mentioned in the first verses of the Surah An-Naba was the apocalypse. How could she connect this to the migration phenomenon, which she initially hesitated to agree with, then suddenly decided to write about? She made an association between the concepts of apocalypse and migration in her mind. Apocalypse was the end of the universe; migration was the breaking point of a life, the end of the human-spatial relationship. This association gave rise to new inspirations, and Simge opened the notebook of her phone and deleted the sentence “Don’t be afraid to go crazy if you haven’t lost your mind,” and started writing. 

“This word, which the Creator gave the news of the apocalypse, was manifested in the family of the gray-haired man. The Fidan family had been moving from the house they had been living in for generations. The relentless attacks and continuously increasing debts had forced them into this situation. When they could find the power to speak, they were always asking the same question: ‘Are we leaving here?’”

She wondered why she chose the name Fidan for the family. The answer lay deep in her mind. To establish a relationship with the cherry trees in their gardens… Thanks to this name, she would emphasize that the family still planted these trees as saplings and grew them with a labor that spread over the years. And that these efforts were incinerated in a fire… 

And who were the vandals? The author-designate had not yet decided where the family lived in the Balkans. The Balkans was a wide geography, and the departure of the Turks from here was fragmented. The fact that millions of people had to abandon this region altogether was breaking her heart. 

“I’m doing just fine,” thought Simge. “It’s okay if I read some historical records and migration stories. I guess I’ll get something out of it.” 

When she came home, it was empty. Her roommate Ceren had not yet come home, she was doing a research on the recent Balkan history in the library. Simge washed her hands, brewed herself coffee, and opened her computer. She had downloaded several documentaries and doctoral dissertations on recent Balkan history by the time the coffee was ready. In the introduction, the new paragraph of the story formed in her head. This time, she opened a Word document on the computer, not on the phone, and wrote:

“While the Ottoman administration was withdrawing from the Balkans, other nations in the region attempted to separate the remaining Turkish people from their homeland. Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians wrote bloody pages in Turkish history. Did not the Creator say that He made the earth a mattress, not a blood altar? What was the duty assigned to humans other than settling in their mattresses, cultivating the mother earth, eating the gifts it provides, and giving thanks to God? Was the coexistence of people in peace without making belief and race an issue merely a sweet dream?”

Some sentences in the paragraph were abrogated from the Surah An-Naba. The father of the Fidan family, whose garden was burned, would look out the window and think about these while watching the ashes. Simge sighed and lost in thought. How could the peoples who lived in peace for hundreds of years under the same roof of the empire be filled with hatred for each other?

Meanwhile, the nail on the wall of the room caught her eye and distracted her.  Simge exhaled through her nose, got up and opened her closet, and murmured, “Oh Ceren…” as she stirred up the bottom shelf. “Again?” 

Last season, Simge had pulverized the leaves of a dried rose. Then she applied glue to the center of the rose painting she had drawn by slightly touching a white piece of paper with a pencil, and then spread the powder on the paper. Thus, a painting of a rose appeared deep red in the sun and black in the light of the fluorescent lamp.

Simge hung the painting she put in a silver plastic frame on the wall and watched it with pride, but her roommate disagreed.

In the night, Ceren had woken up jumping out of her bed. She had said that she had seen unbearable sights in her dream, which she still refused to tell exactly, and she had declared the responsible one as that rose painting. “Please,” she begged, “Remove that rose!”

Since then, Ceren put the painting in the closet at every opportunity, and Simge took it out of the closet and hung it. Despite the two months that passed, Ceren said that she could not sleep while this painting was hanging on the wall. Simge accepted to cover the frame at night, but it wasn’t enough for her roommate. 

Although she understood why her roommate was so sensitive, Simge couldn’t help but be angry with her. Ceren was a girl who grew up under violence and abuse from her parents, even though she survived what she went through, she still had a mark on her soul. 

After hanging the frame back on the wall, the woman sat down at the computer. Pushing the box of antipsychotic pills that kept hitting her hand and a glass of water on the table, she almost involuntarily typed “having a nightmare due to an object” into the search engine. In fact, she was thinking about the story, not Ceren’s attitude, but she found herself investigating this strange issue. Sometimes the human body does not adapt to its consciousness.

The websites providing scientific information mentioned that an object may be related to a trauma experienced by the person having nightmares. For some reason, this explanation did not make Simge feel satisfied. She wanted to go deeper, into mysterious, parapsychological sources. However, under normal circumstances, Simge would believe in science, the most reliable method of acquiring knowledge known to humanity, and would not trust pseudoscience, but at that moment, the mystery and excitement within her heart had taken hold of her.

She found what she was looking for on an old website that looked like it was from twenty years ago. 

“Dreams Linked to Objects 

Each object in the universe has a consciousness of its own capacity. It records and reflects what is happening around it. This definition also includes objects that we describe as inanimate. Even a stone, a flower remembers and tells what happened around it. Dreams connected with objects are the objects revealing and narrating themselves to you.

Simge had a sarcastic smile on her lips. “No way!” she said loudly, but she was trying to remember where she got the rose from. When a friend who was studying in the history department gave her the rose, it seemed to be dried up as if it had withered centuries ago. A fever fell into her for no reason. She called her friend in a hurry and asked which garden she had plucked the rose from as soon as she answered, without inquiring after her health. 

“What is this all about?” said Bilge, surprised. 

The faster Simge spoke, the slower her friend spoke. “I didn’t pluck it. It was in the closet in my grandparents’ living room, among the antiques.” 

As a result of Simge’s persistent questions, she was convinced to tell the story of the rose.

“My late grandmother carefully kept this dry rose and told us to keep it,” said Bilge. “It should never be torn apart… Otherwise, the secret will be revealed. The body that receives the secret, makes the secret its soul.”

“What would it the secret do?”

“Well, that secret would so ingrained in you that you would carry the secret like a soul in your body.” She sounded like even she didn’t believe what she was saying. “She had said so. We just had laughed what she said, but after she died…” She let out a sigh. “We started having the same dream all the time. Mixed but ordinary images: mosque, house, sea. When my father and I saw the same dream over and over again, we decided the reason was the rose. But we couldn’t explain how it happened…”

“Bilge, then why did you give me this rose?” 

“I just wanted to get rid of the dreams. It gets tedious when it repeats itself… I thought it wouldn’t have the same effect on you. Did you also dream?” 

Simge answered the question with another question. “Where do you think this rose was plucked from? Please answer as narrowly as possible.”

A long silence… “My grandmother comes from a Greek immigrant family, she witnessed the migration when she was a baby, but she does not remember it. Since their origins are in the Peloponnese peninsula, the rose may also belong there.”

Simge thanked Bilge and hung up the phone in a frustrated state. Trying to erase the issue with the painting from her mind, she continued reading the doctoral thesis. She had a story to finish writing by tomorrow. 

In the relevant section of the thesis, the massacres against civilians in the Balkans were described. First was the Navarino massacre in 1821. She thought her heart would stop as she read the details. 

A historian named William St. Clair described what happened as follows: “The Turks in Greece left few traces behind. In the spring of 1821, they were suddenly destroyed, and the world didn’t even notice or shed a tear for them… They were killed deliberately and ruthlessly, and no remorse was ever shown.”

Simge held her breath. Her pupils were dilated, her upper lip crushed between her teeth. Did the rose on the wall witness this massacre?

“It’s crazy.” she said, and rubbed her eyes. “There is no such thing. Flowers can’t record what’s going on around them like a camera.” She opened the Word document and wrote the new sentences that came to her mind, this time in her imagination, the father of the Fidan family was talking:

“Imagine a five-hundred-year-old plane tree, its roots spread out in the ground, its branches wrapped around the sun, its leaves shaded to the earth’s mattress, its trunk as solid as a mountain. How could you dismantle this plane tree? Are your axes enough for its magnificence? Even if you have the power to do this, how could you bear to harm the green that stretches to the blueness? History has written many oddities and atrocities of man. They did, my dear, they did. They uprooted the Turkish plane tree from these lands by hurting, bleeding, and killing.”

She could not continue to write because she was sweating cold as if she was having a heart attack. A suffocating feeling was growing stronger inside her. Simge restarted the computer, splashed water on her face, and stood up to regain consciousness. When she turned around, she screamed so fiercely that her throat was almost going to tear. In the middle of the room, a boy stood with a bloody face, his clothes shattered, his arms broken, and he was looking into her eyes. 

“It’s not real,” she said, closing her eyes and ears tightly. “Calm down, calm down, it’s not real…”

Was she going crazy or was she just sleeping and having nightmares? If so, she would have sacrificed everything to wake up. She didn’t want to stay in the house, she had to throw herself on the street no matter what. She had to find peace among other people and get rid of the game that loneliness played on her. She had to see the door to get out, so she slowly pulled her hands away and opened her eyes. 

And another scream erupted.

There was no room anymore. Instead, there were images that Bilge said she saw all the time, but they were distorted. The mosque is destroyed… The house is burned down… The sea was all red. Meanwhile, the child continues to stand right in front of her in a concrete manner, never averting his accusing gaze.

Was this the secret of the rose that Bilge’s grandmother said? What a dark prophecy! Was it this bloody testimony she had unearthed by smashing the rose? Most importantly, how would Simge get rid of this heartache? 

Simge slowly felt her knees unravel. “Please…” She slowly fell to the ground clinging to the wall, now she was crawling. “Please leave.”

Meanwhile, in the midst of strange and translucent images, she noticed that she was still in her room. Fortunately, the images of the rose did not take her to unknown lands, but this time Simge did not have the strength to leave. The dead boy was still staring into the eyes of the living woman with all his eerie appearance.

“I can’t save you. Please go. It’s too late…”

Her pleas were useless. At this point, an idea occurred to the woman who was losing all her physical and mental strength. If she could rip out the rose painting that was still hanging on the wall and destroy it, she could end this nightmare she had while awake.

She jumped to her feet and went through the dead boy as she reached the opposite wall. She held the silver frame with the rose painting. At that very moment, as if the ends of the cables were touching each other, her consciousness broke off from time and space. She went to two centuries ago. 

Peloponnese, 1821… Two adults were beating a child in the garden of a mansion with mocking laughter, which Simge saw in the middle of the room. Then they were torturing him. What happened was unclear, it looked like old movies, with one difference, it wasn’t black and white, it was red and white. As if watching from the reflection of a pool of blood. The boy’s blood flowed like a stream and spilled on the roots of a nearby rose sapling. 

Simge’s gaze changed. The fearful expression on her face disappeared and became serene. She calmly got up from the ground and sat down in front of the computer table, taking the silver frame under her seat. She started touch-typing so fast that five or six pages were filled in half an hour. 

Ceren returned from the library hours later and found Simge kneeling on the floor in the corridor. She put her hands on her cheeks and looked at the whirligig spinning on the ground with a smile in her eyes.

After Ceren laughed, she said, “Simge! You are like kids, what are you doing? Where did you get that whirligig?”

The kneeling woman did not answer. She continued to watch the toy whirling around as if she had never heard of it.

The woman, who had just come home, passed by her and came to the door of the room they shared. She saw the silver frame shattered on the ground. “My god!” she said. “Luckily I’m wearing slippers. How did it break? Simge?”

Still, there was no answer… Simge continued to watch the whirligig as if she were hypnotized. It was also strange that the whirligig hadn’t slowed down yet, as if it has an internal combustion engine. “I wonder how much power she had used to spin that thing,” Ceren thought, sighing, and then entered the room. She walked with slippers, trying not to step on the shards of glass. The open screen of the computer caught her attention. 

“Simge, what is this ?” she asked. When her question went unanswered, she sat down and started reading.

After reading the first sentences, she exclaimed, “This is amazing! Simge, I have to say that you will win the competition with this.”

After a while, the story about the Fidan family suddenly stopped and another story started. This story was narrated through the eyes of a ten-year-old child, unlike the old and rich words present in the first story, a much simpler language was used. Ceren had experienced a disappointment as strong as her admiration just a little while ago.

“I am Ali Osman. I will turn ten this year in Ramadan, says Granny. We live in a mansion overlooking the Aegean Sea, and we love playing in the neighborhood with my four older sisters when we aren’t at school. And my favorite toy is… The whirligig! I spin the whirligig so fast that no one can catch up with me.”

The daily life of a child was being described throughout the paragraphs. Then the narrator of the story was saying, “I don’t understand the elders at all.”

“I want to grow up, but I don’t understand adults at all. We, the children of the neighborhood, love to play together. Nikolas, Mehmet, Yorgo, and me are good friends. But the elders are separating among themselves. It is said that the Greeks are planning a rebellion, and they will drive away the Turks, that is, us, from here. I don’t believe it at all. Because we are neighbors, friends, and we will all grow up and grow old together.”

“This part is beautiful,” Ceren muttered and raised her voice. “Simge, what contest was this for?”

Still, there is no answer… “What a whirligig,” she said and switched to the side tab with the Alt+Tab keys, hoping that she would find the details of the competition there. However, she came across a website about parapsychology. The section “Dreams Associated with Objects” was followed by “Transfers Associated with Objects”.

Ceren first read the description of the dreams and began to figure out why she had nightmares while the rose was hanging on the wall. In her nightmares, she saw the murder of a child wearing clothes from the 1800s, living in one of the old Turkish mansions.

In the other paragraph on the website, the following was written:

“Transfers Linked to Objects

Objects also have the capacity to carry souls. For example, our body, which consists of a pile of meat and bones, carries our soul and functions like a machine used by this soul. Animal and plant bodies have this ability, although not as much as the human body. However, inanimate bodies can only carry the soul, if they don’t, they cannot be used by that soul. Souls that leave their bodies under normal conditions do not move to other objects. However, there may be some anomalies, for example, a soul that has left its body in pain may take refuge in the nearest object.

If this object has a feature that reflects light like a mirror, the image of the soul may be reflected, which creates the ghost phenomenon. If the object is soft or fragmentable, it can transfer the soul to a living body that touches that object.”

Ceren straightened up from her place with her knees trembling, extended her head through the door of the room, and saw Simge continuing to watch the whirligig, who was still spinning, in the same state. 

“You are not Simge.” she muttered. Now, everything was clear in her mind. The theory was very clear: the soul of the murdered little Ali Osman had passed into the rose with his blood and had taken over Simge’s body with the fragmentation of that rose. It was Ali Osman watching the ball in the corridor, not Simge. 

However, to explain a mystery, the first thing to do is to use the possibilities of science. Making a mystical tale up is the easiest way, and it led people to delusion. If Ceren had used critical thinking and scientific consciousness, instead of thinking that a ghost had entered Simge’s body, she might have thought that she had suddenly lost her sanity, or that she had undergone some kind of fatigue and stopped writing and started to spin a whirligig in the corridor.

If she remembered the rules of physics, Ceren would understand that it is impossible for a whirligig to spin non-stop. Because the friction force would slow the whirligig down constantly, and stop it sooner or later. She could figure out that a whirligig that never stops could only exist in her brain as an hallucination. Besides, there was no whirligig in the house before, and it would have been impossible for this toy to be here now if Simge had not bought it after she left work.

If she thought in accordance with the rules of logic, she would realize that the result would not come before the reason, so she would not know that Simge decided to participate in literary competitions unless they talked on the phone. How did she say “Simge, you win the competition with this story.”? Or how did what she read on that so-called website fit into what she experienced? The answers to all these questions were clear with the principle called Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is true.

She took the antipsychotic pill on the table and swallowed it with water. When she looked down the corridor again, she saw no one there. She opened the Word document, which she used as a diary on the computer, and noted the date of that day.

“Hallucinations are the prophecy of memories hidden deep in consciousness.

During the day, I conducted research in the library on Balkan history and especially on the migration of Turks from the Balkans. My goal was to illuminate the nightmares I have seen so far, and also to unravel the secrets of my personality named ‘Ali Osman’. As I got on the bus and going home, I switched to my ‘personality named Simge’. I was able to remember myself, my main personality named Ceren as someone else. Simge likes to write like me and wants to participate in story competitions, but she is not as talented as me. Yet what she wrote was literarily strong, in keeping with my true personality. In addition, the subject of the competition she wanted to participate in was suitable for my research in the library. The ‘Simge personality’ is slowly beginning to integrate with the main personality. 

When I came home, I was still Simge, but I would be able to provide some continuity, so I continued the research in the library at home. When I read about the Navarino massacre in 1821, Ali Osman became a child massacred by the Greeks in Peloponnese in my head and I had very strong hallucinations about him. 

I understood that I created the personality of Ali Osman in connection with my childhood. As Ceren, I could not bear to be tortured by my own father and mother and I put these things on him. I remember how I objected to the similar things my doctor said a few months ago.

While I was painting the rose, the frame of which I had broken during the delusion, I freed myself from my personality named Bilge, and today Ali Osman has united with Simge. Just two months ago I was a multiple personality disorder patient living with four split personalities, now I think I’ve managed to get it down to two. Just me and Simge. There is no one else. I hope I will make a full recovery soon.”

She saved the document, turned off the computer, and went to fetch a vacuum cleaner to clean the glass shards on the floor of the house where she lived alone, and the remains of the rose that had witnessed the delusions.

^{Enes Talha Coşgun translated this story from Turkish to English.}

The man with torn shoe was walking under the sun. His lion’s mane hair was wet, beads of sweat glistening between his dirty beard, and his shirt stuck to his back. Although he has recently turned his twenty, his sagging eyes and slow movements showed him like a man over his thirties. His mouth was dry. Inside of him, there was longing for two things: Color and colourlessness. The color of the trees, and the colorlessness of the water.

All directions were calling him with all their might. What would he see if he went right? If he went to the left, what would he face? Mirage or truth? He wiped the sand from his face and felt his body getting heavier. It was like a curse left from Karun, hanging around his neck, and he was destined to be sucked into the sand.

He was one of the lucky and few people who were passionate about their profession. He had agreed to leave the cold water and cool weather, and had been dragged into the deserts of Africa alone to capture stunning shots from the secluded corners of the world. His assistant got into the second car with the supplies and ran away, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert. His car was out of gas, his devices were out of batteries. There was nothing to eat but a melted chocolate bar in his pocket. Dağhan was a deserted island in an ocean called desert. 

There was nothing left but a four-wheel drive left behind and tents that seemed vaguely ahead. His facial muscles were hurting due to frowning for a long time. The photographer finally sat down on the ground, he was all done in. He took a few sips from the flask he was carrying with him. Closing his eyes was useless. The ball in the sky, setting the desert on fire, was also turning the unfortunate traveler’s eyelids into a red curtain. 

He asked himself where he was. He felt the sand between his fingers. Was that all a dream? Or was this desert a representation of his life from beginning to end? Was the life he left behind the dreams he saw while he was chained to Plato’s cave? Questions flowed through his mind like a river of sand. Concrete has taken the place of the abstract.

What would become of him when the water in the flask runs out? He was going to die… How? He played his own ending like a movie in the dream scene. He was going to start burning hot as fire because he couldn’t sweat. He was going to feel dizzy, his eyes get dark, and he fall to the ground. His mouth was going to dry out. He was going to double up with the great pain in his kidneys. His dehydrated spirit was going to be withdrawn from his veins as if he witnessed the verse telling that every living being was created from water. His desolate funeral wasn’t going to be covered by soil, but by the lonely night.

As he tried to step into the torment of the heat, he remembered the upcoming night as if it were a lover. Oh, where were the winds, why they didn’t blow? Why wasn’t the sun withdrawing and being replaced by the bitter cold of a desert? An awareness fell into his heart, like a raindrop on a lake. Is that why Fuzuli gave Laila her name? Was the lover who prayed for his suffering to increase at the Kaaba the one who ended up in the desert because of this? To miss the night more in the heart of that scorching day?

With one last force, he took support from the ground and stood up, he was hopeful. His body breathed with air, and the soul with hope. He wanted to get back in the car. There was no oasis he could arrive, so he could wait the end of his life on a mattress he was familiar with. Besides, there was a chance the car would have caught the attention of a caravan or a helicopter.

He stumbled along. A few desert thorns sunk in his trotters. His vision became blurred. He could only choose a black silhouette. He was trying to reach the car under the guidance of this silhouette, which was like a bending, rising, growing, shrinking candle flame in the windy air. He didn’t know how far he was from his destination. His predictions were vanishing into the desert sands. If the sky had been darkened, at least the full moon full and the stars would be his friend. 

He stopped to catch his breath. In the meantime, he rubbed his eyes and began to see the surroundings clearly. He saw huge logs, dead and blackened. In fact, these were the silhouette he saw. The car he chased like a butterfly chasing candlelight, wasn’t in front of the man in the desert. Dağhan had been heading in the wrong direction all this time.

He moaned with disappointment. The idea of giving up flew by like lightning, but suddenly he realized that he was actually very lucky. In fact, he would have died if he had gone in the right direction. Because the windows of the car would cause a greenhouse effect, and the seats of the four-wheel drive were going to be warm enough to fry human flesh. 

If there were huge logs in the middle of the desert, there was someone who put them there. Perhaps behind it was hidden a small fountain, a tent, or even an oasis. After a short break, he set off with a stronger determination.

He reached the logs with that power, which is called “for dear life”, and which man can only reach when his life is in danger. He was beaming with joy. He lifted his head and looked. The three logs lay on the ground, touching each other at random angles. A fourth marble log was sewn between them, some of it buried in sand. Unfortunately, there was no source of water nearby.

As he crawled closer to the foremost log, the man noticed that the log was hollow inside. The hollow was large enough for a person to fit.

Dağhan felt relieved after getting rid of the burning sun, and entered the cavity, and laid face down. This place was cooler compared to the outside. He listened to his own breath for a while. “If there are giant logs in the middle of the desert…” he thought once again, there must be someone carrying them. Maybe he or she would come back, give water to Dağhan, and save him from the desert.

Standing up on his elbows, he lifted his head from the log. He swept his hair back and looked around. He was still thirsty, but it didn’t hurt him anymore. He sincerely believed that he was going to be saved.

When he looked into the other log, which lay at an angle that he could see, he remembered a story he had read once. It was about a mirror shop that sells bronze, silver, gold and wooden framed mirrors… The protagonist of the story visits this shop, which has a feature that is nowhere in the world. He asks the seller:

“How much is bronze gold?”

“A hundred Akça.”

“Why is it so expensive?”

Because the bronze mirror could show five years of the past. The hero gets emotional, sees his younger self from five years ago. There were similar scenes in the silver and gold mirrors, each of which had the feature of showing the past ten and twenty years, respectively. 

But the wooden-framed mirror was one hundred thousand Akça. The protagonist astonishes and says, “I want to look in that mirror too”. But the seller warns him. “Not everyone can look in that mirror. Your heart can’t take it.”

The protagonist insists on looking in the last mirror and collapses to the ground, breathing his last.

Dağhan held his heart, which was beating as if it were about to crash. On the “Wooden framed mirror”, he saw his own future. Inside the other log, there was a skeleton.

25.05.2022 || It’s been four years since Renaissance in the Daisy Field was published! In honor of this, I am sharing a special chapter. Also, I was going to make a lot of drawings, but it didn’t catch up… Have a nice read! 🌼

2022, The Isle of Sunnyland

As soon as she opened the door of the caravan, a cool humid air hit Crescent’s face, whose a thin white cardigan on her nightdress. The sound of the waves hitting the rocks from afar was heard from the deep. Even though it was still twilight, it could be seen how the herbs around the caravan flying through the morning wind. Cres blinked. She watched Monustar Castle, which was appearing in the form of a black silhouette under the prussian-blue sky.

When she got cold, she closed the door and hugged her cardigan a little more. The hot air inside wasn’t completely gone, so she got warm immediately. She looked at her husband and son sleeping in the caravan bed under the faint baby-blue light of the night light. There was a shelf next to the bed where she put her bag, took out her cell phone, which had been on charge all night, and pressed the button on the side.

The screen lit up. In front of a family photo of Crescent, Melih and Cem who were locked in a close embrace, the time and date were written: May 25, 2022, 4:32 AM. They were going to celebrate a double birthday today.

Cem Cansever was born while the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the world, midday on May 25, 2020. His face and facial expressions resembled his father. Another one of the men I loved, his mother thought. The little man she loved and always will. A loving, growing family.

She took her bag quietly and went out at her fingertips. She breathed in the fresh air of the morning. She sat down in the lawn chair, which was left in front of the caravan last night, and took out the items in her bag: A tablet, a notebook and a rubber buckle. She opened her notebook after she tyed her hair up. The notebook was a mess like a garnish. The notes she took while practising Turkish, scribbled shopping lists, interesting information she heard randomly and didn’t want to forget, the plan of the week…

While digging through the old pages, she noticed that she wrote mistakenly her son’s name as “Gem” at first, frequently. Gem was an English word, pronounced as “cem” in Turkish, and this was the reason why Crescent named her son Cem. It meant “jewelry” and was the way Crescent’s father addressed her.

She closed the notebook, looked at the castle again for a moment, opened the tablet, and searched for a file. What she wanted to find was a letter transferred to digital environment, which was written six centuries ago.

Crescent Hill was born on June 1, but every year, she celebrates her birthday a week earlier. Because June 1 was full of sad memories for her. When the first day of June came, she would buy flowers, light candles, and commemorate the family members she lost.

The year before the pandemic, she went to the cemetery in London and left flowers in two tombs lying next to each other. For Daisy and Jasmine… And for John Joseph Daisy and Jasmine Llyin who has been given a representative tomb although her bones have not yet been found… Apart from that, she was always in Istanbul; inside her room, she used to go into her mourning, quietly. It was painful not to have been able to go to her father’s, -Eagle Hill’s- grave on the island even for once.

Therefore, she started to strive to spend June 1, 2022 on the island months ago. Her efforts had borne fruit, and this year she had been fortunate. She flew with Melih to London and then to The Isle of Sunnyland. Here she was breathing the air of the island where she was born, raised and became a princess.

It was her first time here since 2017. Access to The Isle of Sunnyland was difficult, the underground system was not working due to lack of maintenance. This year, they were able to go to the island with the caravan after they carried out a costly maintenance.

Crescent hoped the challenges would soon be over. As the sole inheritor of The Isle of Sunnyland, she was meeting with architectural companies. Monustar Castle would be restored, the island would be rearranged, the transportation system and infrastructure would be established, and in about five years, the Kingdom of Hillyin would be opened to tourists. According to the promises of the companies, the island would provide a serious income and bring the Cansever family to wealth.

As the light was shining, the woman in the chair found the letter.

A week before his execution on June 1, 1389, Eagle wrote to his daughter:

❝To my dear daughter Crescent…

Today is May 25, 1389. You’ll be 14 in exactly one week.

My little purple jewelry, which was born in the room where I wrote these lines, was only a week old baby. You were almost small enough to fit in my palms. I held you in my arms in fear. I feared you’d cry, I thought I’d hurt you without knowing. When you opened your tiny eyes and saw me and your mother, you laughed so beautiful that years passed and it stayed in the walls of my heart like a painting.

A week from now, I’ll be smiling to death for the sake of that smile. In my last breath, I will remember your first smile.

The law of the Holy Mongrel… I didn’t want to mention this crumbly relic in my last memory. But this law led me to write this letter. This law wanted to separate us from each other. This law sentenced you and me to death the day you turned fourteen and became a teenage girl.

Time has flowed as fast as the rivers descending from the high mountains… If you can grow up, if you can get through that day – and I did my best to make it happen – you’re going to witness the flow of time and you’re not going to believe it.

You’ll probably be in England with your mother when you read these lines. Dr. Daisy will be your stepfather. He’s a good person, he’s no stranger to you, you know him from your school years. You’ll have a happy life, my dear girl. That’s why my heart burns not with worry, but only with longing. Embrace your new family. Be respectful of your family and your community. Actually, I know, the otherwise is not possible for my princess… I wanted to write anyway because fathers give advice.

Maybe someone will tell you something about the past, something that happened before you were born. You can be mad at me. You might think I’m a lot different than the way you know me. Whatever you say, I accept in advance. But, my dear girl, I kneel before you and beg you.

Please, my jewel, don’t hate me. It’ll kill me. Only then will my soul find peace.

I want to know that you love me. You can be angry with the one you love, or even angry with the one you love the most. But please don’t lower your head because of me, don’t make a sentence that starts with “I wish”.

When you hear my news, don’t cry and ruin yourself. Smile like you did when you were a baby. If you commemorade me once in a while, we’re not separated. Because the real death of man is in oblivion.

With eternal love,
Your father❞

She finished the letter she memorized with tears, once again. She turned to the castle and said, “I love you, dad, I will always love you.”

^{Enes Talha Coşgun translated this story from Turkish to English. Thanks to him.}

^{Enes Talha Coşgun translated this story from Turkish to English.}

𓇻

The sound-waves spread from the floor, climbed onto my pillow, reached my brain through my ears, and woke me up in the middle of the night. The adrenaline was wandering in my blood. My eyes opened as if I hadn’t slept. I was on my guard, listening to the rattling sounds coming from the living room, imagining scenarios in my head where I kill the owner of the sounds.

I was holding my breath. My heart was beating so hard that it was almost going to pop out of my chest. I put my hand under the pillow and felt the comforting coldness at the other side of it. Then a sharper cold touched my fingers: The metal handle of my pistol. I set the gun and stood up. I lay in ambush in front of the bedroom door and watched inside. I looked funny and scary in pink pajamas, a worn-out shirt, lion’s mane hair, and flowing makeup. I crawled into the cellar, threw myself inside, and took a deep breath to calm down.

There was only the light of the green screens. He was hitting the wall with spoiled plaster and bags of pulses on the floor. I blinked a few times to get my eyes warm and sat down at the CCTV system. Surveillance cameras with night vision was providing me full sight from every corner of the house.

The intruder was in the living room. He skipped the expensive TV, the figurines, the chandelier and looked under the seats. Obviously, he was a fool, so it would be easy to take him out. I knew what he was looking for, but he didn’t know where to look.

He was going to follow the path of the others. He will come out of the hall, stand in the hallway, and look around with indecision. And soon he will notice the corridor with the bedroom. He will look first… And look… And will wait to see something. He will notice the green light coming out of the CCTV screens leaking from the old door of the cellar.

That’s when the light will grow because I will open the door.

The light will take him away, because I will shoot him right in the middle of his forehead.

The cameras got into motion. The intruder was coming out of the hall. He looked exactly as the way as I expected, waited, noticed the cellar, and approached. The door to the cellar opened. The green light grew, and a gun went off inside the house.

A scream came from the children’s room as my enemy collapsed like a chopped pine tree. The kid’s awake! My heart twisted because his sleep was interrupted for nothing. It was happening in this way every time.

“Don’t go out, baby, go to bed!” I called out. I didn’t want the little soul in the room to see a bloody corpse lying on the floor. When I realized that I had convinced the boy, I took a sigh and walked down the hallway and turned on the light.

The first sentence that comes to my mind was “How am I going to clean this?”. When they were wounded by a gunshot, their blood flows more than people’s. The floor was covered with a sticky blue liquid. I grimaced with disgust, turned my head away from the gel-looking gray-skinned freak, and headed to the bedroom to bring a sheet.

I thought, “This is the eighth attack of Shirean in the third month of the year.” Sometimes I speak to myself when I am thinking. “How long is this going to last?”

I started crying because of stress and sleeplessness. I was looking for a sheet in the closet while wiping the tears on my face. The chain of events that caused my tears passed through my imagination one by one.

A night in December, four months ago… I was working as a security guard at a university. I was warming my hands with a mug full of coffee in front of the cabin. When a rumble blew me away, the whole coffee spilled on the floor. During the five-second shock, five thousand possibilities crossed my mind: We had been attacked by terrorists, we had been hit by fighter jets, gas had exploded…

When I realized that I still am capable of breathing, I had the courage to look at the laboratory building. I saw that the windows were broken by the intensity of the sound, that the students jumping out of the building ran away in fear, and that a child standing upstairs by the window was losing his balance and falling down. My feet moved independently of my consciousness. I crossed the distance between the security cabin and the laboratory building in seconds, opened my arms and waited for the weight which is going to break my bones.

But what fell on my lap was as light as a pillow. Although it was the same size as a four-year-old boy, its limbs were thin, and head was large. Its skin was dark blue, and there were blue irises in the middle of its yellow eyeball. The tiny lips were as blue as its eyes. It was not human, nor did it resemble an animal species we know. I thought it was a plush toy. I didn’t understand until its eyeballs were turned toward my eyes and the blackness of its pupils grew inside its purple irises as if a drop of paint had fallen into the marbling: That thing was alive and conscious.

While I was waiting in shock, the police came and drove us away from the building. They took the creature from my lap in a hurry. I found myself in an ambulance before I knew what was going on. They gave me a ride home after a general check-up. I hadn’t even taken my clothes off yet, but I got a call from my chief. I was told not to tell anyone what happened.

But I wanted to know what was going on. What caused the explosion? What was that strange creature that fell into my lap and looked into my eyes? The news reported the incident as a simple gas leakage. Rector, governor, mayor, other officials… They were all lying like a rug to the public.

I finally couldn’t stand it. On the tenth day of the explosion, I went to the head of the physics department’s office and asked him what happened. I had prepared myself for all kinds of bad odds. I didn’t care if I was reprimanded, fired, or even arrested.

Contrary to what I expected, the president received me quite calmly. He repeated the pretext for the gas leakage told in the media. I stated that I would not believe this, and I had the chance to explain my experiences that night in detail for the first time.

He listened to me to the end with a pensive, almost sad expression. “So that’s it.” he said. “You saved the child.”

“Child?” I asked.

He said “Yes”. “It is a child, technically a refugee.”

Then he explained that the explosion was the result of a meteor hit. “We’ve always looked for extraterrestrial life on planets, but we didn’t think to look the places close to our planet. There are more than six hundred thousand asteroids and dwarf planets in the Asteroid Belt…”

“What? I did not understand.” I interrupted the professor. “The asteroid belt?”

“The region between Mars and Jupiter. There are hundreds of thousands of small rocks here.”

“It must have been investigated!” I said. “In fact, I read in the news that spaceships have been landed on some asteroids.”

“I’m talking about six hundred thousand celestial bodies, Mrs. Melis.” said the president. “We can’t land spaceships on all of them. If there is an advanced civilization on any asteroid or dwarf planet on underground, it is very difficult for us to detect its existence remotely. Unless we didn’t encounter.”

“How?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Did we, by chance, come across an alien civilization living underground in one of the asteroids?”

“Exactly.” he said, raising his index finger.

My questions rained down on the president like rain. How could satellites, planes, people looking up at the sky in the open air not have noticed the falling meteorite? Why was the existence of aliens not disclosed to other humans? Why was the child a refugee, how did they know that?

He gave satisfactory answers to all my questions. Land of Renka, that was their name, they had an advanced technology for invisibility. The spaceships they built from the carved rocks could not be detected by radar. And when we detect some of them, we thought they were asteroids, and most of them were without “aliens” inside, and were falling apart in the Earth’s atmosphere. No one at the university was aware of the existence of this new asteroid until it hit the roof of the building and blew out its windows.

A few hours later, Renka contacted Ankara. This communication was made in Turkish. In preparation for such an accident, there were special officers who learned common languages such as Chinese, English, Spanish. People of Renka had the capacity to learn up to twenty human languages. They gave information about themselves. They said that they were aware of the humans and did not want their existence to be known, and they made an agreement with the state, the nature of which we do not know exactly.

“It is the child of a group that committed a crime of rebellion against the Renka Government. The rebels disappeared as they entered our planet, and it is the only one who stayed alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“As a result of friction, their ships were burned.”

I remained silent, looking at the tips of my feet. I thought about what it would be like if I lost all my loved ones in a country where I did not speak the language. Even in this scenario, I was better off than the alien boy, because I might have had a chance to go back to my country, but for him, there was no such possibility. Besides, I was going to stay with the beings of my kind anyway, but he was going to be alone for the rest of his life.

A torch shone within me. “I want to take care of it.” I said. “It shouldn’t be living in hospitals or laboratories. No matter what the type, it is a kid, and needs a family.”

“This is impossible.”

“Why, because I live alone? Do you believe I can’t provide a family environment just because I’m single?”

“Melis, I understand you, but we don’t know anything about that kid’s species. What does it eat, what does it drink, what is its gender; we don’t know anything. We need to examine it under laboratory conditions. Don’t worry, no one will hurt it.”

He spoke a little more and persuaded me to wait at least a week. Within a week, they would observe the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on the child, detect possible microorganisms in its body, and allow it to live with me if it turned out that it was okay for it to live in a home environment. I also had the chance to visit the kid every day in college.

I waited for the end of seven days as if I were waiting for the holiday in my childhood. I took the lab route early every morning. While the blood was taken from the kid’s arm, I sat next to it and gave support, took its urine sample for analysis.

The doctor interpreted the results of the blood and urinalysis and said that the Renkas had more calcium in their blood than a human. He gave me some advice. After washing, boiling for a few minutes and drying the eggshells, I could grind them to get powder. If I mix this powder with a glass of milk and give it to the kid mornings and evenings, I could feed the kid ideally. I definitely shouldn’t give him a sugary food, because its body couldn’t handle it. However, the kid had no teeth. That meant it couldn’t eat like us.

It had a tiny body that could be fed with only two glasses of milk a day.

I prepared one of the rooms in the house for it. I made a bed with a mosquito net and bought toys. It found its place odd at first, but soon got used to it.

One day it started talking, said its name. “Ayo.”

“Ayo!” I repeated.

I melted when it said “Melis!” with its mouth without lips.

When it had learned enough of our language, it began to speak of its country. It said the name of the comminity it belonged to. (I don’t know how to spell it, it can be “soreen”, “sorean” or “soregen”.) In their alphabet, this word is written in a hollow circle, “O.” Their alphabet wasn’t phonetic, just like the Far Eastern languages, they had a different letter for each word. Ayo said that even scholars do not master all the letters in the language of sorean.

Ant there were “shireans”, a community of chosen ones who, although they came from the same origin as the others, they changed the composition of their blood and gained a long life and a structure that doesn’t get sick. Shireans decided to destroy the soreans on the grounds that they consumed limited resources.

Ayo hugged me and said that I couldn’t protect it even if I wanted to, that the shireans will kill it somehow. “No.” I said to myself. “I will prove you wrong.”

I was thinking about this with a sheet in my hands to cover the corpse of the shirean. I stroked my face and straightened my hair. I had to call the commissioner.

Once I was having a hard time, asked myself why I put up with all this. Did I have a “mother’s heart”? No, compassion wasn’t peculiar to mothers. Could I expand the expression “the essence of the human being, the human heart”? And that was also inadequate, because I knew; I had witnessed the compassion of the animals and the sorean, who is flying through the unknown dreams in its bed at the moment.

I wasn’t actually doing anything. Among all living and non-living beings… What can I say? How can I tell? There was a bond of light. Some kind of net. I was just clinging to this web, thus I could understand better a being else of me, and feel they were alive, and I was acting accordingly.

Psychologists call it “empathy,” while mystics call it “a drop from the ocean of God’s infinite mercy”.

While I was holding Ayo’s tiny fingers, I was looking at its blueberry and chocolate dragee-like whiteless eyes and convinced that we shared a common heart.

The heart of the universe.

^{Enes Talha Coşgun translated this story from Turkish to English.}

On a working day, those who were half asleep, their heads in their front, their hands in their pockets, on the way of their bread and butter; were staring at the image of a woman passing like a feather through the middle of the street and leaving an ephemeral strong wind behind her.

As she was walking with running steps and her broom hair was flying, the woman was saying, “A promise… I made a promise.” She took to the main street regardless of the stranger glances and did not slow down until the bus stop. Even at the bus stop, she was clapping her hands, banging her feet on the ground, and shaking as if she had a basic need that was inviting every human being.

She tried to get on the bus before anyone else. Yet she stood up as if there was no place to sit. The woman, who was warned by the driver because she was constantly walking from front to back and from back to front during the trip, sat on the edge of an empty seat. She swung back and forth restlessly. When they reached a rather desolate stop, she hurriedly raised her hand. Even though she stumbled as she got off, she did not stop, she redressed her balance by bouncing on one foot and started running in the direction the bus was looking.

That street, surrounded by detached houses and lush gardens, was the last stop. As the driver stepped away from his last passenger to go home, a wristwatch at the edge of the stairs, shining with the golden light of the rising sun, caught his eye. He got up in a flash and picked up the watch. He put his steering wheel straight and drove after her. When he could not show his presence by shouting and making hand gestures, he honked the horn with all his might. However, the woman did not react even in the face of this loud noise that could deafen a person.

At the end of the road, the driver parked the bus. He lost a lot of time during that time. He followed the woman into the field with the watch in his hand. Among the yellowed grass and under the warm gaze of the sun, one ran ahead and the other one ran behind.

The woman, whose hair resembled wheat stalks, was carrying youth on her leaping legs. The driver, who welcomes the signature of agedness in his forehead was stopping and breathing constantly, and opening the distance between him and the woman in front of him. There came a moment when the driver felt dizzy and his vision became blurred. He felt like he saw a silhouette waiting for him ahead.

When he recovered himself and caressed his face, he came across the woman’s large, black eyes. He realized that the owner of the watch was really waiting for him. First he walked and delivered the woman’s deposit, feeling the disintegration of the soil lumps free from the plant on the sole of his foot. Then he tried to leave, but something strange fixed his feet where they were. The man waited for a move: A word, thanksgiving or some other reaction. However, the woman was still standing with the same expression, without saying anything.

After seconds of recession, the woman who turned the clock, muttered, “There are five more minutes.”. She closed her eyes and drew the fresh air into her lungs, deeply. “Thank you.” she said then, looking at the man’s face. “You brought me here, and my watch to me. I would not like to withhold you.”

“Forgive my curiosity, please.” said the driver. He closed his lips, took a deep breath, and gave himself time to choose his words. But the woman already knew what the driver wanted to ask.

“I looked like crazy when I ran, didn’t I?”

“Actually, I was wondering why you were in such a hurry.” the man said. “I wanted to help if there was an emergency.”

Suddenly the woman began to laugh. “Well… It doesn’t matter, really. I mean, it’s important to me, of course, but it’s not something that other people can make sense of.”

“Can you tell me if it’s not private?” said the smiling driver. Curiosity was a gap in the wall of the human mind, and if it isn’t filled, the wall could not remain calm and solid.

“The time has come, I must keep my promise.” Looking at her watch once more, the woman began to walk, looking around. When she came to the middle of the field, she stopped. The fingers she took to her neck untied the chain of a necklace. She bent down and dug the ground slightly, put the shiny object out of her neck into the pit and covered it up. The driver was watching what happened in amazement.

“You left your necklace!”

She nodded her head, smiling as if she had done an ordinary job. “I was able to keep my promise in the third year.” she said, relieved. “Oath of the golden seed…” she added, focusing on the driver’s face, which was looking confusedly.

“What’s that?”

The woman answered the question with a question. “Do you have children?”

In the dream of the driver, the children in the house came to life.

“Yes, I have two children.”

“You must have seen how vast the imagination of theirs are.”

He was giving preference to watching TV instead of playing with his children who were coming and asking him to play with them. He was scolding those innocent minds who were telling things excitedly by saying, “Don’t be ridiculous!”. He bowed his head in embarrassment and blinked his eyes to disrupt the scene.

“Right…” he said. “Their minds are free, not filled with thousands of problems like ours.”

“My brother passed away three years ago, today and the minute I buried the necklace.” She frowned for a moment, her voice vaguely hoarse, but she swallowed and her sorrow was shrouded. “He had been receiving cancer treatment for a long time. Before his death, he wanted me to make a promise.”

The driver remained silent. This was an unnamed mourning for a child he didn’t know.

“Every year I will walk into a random field and bury a golden jewel. The owner will find this jewelry and if he is having a hard time, the jewel will be support him to overcome this hardship. And if he wouldn’t need it, he will remember that one day he may fall and that God’s help will never leave him alone. Yes… That’s what he said. If he had lived, we would have done it together.”

The breeze was blowing her hair out. The air made its presence felt on their skin like a father stroking his child’s head. After a short silence, the man asked, “So why the field?”.

“Sometimes he was nauseated by medicines. He didn’t want to eat anything at that time. My mother used to talk about the benefits of grain to convince him to eat. And thus, my brother admired the farmers over time. There were always fields in the paintings he drew, you should have seen them, the wheat he drew with the golden color he obtained by mixing yellow and orange crayons… “

Feeling a hot drop rolling down his cheek, the driver took a deep breath, his lungs trembled. “We say, ‘May God forgive his/her sins.’ for our dead, but what could be the sin of an angel that he should be forgiven? May God bestow his blessings on him in paradise, and forgive our sins.”

“Amen,” she said, crying, looking at her feet.

Her rush in the morning had left its place to a pure tranquility. She followed the driver out of the field. Inside of her, there were both longing, and joy in being able to keep her promise this year. Maybe her little brother’s body wasn’t alive, but she was going to keep his golden heart alive in the golden seeds.

❃

Kayıp Rıhtım was originally founded on fantasy and science fiction, and today it is a platform that touches every aspect of literature and life. It started broadcasting in the first month of 2008. In addition, they have been publishing a selection of short stories on a different theme every month for thirteen years.

I took part in the March 2022 selection with the theme of Uçan Balon (Flying Balloon) with my story called En İyi İhtimal (The Best-case Scenario). The original link is in Turkish, but you can read it in English here – thanks to Enes Talha Coşgun for the translation.

❃

She was asleep the whole trip. She was barely able to move her head from the blue-flowered seat thanks to announcements made to the attention of the bus drivers whose departure time was overdue and to the rumble of the crowd and the men selling tea, coffee, and other beverages through pushing iron counter with wheels. Before getting off the bus, she had to wait a few seconds to get her balance, close her eyes tightly and rub her temples. If she didn’t mind strangers gathering over her, she’d slap herself.

After everyone left, she stood up and stepped out carefully. Her hair had lost its volume by getting wet with sweat, and her clothes had become as heavy as a hand-carried coat in the spring. “Look what the woman at the bus terminal did?” She would completely undress if she knew that she wouldn’t play the leading role of the news began with the lines “28-year-old Ç.N. …”. She confined herself to taking off her paving stone-colored tracksuit top and tying it around her waist. She relaxed a little more by doing that.

Her chest was thirsty, her stomach was on fire. She entered AŞTİ and approached the first buffet she saw. She bought sandwich and juice and paid a small amount of money in return. Her eyes widened with the expression on the seller’s face. She made a mistake. It was a momentary oversight that could ruin everything.

“Ma’am, that money…” the seller was going to say.

“Oh, sorry!” said the passenger, taking back the money she had given to the seller. “Yeah, it’s out of circulation. I gave you the wrong money. I was taking it to Central Bank. Sorry about that, take this, please.”

“Thank you.”

Çiğdem, -that was the name of her- who sat one of the chairs made of perforated sheet metal looked at the front face of the 20 Turkish liras worth of banknote, which she gave up giving to the seller at the last moment. On one side of the banknote, there was a pale note written with a lead pencil:

“Don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz.”

Çiğdem swallowed, pressed her lips together, quickly hid the money in her pocket and started eating her sandwich. She was biting as big and fast as she could to take out her ambition. She would have screamed if she didn’t have a secretive and introverted personality. If she had focused on the situation she was in, she would have pulled out her hair until she was confined to the nearest asylum. She watched the passengers passing through to chill herself out a little. As she remembered the idea that the material appearance was a fluctuating “passenger” in a sea of possibilities, she stopped watching. Some issues related to quantum physics… She looked at the giant clock hanging from the ceiling and sipped the juice. Focusing on the flavors was making her relaxed.

When it was 12 noon, Çiğdem was startled. She set her sights on the nearest automatic door to platform 58 and started to waiting. She repeated the instructions given to her in her mind. Soon, an old woman wearing a hijab and shalwar and a boy with a shaved hair, a dirty face and a pale blue T-shirt came to the door.

The old woman didn’t look like she was going to board any bus. She was spreading stereotypical verses with sad melodies ripped from arabesque songs, showing her child and extending her palm. Çiğdem stood up after making sure who she was looking for, jingling the coins -didn’t taken out of circulation- in her pocket. She caught up with the beggar woman before she turned her back and left.

“Here you go, Ma’am.” she said, giving the old lady the coins. A little chocolate came out of the same pocket.

“And this is yours.” She looked into the boy’s eyes and smiled bitterly. “For the best-case scenario.”

While the child was trying to unpack the chocolate without saying anything, Çiğdem turned her head by hiding her tears. That was her business in Ankara, where belong to the time two hundred and fifty years ago.

Now she had to get on a bus heading towards Istanbul, get off in the halfway at a desolated rest station where she memorized its name, walk to an ownerless empty field, and find an iron hatch covered with soil. She had to open the hatch and go down to the structure in underground named MOSL, Manipulation of Subatomic Layout, and go back to the time she was born.

MOSL was designed as a transparent sphere large enough an average-sized person to fit inside in fetal position. The smaller the surface area, the less energy would be used. That was the reason why a spherical design was preferred.

The system was based on the replacement of subatomic particles with their opposite twins. That was making it possible to break away from the natural flow and go back and forth in time, also called the “arrow of time”. It was kind of like a flying balloon floating off the ground. Therefore, the parts of the system were given names pursuant to that similarity. The area reserved for the passenger was called “basket”, and the area where the particles collided was called “balloon”, this process was called “ignition”, and the temporal change was called “elevation”.

Çiğdem got in the basket of the device and waited for the device to detect her. She heard the confirmation sound coming from the device. Then it began to darken and even became silent, so that the passenger could no longer hear her own breathing.

The most fascinating part of the journey was beginning. Bright lights appeared everywhere just like the universe emerged from a fertile void. This flood of light, which resembled corals mixed with fireworks seemed just as if it was every color at the same time. Purples, blues, pale oranges, greens were interwinning, and pinks and oranges were fluctating. The distance of the images was unpredictable. Everything was both clear and blurry. It was like looking at a star on the other side of the universe, and adjacent to the wall of the sphere.

The woman’s ears were full of high-pitched voices. She was feeling as if hearing the voices of a little girl screaming, a baby crying like it was gonna tear its throat out, and nails scratching a flat surface. It was something harmonious in a strange way and wasn’t bothering her. It didn’t have a certain source; the sound was coming from wherever the woman turns her face. Sometimes she was hearing it in her head.

Çiğdem, who had received a strict training for her duty, knew that sounds and lights were related to her brain. The flames she saw were her own dreams, the screams she heard were her own true inner voice. Manipulation of Subatomic Layout was isolating the body from the external environment and affecting the communication between the nerve cells.

Another effect of the journey was to eliminate some changes made within the manipulated time frame. In general, this effect was quite restricted. For example, if Çiğdem had cut her hair in the bus terminal, this change would have been preserved substantially.

In the case of the paradox, the effect was very intense. The fact that a passenger went back in time and killed his/her grandfather would result in the passenger vanishing on the way back. So is the fact that the passenger reached his/her own childhood and gave him/her some information.

The trick was not to cause a self-paradox. The time traveler was safe as long as she did not take any action that would affect her own existence. Apart from that, she could affect the present by changing the past. By killing someone, she could eliminate her current projection. She could give information about the future to someone who lived in the past. But there was no room for error and she had to calculate infinitely possible consequences of a single job.

No one could be a time traveler except for those who had completed the necessary trainings and passed the exams. Very limited computer-defined changes were allowed. The only purpose of the changes was to find the best-case scenario; the long-term best case for the whole universe. Some of the laws made after the invention of MOSL were inspired by Isaac Asimov’s book The End of Eternity.

These were written in the regulations. And there was a feature that the time traveler had to possess that was not written anywhere: a sacrifice that could, if necessary, destroy his/her own existence. Even if this feature was not written, the law expected them to do so. It was not a valid justification for the cancellation of a necessary change if the timekeepers were harmed.

At the center of MOSL an officer was working who would smell his fiancé’s hair, kiss her for the last time and send her on a journey with directives that would destroy herself.

He said, “Find the beggar and the boy in the blue shirt at the location we specified. Keep them busy. My great-grandfather and his descendants will not be born. This chain of events will trigger the results that will lead to the fact that MOSL has never been invented.”

Then the system decided to eliminate itself. Because every prognostications about the near future was indicating that terrorists would abuse the system. Therefore, the change in the past should have served to prevent the invention of MOSL. A short distraction of a beggar child passing through the AŞTİ of the 2000s would reveal the most beneficial cause-effect relationships.

The only major side effect of this action was the absence of a past marriage. So that the great-grandfather of that timekeeper wasn’t going to be born. Therefore, the timekeeper and his family would not exist, but the negative consequences would disappear.

But for Çiğdem, that was madness. She held her fiancée’s hand and begged, “You can’t destroy ours to save the future of the universe. Are we going to destroy the system because the stupid computer shows that the system will be abused in the future?”

But the timekeeper accepted the situation with fortitude. He tried to calm the woman down until the day of the trip. He spent time with her, hugged and kissed her. Actually, he had no choice but to accept the situation. He was scared inwardly, even if he didn’t show it. This one, wasn’t death. It was not the deletion of someone from the book of the future who was existed once upon a time.  That was a total deletion from the line of history. Absence was an obscurity that the mind could not receive.

She was trying to get over the fear by whispering to herself, “God doesn’t forget. God never forgets his servant.”

When the big day came, Çiğdem talked about secretly writing his name on the banknotes she would take for camouflage. So that even if she had lost him, his name would still be written somewhere.

“Don’t write my name.” said her fiancée. “You won’t even remember why you wrote it. Just don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz: Longing couldn’t be better than that.”

Those were the last words she heard. The words she wrote on the money… Don’t forget Ghazali and Leibniz.

She got out from the domination of lights. The basket opened. The journey ended. Çiğdem stepped into her current time.

She froze and bit her lips.

It was empty and cold in there. The power was off, the lighting and heating systems went out. Normally, MOSL would be bright and always crowded. Scientists and officials would never leave the center desolate.

A little further ahead, she noticed that an officer was waiting for her. When she realized that she knew him, her pulse began to beat fast enough to tear her skin apart. “Erdem…” she said, running. “Erdem, you…”

Erdem was her fiancée. He was the time attendant whose birth will be prevented at the end of the journey.

In the eyes of the woman, there was a deep disappointment. In a soulless, deep tone he asked, “What is your business here, ma’am?”

Çiğdem’s mind stopped. “I…” she stammered. “I did everything you told me to do, I did what the computer wanted me to do. I did it at the cost of you to vanish.” Her voice grew louder and turned into a yell. “I distracted the boy’s attention in the blue shirt. What’s going on? What happened to this place?”

“At the cost of me to vanish?” the man asked. His expression softened, but his attitude was still unfamiliar. “Have you been given a task, ma’am?”

Çiğdem was caught in a mood that gave her a desire to pluck her hair. “Are you out of your mind?” she shouted out loudly. “Why do you call me ‘ma’am’?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” said the other, astonished.

“What the hell are you asking about! We’re engaged.” she said, articulating the syllables harshly. “I… I don’t understand. When reality changes, we both need to adapt. If you didn’t know me in the new reality, I shouldn’t have known you either. Moreover, until now, the computer’s plan was never wrong, and by the end of the mission, you should have been vanished. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad to know you, but… There is a big mistake.”

The man listened to her with a growing smile and then began to laugh loudly. The annoyed woman could do nothing but swallow and watch. The man barely calmed his laugh, “I’ll explain,” he said, breathlessly. “I must ask one last question. What was the purpose of the change? How did I consent to vanish?”

While Çiğdem explaining her task of stopping the terrorists, the disappointment in Erdem’s gaze traded places with admiration and happiness. He knelt down and put the woman’s hands on his lips, and kissed them on and again, like in the old days…

“What’s going on?” said the woman, taking her hand away. “You say you don’t know me, and then…”

“I loved you platonically in my own reality. I was afraid to explain my feelings because you were so stiff. So I had to pretend. It’s like a dream to see you love me that much.”

“I was so afraid I was going to lose you.” That was the last thing the woman said before she burst into tears and hugged her fiancé.

“I’m here, my love.” said Erdem. “We’re together now…”

Then Çiğdem pulled herself back, wiped her tears away, and asked, “Why has the power of the center been cut off?”

“Because there is no center anymore. There is no MOSL.”

“What?”

“I was the one who went on duty in my own reality.” said Erdem. “Our mission and purpose were the same. I was going to stop that boy in the blue shirt at the bus terminal in Ankara and prevent my great grandfather’s marriage. MOSL was going to be destroyed, but I was going to vanish also.

Çiğdem continued to listen without making a sound.

“I was cold blooded on the way to my duty. It was scary to vanish, but I didn’t care. I thought of you, I wished you to be happy. I thought it would be like falling asleep, but here I am.”

“What happened to me?”

“Nothing. The only explanation for what happened is that either you have somehow disappeared, or there is a parallel you are living in our old realities, unaware of everything.”

“Well, what about this place?”

“We’re in a flying balloon!” the man said cheerfully, opening his arms. “There is no power, because there is no outside. We are in an isolated parallel universe.”

“What do you mean there’s no outside?” said the other.

“It is free to try. Run to one side randomly and see.”

Çiğdem took a deep breath, put her foot forward, looked at Erdem for the last time and started running towards the exit. There was supposed to be a door in front of her, but now, the only thing that existed was darkness. As if she had a light source in her belly, the places she passed by were illuminated. Then the darkness completely dissipated and Çiğdem returned to Erdem in the opposite direction.

“What the heck is this?” she said breathlessly.

“I ran everywhere. I’ve tried everywhere,” said Erdem, crossing his arms. “The laws of physics seem to work the way they used to. There is neither a man, nor a way out. We can’t get out of a limited area.”

The woman was thinking, lost herself in a vague point.

“We’re in a flying balloon. In a tiny balloon that floats freely between universes.”

“What shall we eat and drink?”

“Huh?”

“We won’t be able to get out. We’ll have some needs. We don’t have time to wait for bacteria to evolve.”

“I…” said Erdem, holding his stomach. “I have never thought that.”

Çiğdem grimaced. “Come here.” Erdem said, pulling her to his side and pressing her to his chest. “We have three days until we are out of our minds with thirst.” In three days, maybe a spring appears, maybe the physical rules are changeable here and our bodies won’t need water anymore, I don’t know. I don’t care because I’m with you, with the one who loves me. The only thing that could make me suffer is your suffering.”

The woman opened her eyes, which she had closed. “Did you try to get downstairs?” she said with hope.

“No.”

“If the ground floor still exists, that place is a shelter you know, there was a warehouse in there.” There might be something.” They held hands. Çiğdem wasn’t sure if she was in an alternate reality or if she was having a dream close to reality. But no matter what, she was in a balloon and was going to enjoy it. Wasn’t the dream a balloon cast into the skies of the unconscious mind?

❃

Kayıp Rıhtım was originally founded on fantasy and science fiction, and today it is a platform that touches every aspect of literature and life. It started broadcasting in the first month of 2008. In addition, they have been publishing a selection of short stories on a different theme every month for thirteen years.

I took part in the April 2022 selection with the theme of Safari (Safari) with my story called Örneklem (Sample). The original link is in Turkish, but you can read it in English here – thanks to Enes Talha Coşgun for the translation.

❃

“One hundred millionth of the population of Varavis is a good sample.” President Abanel told its assistant. Varavis was the name the Venusians gave to Earth in their own language. It meant “solid, concrete.” Abanel did not say this statement with its mouth open, for it had no mouth to open. Abanel had no tongue and no teeth. For them, talking was composed of changing some of the chemical compounds in their bodies. The bodies of the Venusians were like puddles of water, or mercury. Their bodies were all liquid.

That’s why they organized the most expensive experiment in their history. If they manage to use their body by infiltrating the brain of the most advanced creature on the neighboring planet, they would make a big breakthrough. They could be able to make sounds, walk, use tools. They were too bulky in their current situation. Tens of generations of Venusians -or “Omayrisses”, which was their name in their own language- could be able to finish building a space ship in hundreds of years through melting Venus’s soil, which a team of people could build in a year. “The picture of all mankind is here.” said the president. The excitement increased the salinity of Abanel’s body.

They passed by a boy. The child on the ground was groaning painfully between the teeth he was gnashing while he was pulling his knee to his stomach. “Mom!” he was screaming, the artery in his right leg was in an extreme pain. The liquid being passing through the blood path was tormenting as if acid had been spilled.

On the spaceship, there were children just like him, and adults, and elderly people. All the people lying on the metal floor were calling each other with their own tongues, praying in their own religions, expressing their pain. Surrounded by grey walls and illuminated by artificial white light, more than ten thousand people were lying in the confined space: Seventy-nine people from every country on earth.

The president and its assistant flowed down together. They moved towards the large area where the prisoners were gathered. In order to do that, they were making extensions in the direction they wanted to go, which could be called the “fibber foot”. But there was no need for fibber feet as they went downhill, gravity was adequate.

The reason people shouted in pain was because each one of them had an attendant Omayris crawling through their veins. The real work had not yet begun. These officers were there to prevent people from escaping. Their acidic compounds were stimulating nerve endings, revealing the feeling of pain.

During the experiment, the complaints were going to end. Because human brain couldn’t feel pain. Liquid beings were going to flow directly into the brain, melting different regions and observing the result to understand which brain region regulates which function. The price for knowing an unknown being called “human” was the lives of the prisoners.

The generations of Omayris knew that the Earth was a difficult and dangerous planet for them. The temperature of the land of Venus was much higher than that of Earth, and the air pressure there was much higher than here. This meant that the Omayris faced the possibility of freezing or evaporating outside Venus, which was just one of the risks they took. They injected liquids into their bodies to balance them before the trip. In experiments to discover the correct composition of equilibrium fluids, a few times the population of the human sample collected here today had died in Venus.

While the two planets are revolving around the single Sun and time is flying by like melting lava, humans evolved at great speed. In the century when the construction of ships began on Venus, only the spikes of towers and temples were high enough to touch the sky. By the time the construction was complete, planes and satellites were flying around the bright blue dot.

The president and its assistant were engaged in a playful conversation about the memories of their great ancestors.

“If we had come 50 years later, they would have definitely caught us. Fortunately, they were trying to kill each other with cannons and rifles while we landed our ship in the Atlantic waters.” Abanel knew common human languages and used to pronounce proper names in sentences to boast of it. One advantage of being an Omayris was that you could learn a lot of things quickly. Their liquid bodies, which gave them superiority in learning, turned into obstacles when applying knowledge in practical life.

“In those days, my ancestor’s ancestor was on the team that swam towards the European continent. The ocean was so cold that my ancestor split before it could reach land. My ancestor and my ancestor’s sibling went up to Lisbon on a snowy night in a fisherman’s net.”

Venusians reproduce asexually, they have no gender, so the kinship words express only degrees.

“The President,” the assistant said excitedly, “you know what? My ancestor was on the same team, and it also saw Commander Brush-mustache with its own eyes.”

“Lying is beneath you, I wouldn’t expect that behavior from you, Yiza.”

“I am for real! I feel it in my belly.”

The memories of Omayrisses who were reproducing asexually, transfer chemically. A Venusian new to the world would find the memories of all its ancestors present in its memory. That’s why the phrase “feeling in the belly” was invented, which means “remember.”

“There is noone called ‘Commander Brush-mustache’, Yiza. His name is Adolf Hitler.”

Abanel laughed when the assistant said, “Oh, whatever!”

As they talked further, Abanel continued to attract the attention of its assistant with the information crumbs it collected from the Varavis world. The part Yiza listened to the most was the creation myths. When Abanel realized that Yiza was interested in this subject, then went into detail.

After saying that people are not in consensus, Abanel talked about the existence of many beliefs and legends. “Which one should I start with?”

“As you wish. With the most common. I wonder how people were created.”

“Well, then.” said Abanel. “A place where you will never evaporate, where the composition of your body will never change, and where you will never suffer… You get hungry, and the meal is in front of you, suddenly! You’ll be able to live there forever. Even if you divide, you will not perish, and you will be able to see your children, and even your child’s-child’s-children.” There was no word for ‘grandchild’ in the Omayris language. The child of a child was called “child’s child”, and a “child” was added for each degree and so on.

Dividing was both having a child and dying. Therefore, an Omayris could not see neither its ancestor nor its child.

Yiza was about to boil with excitement. “That’s not possible! Could such a place exist?”

“Paradise…” said the President, longing. “It’s called paradise. The place where the great creator power rewards -the god as humans say- good people after their death.

“Well, then? What does this have to do with the creation of humans?”

“God created the first man Adam from the earth.”

“So that’s why their bodies are rigid. He created us from water I guess.” Yiza said. Abanel, on the other hand, got carried away, and continued without hesitation.

“He placed the Adam in the paradise I mentioned, and made only one rule for him, that he should not eat fruit from the forbidden tree. Everything else was free. Meanwhile Adam was lonely and felt bored a lot.”

The assistant suddenly said, “That’s why Adam was divided and had a lot of children!”

“No, Yiza, people can not divide! People need partners. And God created Eve from the rib of Adam. A wife… Then one day Satan came and persuaded Eve to eat from the forbidden tree. And God drove them out of paradise and exile them into the earth.”

“What does Satan mean?”

“The evil entity that deceives people.”

Yiza fluctuated. If it had a face, Yiza would purse its lips. “This makes no sense… If there was only one person, the devil could deceive him, but two people warn each other. They should have said, ‘This tree is forbidden to us, let’s stay away from it.’”

“But they encouraged each other. The Varavis are strange creatures, aren’t they, dear Yiza? After eating the fruit, suddenly they have become naked. With shame they tried to cover themselves with the herbs of Paradise.”

Clothes, nudity and shame… An Omayris could not be expected to have an opinion on this. “Unnecessary detail.” said Yiza. “Besides, what was God’s reason for banning that tree? What did Satan say that led people astray?”

“You find the details I say unnecessary, but you want new details.” Abanel said. “Let me tell you another epic of genesis.”

The experiment had begun. The moans stopped, and everyone gone quiet. People were unconsciously contracting and trembling under the influence of liquid creatures entered their brains. The president began to speak after moving to a convenient place where they could easily see the square.

“Izanagi and Izanami were the two gods who emerged from eternal chaos after the separation of heaven and earth. They met on the bridge that connects the sky and heaven, floating in the void. Izanagi showed his body. He was halfway there, and he didn’t like halfness.”

Abanel fell silent and listened to Yiza’s curious silence. His body was like a stagnant lake. He loved him in that way.

“And Izanami said, ‘I’m half, too. If we were together, we’d be one body.’ They walked towards each other on the bridge and united in the middle.”

Abanel paused and said, “I need to clarify a point. Male and female are the genders peculiar to people.  You’ll think about gender in everything about people. For example, Eve is female, Adam is male… About half of the subjects, we’ve recruited here are females and half are males. A female mate with a male and a new offspring is born. Okay?”

“Okay.” said Yiza, impatient to hear the rest of the story.

“Izanami became pregnant from this breed and gave birth to her first child, Hiruko, the ‘leech child’. A crippled and deformed child…”

The assistant’s body fluid got cold. “Why?”

“Just like Adam and Eve, they had transgressed a prohibition. Izanami should never have been the first to speak. They put their children in a reed raft and put in the water. They were reunited, this time following the rules. They created the Japanese islands-the gods of rivers, plants, mountains, and winds.”

The spaceship was in a deep silence. The prisoners, whose pupils had slipped back, and their eyes were white, were lying motionless on the ground. They were lined up in properly. If someone was looked down from above, it would see a view looking like a striped notebook.

“Just as it was giving birth to the fire god Kagutsuchi…” Abanel said, “Izanami began to burn. It was weakened, the burns were growing, and someday died, went to Yomi, the land of the dead.”

“What about paradise?” Yiza said.

“It was in the previous story. Each story has its own place. Izanagi went to Yomi to get his beloved wife back, but he saw her body rotting and covered with worms. You’re terrified, Yiza. The death of varavis is terrible, they stink, get wormy, and rot. I saw so many Varavis corpses during the war…”

The assistant could not understand why Izanagi was going after Izanami. What drew them together? Yiza didn’t ask these questions because it was afraid to bore Abanel.

“We are lucky!” Yiza said. “When we die, we just dry out, without leaving a trace.”

At this time, the shadow of the four people standing up fell on the ground of the spaceship. Their faces were expressionless, their eyes were white. They took hold of the arms of two of those who were lying down, a woman and a man who may or may not have been twenty years old. At first, the captives were calm like dolls, but they came to themselves and started screaming and struggling. Their efforts were useless. There was no chance of getting rid of their power.

Four people dragged two awakened people to the president. They made them kneel. They grabbed their necks with their hands and stepped on their backs. The poor people were barely breathing in that position.

“The experiment was a success, President Abanel.” said one of the standers. “We were able to control the Varavis’ brain. We have reserved these for you. We selected the strongest and healthiest subjects from the sample. Go ahead, Mr. President, they are yours!”

Abanel smiled and flowed towards the prisoners, Yiza followed. With the help of false feet, they got on their knees, climbed into their bellies, passed from their shoulders to the face area and entered through their nostrils. The Venusian, who reported that the experiment was completed, was guiding them.

Yiza moved towards the sinuses. It was solving the anatomical structure of man through fluids entering his body, and was witnessing with amazement how complex and systematic this solid body was. It detected synapses, noticed that the neurons spread from the brain to the body like a tree. Is this the forbidden tree that Eve ate of? Were the electric currents flowing from the branches the sparks of the fire that burned Izanami?

Yiza discovered the brain, step by step, region by region, and had feelings that it had never tasted, words, meanings, controls, and perceptions it had never known. Infiltration was completed. Yiza worked for a few minutes, straightening its shifted eyes. It saw the outside world blurry at first, clear when it blinked a few times.

Abanel stood before her as a brunet, tall man. When these descriptions appeared in her mind, Yiza was surprised. A strange feeling filled her. A mixture of admiration and ambition, beyond these two emotions… The river of fire seemed to flow through her. Now she understood those legends, now she knew why the forbidden fruit was sweet and why Eve did not warn Adam. Now she knew why Izanagi and Izanami were half without each other.

She approached Abanel, stroked his cheek, and got up to her fingertips and touched his lips. Vamayrisses… The people of Venus… This was the legend of genesis of a new race, and it was beginning now.

Translation: Enes Talha Coşgun

She was afraid of falling off the balcony. This feeling entered into her suddenly, as instantaneous as the vane touches twelve, as definite as the day progress of the calendar, and as irreversible as the arrow of time. She feared that lies would be told on her behalf; she was afraid that her death would be decorated with a seven-letter word with a lot of “i” and a romantic sound: “Suicide”, Such a gentle word! Like “anticipation” or “pride”.

But was the word “murder” look alike like those words? It was a vulgar, blood-smelling word, even when it came out of mouth. The people who would throw her off the balcony would not have described it that way, only because of respect for the beauty of the victim. They were gonna say, “She fell down from the railing.” Just like those women who hit the headlines, at an unexpected moment -for example, when going to the plaza for a job interview- falling from any floor of a skyscraper…

That was the thing which Aysel was afraid of when she was drinking tea with her night-colored nightdress, under the wall clock which shows that it was just after midnight. She was sitting alone in a three-story old apartment on a narrow street. It wasn’t very high. Still, the distance was enough to break her bones.

For about a season, she had lived with threats directed at her life. A close friend, a lover, a company and a million dollars turned her life she thought was ordinary into a city that had survived a war.

She was a physician who had just started her life a year and a half ago. Her dreams were in her mind, her enthusiasm was in her heart. She had finished her compulsory service, completed her expertise as a dermatologist, saved money and attended entrepreneurship courses. And she found a friend of her kidney. Together, they were gonna establish a company that produced cosmetics for deformed faces. The people who lost their faces due to illness, accidents, natural disasters would hold on to life again with the products of this company.

Aysel was the one who offered to give her partner’s very nice name to the company: Rozerin… It means “The dawn”. And Rozerin, who was seven years younger than Aysel, came up with the business idea. She said she was inspired by what happened to someone she knew, but she didn’t give any details. The sign was hung on the exterior of an apartment. The interior was painted white, decorated with sunflowers and roses. The products were lined up in glossy displays. Dr. Aysel and sales specialist Rozerin started to wait for their customers.

With the first month behind, the company gradually became known. One Monday morning, the sound of a car approaching the front of the apartment building was heard. The stairs carried a pair of feet. The office door opened, and a medium-sized man walked in. His face was covered with a surgical mask as much as possible. His eyes weren’t visible. Although it was the hottest day of the summer, he had a thin jacket and a painter’s hat on his head.

Meanwhile, the partners were having breakfast in the back. Rozerin who lives with her family was telling that her parents were longing for child and that they wanted to adopt a child or be foster parents. Their conversation was interrupted with footsteps. Aysel left her tea unfinished, wiped her mouth and went out. She smiled at the invisible face of the person who arrived. “Wellcome,” she said. “Can I help you?”

The customer quickly pulled out a large notebook curled up in his trouser pocket. He showed the first page to Aysel. It said in capital letters, “I can’t talk, sorry.”

“No problem,” said the woman. “How can I help you?”

The man slowly grazed his jacket. His arms were full of blisters. The skin had lost its natural color and was turned into various shades of red.

“I see,” Aysel said. “You want a product for your arms. If I learn how these blisters formed, I can recommend a right product.”

She handed the customer the pen that she took out of her apron pocket and showed him where to sit.

The man put his notebook on the table decorated with various magazines. He turned the page and wrote “chemical substance and fire” in a hasty and distorted writing.

“Ah,” said the doctor. “I’ll be right back.”

She went to the warehouse and soon returned with a tube of cream in her hand.

“This product of ours called ‘Deep Effect’ combines the active ingredients that regenerate skin cells with the content of excellent concealers. I can’t promise healing for such a deep burn, but I can tell you that it will give your arm a healthy and natural appearance and will not cause any allergic effects. Shall we try?”

He nodded his head. Aysel opened the cream and put drops on several points on the man’s arm. Then she distributed the cream drops by massaging. The color of the arm changed instantly, and when the cream dried, it took the appearance of an ordinary skin. The customer lowered his head, pulled down his mask slowly and examined his arm. He raised his thumb in the air.

“You liked it, that’s great. So how many tubes do you want?”

The man raised his three fingers. Meanwhile, “And…” said Aysel, then, “Anyway,” she said, and then she kept quiet and stood up.

The man grabbed the woman by her apron and showed her the page he had just written.

“And what? My face?”

“Well,” said the doctor, feeling caught red-handed. “Frankly, I thought you wanted a product for your face too, but…”

The man quickly turned the back of the notebook. “I’m sure you don’t have any products that will benefit my face,” he wrote, and then he drew a smile.

“You’re terribly wrong about that,” said the the doctor, smiling. “We have products for even the most severely damaged faces. Can you remove your mask? Let’s take a look at the general situation.”

The man took a deep breath and turned the back page. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I am, this is our job.” the doctor said, her smile grew. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

The second act of the man, who took off his beret in a single movement and his burnt, hairless scalp emerged, was to free the strings of the mask from his ears.

Aysel swallowed without showing it, and forced her will not to lose her smile.

The man’s face had completely lost the “face” shape. The nose and mouth had melted, leaving a hole that looked like a borehole. His throat was clearly visible. His little tongue was shaking, his tonsils were like gills on either side. His eyebrows had fallen out, one of his eyes had flowed, and the other one’s shape was deformed and was looking at Aysel between its eyelids which were glued to each other.

“Yes, the damage is bigger than I thought.” she said thoughtfully. “Still, it’s not hopeless. You’ve probably had several surgeries, and there’s nothing more that plastic surgeons can do.”

The customer nodded his head slightly.

“We need to produce a special mask for you that is useful and no different from your actual face. We’re gonna have to work together for a while. Alone…” She hesitated when she said this part. “It will be financially burdensome.”

The man leaned over to his notebook and wrote, “So if I don’t have money, won’t you help me?”

Just for a moment, “Do we look like a charity?” Aysel wanted to say, rigorously. But her heart was still beating faster than usual, she was asking herself how a person could live like this, and her brain was producing horrible scenarios where her own face melted.

“Of course we will…” Aysel said. Her stance was quite calm. Nothing was being reflected her outside from the storms in her inner world. “You are in urgent need. I mean, you don’t ask a starving person for food money. In fact, the necessary interventions should have been done already. In Conclusion…”

She was angry with herself: “Why the hell did you mentioned the financial burden, girl!”

“I don’t want to be under obligation.” wrote the man. “As soon as I can’t make the payment, I stop receiving services. Don’t worry.”

Aysel couldn’t say anything. Meanwhile, the client was putting his mask back on. He took a page out of his notebook, gave it to the doctor, paid for the cream and left. There was a name, a surname and a phone number on the paper.

“Sinan…” the doctor muttered.

Two mornings passed and the same sounds were heard again: the sound of the engine, the footsteps on the ladder, and the sound of the door opening. Aysel had not yet perceived the voices as conscious when her heart began to beat rapidly, just as when she saw the man’s face without a mask. Her body was responding faster than her consciousness.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Rozerin said and stood up. “I will handle it.”

The doctor acted quickly and tried to stop her. Maybe she would have explained, “I think I should do that.” “Mr. Sinan came. We saw each other first. I’m the one who can help him. Please move, it’s my turn now.” She didn’t act or say anything like that. She sat like a stone with a fork in her hand.

It wasn’t long before Rozerin came back and said, “The customer is calling you.” Aysel got up with a smile that she couldn’t prevent and walked in.

Sinan wore a visored cap this time. He was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt. His arms were the color of his skin, smooth as a statue. The make up… Effect of the cream… The man who took out his notebook opened one of the pages and pressed it against his chest and tilted his head with gratitude.

It said “Thank you, ma’am.” in a very legible way. Underneath, there was the expression “It feels great to be able to wear sleeveless in the summer.” with smaller letters, and in the lower right corner there was a heart.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Sinan,” said the doctor cheerfully. She was about to talk, but she heard the sound of the notebook. The back page said, “I was rude not to ask your name.”

“My name is Aysel,” she said, and waited until her heart beat calmed down.

They sat together and drew up a general plan. Aysel talked to a plastic surgeon whose class she had attended at the faculty. She explained Sinan’s situation and asked what could be done. The professor said that he had to examine Sinan to express his opinion. He had to see for himself the extent of the tissue loss. They made an appointment for a proper day.

Aysel wanted to ask Sinan many questions. Unrelated to her job, they were just questions of curiosity. How could he eat without his mouth? Did he have a sense of taste or smell? How did his face get like this? Could any of the chemicals have done this kind of damage? What did Sinan look like before the accident? His voice… How was it sound? She couldn’t ask any of them, but she couldn’t erase them. Aysel had a headache because of the noise in her head.

Rozerin was doing her own thing on the computer on one hand, and on the other hand, she was watching her colleague out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t said anything even after Sinan left. She started writing things down on her cellphone. Aysel leaned against one of the customer seats with fatigue and looked out of the window.

It was a midafternoon cooled by the summer rain. Traffic lights and headlights were reflecting off the asphalt, just like a mirror. Aysel was walking on the road with an empty mind that tired of thinking, her aimless glances which were focused on the sidewalk was an indicator of this situation. She had heel sandals on her feet, and they were became sopping wet. An ordinary anxiety was wandering among the curly wet hairs, how could she get home without getting wet from head to foot?

A yellow light as dense as the sunrise came close to her and stopped. When the woman turned her head, she saw that there was a taxsi next to her. Then she caught her eye on the rear window, recognized the person there, she felt like they came eye to eye, and smiled. Back door opened. Sinan invited Aysel in with his hand.

The unhealthy void in the woman’s mind had suddenly dissipated and replaced it with pure joy. She felt as if the life was convicted to stagnation with the “Pause” button before, and now the “Play” button was pressed again. The colors were vivid, the sounds were fluid. “Mr. Sinan how are you?” she said, her slightly yellowed teeth came in sight as she was smiling. It was hard to believe that this happy woman who sings like a spring bird was the one who boredly walking woman on the side of a street a little while ago.

Sinan raised his thumb. Then he extended his index finger towards her.

“I’m fine, thank you.” she said.

“Where to, ma’am?” the taxi driver asked.

“Well…” Aysel said, turning to Sinan. “Where do you live?”

The passenger took out his phone and showed an address on the map. It was in a remote neighborhood, it would take about half an hour to get there. The doctor’s house was much closer, ten minutes distance on this route… After describing her home to the taxi driver, Aysel invited Sinan to her home as a guest for one night.

“You can stay with me, that road is unbearable in this rain. Please don’t misunderstand me…”

A month was enough to turn a misunderstanding into a truth. Aysel started to have intense and red feelings towards Sinan. She was meeting often with her client on the pretext of inquire after his health, inviting him to her own home, claiming that his home was far away. She had learned the details of Sinan’s life. For example, his age, seven years younger than thirty-two… Or that fatal accident… What happened to the man she liked was a rare misfortune or luck, maybe both.

Five years ago, this young man worked in a factory where powerful acids were involved in the production process. The fire and panic that started when a machine got out of control resulted in Sinan being caught in the flames and squirting acid directly into his face. The man, whose face melted there, stayed in the intensive care unit for months and underwent a lot of surgeries in a row. The doctors described this as a miracle that he survived and did not lose his vision completely. The way the accident occurred was unfortunate, and it was fortunate to get out of such an accident in one piece. The question of which side you’re looking at…

When Sinan responded to Aysel’s feelings, a relationship started between them. Using his hands was the only way to show his feelings. He used to hold the woman’s slightly shriveled hands together, then separate her fingers, and press them, fondle them, play with them; and transfer his love, compassion and lust.

Their first sex was as hot as an August night. The woman kissed the man to her heart’s desire. She kissed mostly the places she forced her will not to turn her eyes away on the day Sinan first took off his mask. From the neck, chin, where the cheek and mouth cavity meet, from the exposed nasal bone, from the joy and astonishment tears that flow from the one eye of her lover… She felt her body as a marble statue, the body she doesn’t like due to its a little overweight and saggy shape.

Formality was lost between them. Thereafter, Sinan’s problem was Aysel’s problem. The doctor was willing to do whatever she could for his face, without any charge. In fact, it wouldn’t matter to Aysel. She loved Sinan as he was, and she was feeling that even if he miraculously returned to his former self, her own love or admiration would not increase even a drop.

One morning, when the doctor opened the door of the shop, she saw Rozerin in the waiting room, not in the back room. It was not a strange image, but Aysel was still surprised. Because Rozerin was talking less lately, sitting in the back room when she found a chance, and not taking much interest in customers. She was spending most of her time corresponding with suppliers and wholesale customers at the distant. She even restricted chatting with her partner. When Aysel insisted on introducing Sinan to her, she spoke only one sentence with a cold smile.

The tall woman with the curl was alive and cheerful, even though she was still in front of the computer. The smile on her face went out when Aysel who was watching her for a while said “Good morning!” to her.

“Huh,” she said, after waiting a few seconds, as if she had a sleep catatonia. “Good morning.”

Aysel sat on one of the seats with quick and light steps. “Roz…” she said. “Is everything okay?”

The woman with the curl said, “Yes…”, she suddenly turned off her laptop and took an attitude that did not know where to put her hands and feet. “Why would it not?”

“I don’t know, you’ve been so preoccupied lately.”

“Because of the season change I guess,” said the young partner. “Autumn is starting. It affects our mood.”

“Yes…” Aysel said. Unlike Rozerin, she loved autumn.

In the following days, the doctor started working with the computer more intensively than her partner. She wanted to push the possibilities for Sinan to the limits. She was researching bionic facial projects. Since the nerve cells on Sinan’s face were completely burned, surgeons say that it is near to impossible to make a functional face. The best thing they could do was save his appearance, which is what Aysel said at first. But since the bionic face would have an internal electronic circuit, it would be able to move, even transmit feelings to the brain.

While the October rains left the city longing for the sun, the store’s sales began to sparse. The monthly profit was reduced by half compared to the previous period. This situation was influenced by the disinterest of the partners in the company. Rozerin has been absent from work occasionally, she was often arriving late to the office and she was spending half of her time by surfing on the internet, sitting at the computer. And Aysel’s mind was on Sinan all the time. She was trying to finish their work as soon as possible, leaving early in the evening to go to the house they lived together.

She was buying hot wine on the way home. Because even if Sinan could not taste and smell, he felt the warmth of the drinks poured down his throat through the tube and liked to be half tipsy. The act of eating was completely thrown into the background. The man had to pass the food through the shredder and then tube it into the esophagus to be able to feed. Aysel didn’t want to see this process. She was going out for eating or snacking quickly at home, because what was the point of eating without him?

Aysel was eating less now, her body became weaker. She became weaker and her facial lines became clearer. If her abdominal skin hadn’t sagged, she could even be fit.

She started correspondence with a biorobotic company in Canada. The company was accepting to produce a functional face which very similar to the real one for Sinan, but wanted an astronomical price. One million Canadian dollars amounted to approximately twelve million Turkish liras. Moreover, this price was only valid until February of the following year.

Aysel had no savings. She was living in a rental house. She gave her everything to the company. Sinan received compensation after the accident, but the amount was not enough to cover the money the company wanted. The doctor became full of ambition to earn money, but she didn’t know how to realize this ambition yet.

One cold evening in November, the woman was looking at her phone, Sinan was lying on the sofa, reading a book of poetry belonging to Attila İlhan he had taken from the showcase.

The book was belong to Aysel, but she didn’t used to read much poetry. The reason why the book was at home was that Aysel’s name was mentioned in one of Atilla İlhan’s poems.

Sometimes she used to hum this poem like a song, the poem that never touched anything in her life: “Aysel go away, I am not for you / I sense that my death will happen suddenly / I am bad and dark, a little ugly / Aysel go away, I don’t want to…”

When the redheaded woman saw the book on her lover’s lap, she began to spontaneously shed these lines. Then she got goosebumps and stopped. She was discovering the meaning of the sentences she had memorized for the first time. It was like seeing an old witch mumbling an ancient curse in the reflection of her phone glass. She was horrified. Standing up and wandering, she tried to throw away the coldness that fell into her; the coldness which was like the decrease of warmth in February. Outside, there was a wind that whistling on the branches of a tree and capable of covering a glass of water with a blanket of ice immediately.

The company’s revenues continued to decline. In the last month of the year, they could not make any profit, only the expenses were covered. The partners were running away from each other, and needless to say, they weren’t making any meetings. They working hours were divided into two parts that did not touch each other. Aysel was taking over in the morning, and Rozerin was in the afternoon. They were drinking coffee at the office, wasting time, and putting off the problems by ignoring them.

Opening the door with the key on the first day of the new year, Rozerin encountered an environment that turned into a battlefield, she was almost passed out. The shelves were scattered on the floor, the seats were turned upside down, one of the windows was broken with the cameras, and as the police investigation revealed later, the company’s vault was opened and a hundred twenty thousand liras were stolen.

Rozerin didn’t calm down after the robbery. She was using medication to sleep at night, having occasional panic attacks, and definitely didn’t want to step foot in the company again. The door of the rice bowl, which did not make money, was shut down irremediably.

Aysel had to be very active in this process. She was just coming home to sleep. If Sinan wasn’t always be with her, it was only matter of time before she gave up because of tiredness. She was talking to the cops, running around the police station and the courthouse. According to the commissioner, the thief was a novice. He left a lot of trails like his hair and his fingerprints. Moreover, these evidences matched the records of a criminal. A grizzled man in his fifties, who has been in prison several times for crimes such as extortion and hijacking, living alone with his orphaned grandson, struggling with a progressive and fatal muscle disease, named Selçuk…

“He probably wanted to guarantee his grandson’s future before he become weaker,” the commissioner explained of the criminal’s motivation.

“Well, if the man is imprisoned, who will look after his grandson?”

“If there is no relative, the kid is taken to child services.”

“Actually…” Aysel said, intertwining her fingers. “I know a family who would like to take care of the child. My partner Rozerin’s family wants to adopt for a long time.”

“Did they apply?” said the commissioner.

“I guess not. But can’t the child stay with the family without the procedures?”

“Unfortunately.” said the police. “First, the first meeting does held under the supervision of the state, then the family’s convinience does investigated, these are the processes that will take a few months.”

“I see.” Aysel said and sent an informative message to Rozerin.

The next day, Selçuk’s body was found hanging in a ruin. In the note he put in his pocket, the deceased had reported that he had committed his last theft for his grandson, that he had committed suicide of his own free will, that no one was responsible for his death, and that he had made a will to take good care of his grandson. But the stolen money was never found.

When the case was closed and the incident started to get cold, Aysel offered her lover to go on a Cyprus holiday together. The man was quite reluctant, first he used the sign language and then, when he was writing that there was no need to spend money for such a thing at this financially hard times, the notebook was almost gonna tear up. And how could she think of a vacation when her best friend was lying in her house, frustrated?

Aysel could not make sense of the last sentence. She frowned and read it again.

“Whom are you speaking of?”

Sinan picked up the paper in a snap. “What do you think? he wrote and added “ROZERİN” in capital letters. So the fire of their first quarrel ignited.

The redheaded woman shouted at Sinan for the first time since the beginning of their relationship.

“Why the hell do you care about Rozerin?” she said. “You talked with her only for once! You spare tire. She’s my friend, but she’s nothing to you.”

Sinan was defending himself with quick hand gestures. At the hottest moment of the fight, he slammed the door and walked out. Aysel threw a wine glass behind him and watched the glass pieces scatter on the ground. Then she cleaned the entree with tears.

Footsteps approached the head of the couch where she fell asleep later in the night. Thin and long fingers gently caressed the red hair that had sprouted white hair from its bottom. Sinan left the two Cypriot round-trip ticket on the edge of the sofa.

On the plane, the red-haired woman sat by the window, and the man without a face sat in the middle. The woman had a small, naughty smile on her face.

Watching the city sunk into the clouds, she thought about a month ago. The day when she saw the crowd shouting at someone on the roof next to the building of the apartment building…

“Don’t do this, uncle!” people were saying. The one on the roof said, “Get away! Let go of me.” he replied.

“Hey!” Aysel shouted. “Sir, please, I’m a doctor. I’m coming to talk. Calm down, all right!” Regardless of the objection of the person on the roof and the people around her, she burst in and went to the old man.

Her first move was to grab the old man and pull him back. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. She didn’t mean to yell, but she sounded loud. “Are you crazy? Why do you want to jump down?”

“You can’t help. None of you can help me.”

“First, tell me.”

The old man started to talking to Aysel with tears. He described himself as a useless man with no profession. He’d never worked in a place for more than a few months. He was involved in a crime, he went to jail and got out. He had no pension. He fed his grandson by begging. His daughter had married a villain and had been a victim of femicide; the murderer husband had disappeared after he killed his wife. And the orphaned baby had no one but his grandfather.

“On the top of it, I am sick, the doctors say I will die in a year,” said the old man who wiped his tears. “I am exhausted. I won’t be able to walk soon. I will go down with this illness… There’s no remedy. Tell me, Doctor, what is gonna happen? Who will look after Devin?”

Aysel wanted to change the subject to dispel the distress inside of the man.

“Is your grandson’s name Devin?”

The old man nodded.

The devil touched Aysel’s neck and imbued her with an idea. The idea sprouted with the water of ambition and grew like a seed. With the effect of this sprout, a cunning, evil flash had formed in Aysel’s eyes. “I have a n offer for you.” she said. “Do something for me, and I convince a family that will take care of Devin with love to application for adoption.”

“What?”

Aysel looked around. “Not here. Let’s talk in a quiet place. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Selçuk,” said the old man. The memory was ended here.

The redheaded woman mentally returned to the plane. Occasionally she was checking her bag and smiling as she saw the green of her dollar bales. Frankly, she was afraid that Selçuk would not succeed in this job. However, the old man entered the company without breaking his promise and opened the safe with a key and counted the money into the hands of the redheaded woman. A hundred thousand Turkish liras worth of currency was lying in the bag. Later, Aysel laundered the money with a fake document as if she had sold gold in a jewelry store. She had to give one-sixth of the money by doing that, but she didn’t care. Especially if she gets lucky in Cyprus…

She held the bag slightly sideways. The purpose of this move was to hide the money from Sinan. Sinan didn’t know about the fake robbery or the money. Aysel was planning to sneak into the casino and gamble with this money. There were two possibilities, winning and losing. If she lost, it would be a secret between her mind and herself. If she won and made a million Canadian dollars’ worth of money, she’d surprise her lover. She would have won his heart forever.

As she was getting off the plane, she realized that Sinan had taken her poetry book with him. The corner of the book was appearing from the open corner of the zipper of the man’s bag. Her red mind took advantage of this and started to think those sinister lines: “how would you be afraid if you were sleep my sleep / you can’t live any minutes of mine / Aysel go away I am not for you / don’t pollute your brightness for me”

After settling in the hotel and placing his belongings, Sinan told with hand signals that he was tired and was going to sleep. After watching him fall asleep, Aysel put on a light pink shirt, black fabric pants and appropriate shoes. She brushed her hair and tied it up. She looked in the mirror and examined herself. She approached the bed and whispered her partner’s ear that she was going out for a walk, then she went out quietly.

She was now in the corridor, under the gray ceiling, on a road where luck and misfortune converged. She went down to the lobby. She found out from the hotel reception that the casino is just downstairs. She went down the stairs and stepped into the hall where many fortunes changed hands.

There wasn’t a single window inside, but the place was lit up with lamps. Seeing that Aysel was waiting on the red carpet at the entrance, an officer approached and described that she should register with her identity card and get a receipt from the safe. Since it was still early, there were not many customers. Only one of the tables was full.

The red haired woman couldn’t take her eyes from the men in suits playing poker at the table when she was lingering and even loosing about fifty dollars in front of the slot machines. When she saw that the gamblers had finished the game and were recovering, she went to them with small steps like the birds walking on the ground.

“Excuse me…” she said, she was playing with her nails. “May I ask you something?”

“Sure,” said the fattest one.

“I’m a novice here. And I need to make some money… Which game do you think has the best chance of winning?”

While Aysel was telling her story in a thin voice, a smile spread on the man’s face.

“Well, ma’am…” he said. “It’s really hard for you to make money at this rate. Have you never heard of the phrase ’the house always win’ ?”

“I haven’t…” she said, taking a deep breath. “Don’t I have any chance?”

He leaned against the table with one hand. “How many times do you think you can get lucky? Listen, ma’am, if you don’t want to lose your all money, the first thing you need to know is that you just should play for fun. There are two possibilities, win and lose. If you lose, you will begin a new game with ambition. If you win, you’ll start a new game with the ambition to make more money. The more money the game gives you, the bigger your ambition. As a result, gambling becomes an addiction that you definitely lose.”

“I don’t have time for fun, I need money.” Meanwhile, Aysel was worried that her eyebrows had taken a ridiculous and pathetic shape. “I need a million dollars.”

The men in suits laughed silently at first, like the water warming and boiling on the stove, then burst into laughter. They laughed holding their bellies, laughed like crazy. Meanwhile, Aysel was continuing to bite her lips and playing with her nails, she could not even be offended, she sensed that she was gonna find her way out of her difficult situation thanks to these fat men.

When the man who spoke the first calmed down, he said, “Please no offence, ma’am… Well… What are you going to do with a million dollars? We are really curious. Let’s go outside and talk.”

They bought Aysel a drink at the bar and listened to her life story. Semih, that was the name of the man who spoke the first, said that it is very difficult for a person with no funds like Aysel to raise a million dollars unless she didn’t engage in illegal business.

“Dear Mrs. Aysel,” he said with a little progress of sincerity. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try at all. Now you’re gonna ask me why. We men do love to run after women. And if women run after us, we start to like ourselves. We don’t like our wife, we consider ourselves worthy of more beautiful women. You know those guys who divorced their wifes after they found the money. So I say, leave his face as it be. I see you as a sister, do not get me wrong, you’re a beautiful woman. But that’s not enough for him. If he gets a better appearance, the first thing he’ll do is leave you. Someday tomorrow, I hope you won’t say that Mr. Semih was right.”

Aysel said, “Never!” to herself, but the disappointment prevented her from reacting externally by shaking her head.

She returned to the hotel before nightfall. She found Sinan corresponding with someone on the computer. After the accident he studied graphic design and started to work as a freelancer on the internet. He corresponded frequently with his clients. That’s why Aysel didn’t feel weird.

“Baby, we’re on vacation,” she said as she threw her bag over the bed. “Don’t make yourself tired.”

She woke up in the middle of the night with a dry throat. In the sky, the stars were glowing dimly under the influence of light pollution, and crickets chirped in the garden. Sinan was lying next to her, his shapeless eyelid closed one of his eyes. Aysel turned around quietly, crawled and down from the end of the bed to avoid waking him up. She stood up. She walked to the mini-bar at her fingertips, noticed that there were no bottles left, and sighed. She had to make do with the warm water on the table.

The jug, the empty glass, the laptop with open screen and with blue light were standing side by side. As the woman tried to fill the glass with water from the jug, her elbow hit the mouse and the screen opened. Sinan forgot to turn off the computer.

Aysel grabbed the mouse to turn off the device and looked at the screen. A file on the desktop caught her attention: “ROZ_CV.pdf”

She hated invading someone else’s privacy, but she couldn’t help but wonder, so she double-clicked the file. The content was as strange as the name of the file. Rozerin’s résumé was here. The schools she studied, her work experience, etc.

“What is this file doing here?” she thought when she were looking at the lines.

She knew a little bit about her partner’s past. She knew that Rozerin worked as a sales specialist in a corporate firm in the field of industry for a while before their company was founded. However, when she saw the name of this company on her resume, she could not prevent her eyes from opening wide. This is where Sinan lost his face. Moreover, the working years showed that the accident occurred while Rozerin was working at that company.

So Rozerin was Sinan’s old colleague.

The first word that comes out of Aysel’s mouth was, “Why?” Why did they pretend as if they didn’t know each other all that time? What was the reason for this role, this lie? As she looked at the resume with shocked eyes, she noticed a second detail: their high school was the same. They went to the same school for four years.

As the warm fluid of anxiety spread into her abdominal cavity, the woman opened the browser and entered her lover’s social media account. Since she had never used social media before, she did not know where to click and, more precisely, she did not know what to look for. She clicked on “The Photos” tab. Sinan was here before the accident, year by year, from five years ago, from high school, even primary school. She looked at each one of them, one by one and quickly.

She stood in front of a group photo. It was a photo of more than a hundred teenagers standing together from all the classes. It was hard to choose the faces. Aysel clicked once, uncovered the labels and tried to read the names by approaching the screen, frowning. Rozerin wasn’t among them.

If she was there, what would that mean? She did not know. She pressed the back key until she reached the home page. She wrote Rozerin’s name and surname in the search section and opened the profile. After examining the page with mouse wheel for a while, she went up as if she inspired and pressed the message key. She saw the messages.

The beginning of the texting was last summer, the day Sinan first came to the company named Rozerin.

“Roz?” Sinan wrote. “I came for you. And you didn’t even look at me. Why?”

Rozerin replied half an hour later. “Please… Look, I still feel guilty.”

“What good is your guilt feeling to me?” Sinan said.

“I opened this shop inspired by you. Ask Aysel. I told her it was someone I knew.”

Sinan was on the roll now. “First you burned my face, and now do you see yourself as a guardian angel because you established the company?” Then a smiley… “I’m kidding, Roz, the fire wasn’t your fault.”

The sentences were short and piecemeal. Aysel felt a lump in her throat.

“A human error. The administrators got the punishment. You know that. Even if you left the heater on, it would have to turn off automatically.”

So the fire at the old firm started when Rozerin left the heater on. And years later, Rozerin opened the cosmetics company in partnership with Aysel to get rid of the guilt of what happened.

“I miss you, Roz. Talk to me. Just for once.”

Ten minutes of silence…

Rozerin did nothing but express her guilt at first, but in the following days she started to write as willingly as Sinan. They talked about the high school years. They weren’t in the same class in high school, but they were lovers, and they had pictures of them hand in hand.

In a section from the following months, Sinan was saying, “I still love you. I wish everything could be the same.”

“Are you saying this while Aysel is sleeping inside? What do you expect from me?” Roserin said. “Sinan. I can’t. I can’t see your face, I can’t hear your voice. Moreover, it is because of me.”

“Stop it. How many times do I have to tell you? It wasn’t because of you.”

Soon, Rozerin gave her obstinacy up and they started meeting secretly. They started calling each other “my love” and giving compliments. Rozerin once asked Sinan, “Why did you settle in Aysel’s house?” furiously. Aysel did not realize that she was crying until she tasted a salt on her tongue.

The conversations continued until yesterday evening, with the dose of sincerity increasing. The last sentence of the texting belonged to Sinan. “Our fellow is in the house, I’m going now.”

Aysel, who perceived the word “our fellow” as a blasphemy, turned off the web page and the computer in a rage. She didn’t make a sound, but her face was full of tears. Her legs were shaking. She wished that all this would be a nightmare so that she would wake up and be okay. She hurt when she bit her finger. The pain was real, as the whole thing.

She took her bag and got out. She went straight to the casino. She put a lot of money into the slot machine. As she watched the rolls spin, she drank the hard drink she bought down, and the meantime she heard the ringing sign that she had won.

A penniless and beloved woman turned into a millionaire and cheated woman just in five hours.

On the first weekend of March, all the customers of a restaurant in Toronto were eating their meals indoors due to the cold weather, and a Turkish couple was sitting on the terrace. Aysel, wrapped in her thin coat, was smiling at Sinan, whose face was wrapped in bandages.

After the night in Cyprus, she dissimulated the things her know and she announced that she had earned money for the bionic face. Sinan couldn’t believe what he heard, and after he made her repeat the good news, his only eye glowed, and he hugged his lover.

His semi-organic bionic face was gonna be ready to use without bandage in about a month. However, he could already move his new tongue and lips, speak, and grind food with his prosthetic teeth. When Aysel first heard Sinan’s voice, she felt like she was walking on clouds.

The woman who paid the Canadian company sent the remaining money to Rozerin and said that she could continue her cosmetics company. So she thought she’d atone for the theft she committed somehow.

She separated her days from her nights. While the sun was on top, she was taking care of Sinan, smiling at his face -with a real smile- and when the stars took over the watch of the sky, she was logging in the Sinan’s social media account and reading the ongoing texting with Rozerin.

“I miss you so much.” said the woman with the bangs. “I imagine your lips. I shouldn’t do that. It hurts.”

“Why? What’s wrong with imagining?”

They were talking about Aysel and that their lives have improved thanks to Aysel. They were praising Aysel in the lap of their betrayal.

“She is my best friend Sinan. We’re doing wrong.”

“No, Roz, give me time. It’ll all be over when we get back. There’s nothing to be sorry about, we’re adults.”

Aysel wasn’t making a sound, she was just reading.

When the sunshine and colorful flowers were welcoming May, the couple returned to Turkey. The streets were chirping. With the excitement of approaching summer vacation, the children were running around. Sinan was the only person who didn’t get his share of this energy in the vicinity. Sinan’s new face could show any facial expression like other faces, but smile was not one of them.

And Aysel was laughing at every opportunity, she was never fading her smiling face and was hovering around Sinan. She was making excuses and wouldn’t leave her lover alone for a minute. The man wasn’t happy with this situation at all, he was waiting for the opportunity to get rid of this woman and go to the other woman he loved.

The first moment Sinan smiled was when he received the offer “Let’s go to dinner with Rozerin.”. For the first time in days, the couple were happy together. Especially the man was unable to contain himself. He was just feeling like his heart would come out of his chest as he imagined Rozerin’s bangs and her big eyes. The red-haired woman was also happy for a reason only she knew and was laughing without pretending.

The first time the three saw each other was worth seeing. Rozerin and Sinan were being indifferent to each other and showing an exaggerated interest in Aysel. Little Devin was running around and trying to figure out what was going on. And Aysel was observing the environment with utmost care. She had to pick the right time.

She had a big conversation with her partner’s mother. She talked about Devin, she talked about the company. Her eyes was on the mother, her mind was on the rest of the room.

Rozerin, who was sitting as happy as a child on holiday, got up on the pretext of bringing coffee. In thirty seconds, Sinan said he had to go to the toilet. Aysel was already waiting for this. After he left, she counted to thirty, stood quietly and twitched towards the corridor.

She turned her head to the left. She saw the man walking towards the kitchen balcony. She followed him with mouse steps. When he went up to the balcony, the redheaded woman approached and ambushed under the window.

Rozerin was in the corner of the balcony, leaning against the railing. She was wearing a big green flowered dress that looked like a kimono. Her eyelids were painted with a dark eyeshadow, her chestnut bark hair was blow-dried. After hugging Sinan evasively and fearfully, she took hold of his cheeks and brought his lips closer to her own lips.

This is exactly the moment the red woman was waiting for. The moment when these organs, which contain nerve cells intensely in the human body, would touch each other and attain their desire… When she stood up and clicked on the window, the young lovers jumped over with fear. They stepped back and looked at her. The woman managed to force open the swollen balcony door due to moisture and went out.

“Aysel…” Sinan was going to say.

Aysel could not keep her promise that her voice would not tremble. “I know everything,” she said.

“I…”

“I’ve read all your correspondence.”

Rozerin turned her head and didn’t say anything as if she wasn’t there. When the red woman realized that she could not hold back her tears, she turned around and left quickly. Sinan was coming after her like a shadow and calling out her name. “Aysel listen, please listen to me.”

In Aysel’s mind, the verses wandered like rain.

“Either you gain the mastery of dying / or you gain the ability to accumulate fear/ my pain becomes abundant for you /and my joy never fits yours”

When they arrived home after a long road, Sinan decided to play the grumpy man. He screamed that he loved Rozerin, as if he had not adorned the four seasons with lies. Aysel sat on a seat. Sinan was standing, and started to talk.

“Sinan, I…”

“Let me finish your sentence. You didn’t love me despite my face.” he said. “You loved me because my face was scarred. More precisely, you did not actually love me.”

The red-haired woman sighed like water in a whirlpool. She didn’t even have strength to ask questions.

“Do you know what was the thing you loved?” Sinan said. He stood up and raised his voice. “You loved your godlikeness. You loved healing a loser, Panacea! You loved looking down on and feeling sorry for me, you…”

“I didn’t pity you.” Her voice was muffled because Aysel had burst into tears, even though she had made many promises to herself in the opposite direction. “I protected you of the blowing wind so that you wouldn’t get hurt.”

There was not a single sign of feeling in the man. “She protected me of the blowing wind so that I wouldn’t get hurt…” he repeated in a low voice. “I loathe your arrogant compassion.”

“What do you want?” she said, wiping her tears. “Well, you don’t want compassion, you said you were adore it before, but never mind. If you tell me what you expect from me, I will do it.”

“There, that’s the problem you can’t see. You do want me to have expectations from you, and be in need of you so that I come to the door of the goddess and plead, desperately!”

The woman grasped her hair with both hands with fierce, “Why are you manipulating?” she shouted. “What is the relevance? Sinan, you cheated on me with my best friend. Is this how you get away with it?”

“Because I couldn’t break up with you!” the man replied in the same tone. “I couldn’t dare.”

“I would give my life to hear your voice. However, I didn’t know that this voice would carry the words bitter from poison.” said the redheaded woman to herself.

Sinan said, “Okay,” as if he felt her thoughts and sat down in the nearest chair. “My treatment was done thanks to you, I am grateful for that. I can talk, I even got my gestures back. I’ll owe you for life. But the payment doesn’t include relationship. I can’t be happy with you. And you can’t be happy with me. So let me be happy with Rozerin.”

“I was happy,” Aysel said. “It never occurred to me to see you in debt. I’m sorry if I made you feel the heavy burden of gratitude without knowing it.”

“So, if I accept your apology and return to you, will you accept it? Have you no pride? Was the goddess so powerless this much?”

The woman looked out the window and did not answer. Was the sunshine too pale today, or what?

“If we had a healthy relationship, you wouldn’t let me come back at this stage.” Sinan said. “I, for example, would suffer a lot if Rozerin cheated on me, but I would leave her anyway. I wouldn’t look at her face again. Because if I keep the affair going, I would always remember the stain of her infidelity, and I couldn’t love her as pure as I used to. And you’re ready to accept me even though you know everything. You know I’ve been writing to Rozerin since day one, but you want me to get back to you.”

Aysel remained silent. “I’m not telling you to come back,” she said. “I don’t want your lips to touch her lips, wouldn’t you do that?”

“You’re addicted to the feelings I’ve given you. So whether I cheat on you or humiliate you, you’re ready to accept me. Anyhow, the chemicals your brain is addicted to will be released. There is no difference between you smoking marijuana or hugging me.”

The devil slipped through the open window like the wind. He put a little kiss on Aysel’s neck. A seed of idea that mixed with a poisonous rage sprouted into vines. Her mind was just like a Winchester House; the unfinished mansion with dead-ended stairs, with a door to the void and hundrets of rooms which was made built by the widow of an American arms dealer who lost her mind due to the grief and remorse of losing her child…

She went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee. She got up and started packing. The stuff to fill a small suitcase was enough. She also put Attila Ilhan’s book in and zipped up. She phoned a nearby hotel and made a reservation. She slammed the door in front of Sinan.

Although Sinan felt terrible, he shrugged his shoulders after a while and muttered, “I didn’t tell her to leave the house.” He opened the fridge and drank the unfinished wine. He was getting dizzy before he threw the bottle in the trash. Was it normal for him to get drunk so quickly? He collapsed when he was thinking about it.

The first thing he felt was a pain when a dim red light filling his blinking eyes. His head was aching as if it were going to crack; his back, arms, legs, all of his body was aching. When he tried to move, to open his muscles, he noticed that he was all trapped and his stomach was contracting with fear. He thought he was paralyzed. His head was tilted back in a very uncomfortable position, and when he tried to move it, he was being obstructed by an uncertain source.

When he fully awoke, he understood the situation. Sinan was tied to a chair. A thin long chain wrapped around his arms, legs, body, neck and restrained his head by holding his forehead. His face was staring up at the ceiling. There was a funnel hanging from the ceiling just above his nose.

“Well, it was not something that required a lot of intelligence.” Aysel’s voice was heard. “Knocking you out with a drink and carrying you here, tying you up tight, arranging the funnel, etc. But you cost me a lot of money, do you know that? A ten-meter chain is 500 liras. I didn’t feel sorry this much even for a million dollars.

She opened the bottle full of acid and listened to its hissing sound like a symphony. “Sinan!” she exclaimed. “Do you recognize this sound?”

Aysel stroked her face and shook her head. No, it wasn’t real. The suitcase she put at next to her feet was real, she really abandoned the house, and she waited like a kitten indeed, but the rest was a dream. Dreams seeping from the reddest corners of her mind… She had not drugged the wine, hung a funnel from the ceiling, and wrapped a six-millimeter ten-meter chain around the body of the man she loved.

Her feet moved almost independently of her will and dragged her to the police station to confess her crimes.

***

She took one of the two letters on the table and opened the folds.

“My dear Aysel,

I’m writing this letter, like the three previous letters, to ask you to forgive me.

I know I’ve lost your friendship, and it hurts. I know there’s no excuse to justify me, but just hear the things from my angle for once, please.

High school romances are like a flash in the pan, they are short lived, but they leave a mark. Sinan was the first person I loved in my life. I used to think I’d pass out when I was holding his hand. When we were at the senior class, he said that I was inadequate for someone like him, that he deserved better than me, and he broke up with me. I stopped eating and drinking for a while. I was so angry with Sinan that I wished for something terrible to happen to him and for his ego to be rasped.

The years that have passed have brought us together in the same workplace. Sinan was in the production department, I was in the administrative department. We didn’t run into each other except in and out. I wasn’t angry with him anymore, but I was pretending not to know him. On a cold winter day, I went downstairs, forgetting the heater on, which I used to warm my feet. My scarf hanging from the chair was caught on fire. It had made a wick effect and burned the stuff inside with the domino effect. It was splashed all over the place within an hour. When one of the machines changed its direction due to heat, the pressurized acid squirted into Sinan’s face. A chain of omissions… It was a lousy place that didn’t even have a functional fire extinguisher.

I was tried in court, and I wasn’t punished, but I couldn’t take the guilt out of me. That’s why you and I started the cosmetics company. Thus, I believed that I could give back what I received from Sinan and get rid of the guilt. I invited him to the store, but when I saw him, I couldn’t talk to him out of grief. I stayed in the shadows like a coward.

I should never have texted with him. I should have been able to stay away from him when I saw him giving you hope, when I witnessed him sucking the love inside you had for him like a sponge.”

Aysel put the letter back in the envelope without reading the rest of it. Ever since she went to prison, she’s been getting letters from Rozerin, scorched with remorse. However, how would be appreciated the conscience that doesn’t guide, and what would be the benefit of the pain that had been felt too late? Her anger at her old best friend had faded away, left its place to pity.

The second letter came from a businessman she met in Cyprus. Semih found out that Aysel had been imprisoned and wondered about her recent situation. “I can get back the favor he didn’t deserve,” he said, implying that he could hurt Sinan’s face. The redheaded woman didn’t want that. She left them be so that they may live each other’s and themselves’ nature knowingly. There was no greater punishment than not being able to look in the mirror of conscience.

She knew the latest news. The company was in the process of being shut down. After Rozerin rejected Sinan, Sinan went abroad and disappeared.

“Three months,” Aysel thought. She spent three months in prison because of the crime of instigate to robbery. Moreover, Selçuk’s relatives who did not look after Devin suddenly appeared and started to threaten her. Of course, it was just a bluff, but it left a mark on her soul. Someone who was scared enough would not believe it for a while when he/she is safe again.

It was because of that reason, on a December day; ten days after she had been discharged she was afraid of someone to throw her down and make this murder look like a suicide when she was drinking tea at midnight, under the wall clock which hung in the kitchen of her new apartment in a three-storey old apartment building in a narrow street. After this momentary and irreversible feeling, she recalled that her delusion was inappropriate and took a deep breath. On the longest night of the year, she felt something that she could describe as a cool spring flowing in her; free, strong, safe. After drinking her chamomile tea to the last sip, she left the glass on the counter and went to sleep.