By Zeynep Özer
Winner of The Long River Review Graduate Writing Award
Three Women
That’s when
they started talking.
Not when the man
with the gun
walked into the puddle of blood.
Puddle of his wife’s blood.
Not when the puddle
turned cold turned light
painted sirens red and blue.
But when everyone
even the terrified terrorized abandoned
children
left
and the two women
the only two witnesses
finally held
each other’s gazes
in the concretely now-empty
parking lot.
There is a more straightforward way to tell this story. The story of three women who happened to be in the same place, at the same time. The setting, unremarkable for most, is not so for the women, the husband with the gun, the two children silently shivering in the back of a dark forest green ‘92 Lexus bought for $500 from a heavy-set tobacco-smelling dealer in Ohio, parked in the lot behind the run-down minimart.
The first woman – let’s call her Fran, she is the customer – is hovering at the back, wondering if she should get the diet coke. She is always searching, never finding, the taste of that first can she bought with her bus fare when she was thirteen. She’d always wanted to try it, the store only had diet. A tarry sweetness lingered in her mouth as she walked back home, two hours away.
In comes Enid, with a surrendered glimmer in her eyes that renders her steps silent and light. She is tired, but finds a smile for Reign at the register. With a half-contented sigh – first smile of the night – Reign leans back down to her sudoku. Keeping her mind fresh, as she tells her niece. She struggles with the nines and threes today. This is the “easy” game, but she’s preoccupied, trying to fill the squares with numbers from her sister’s hospital bills. Missing numbers, money they don’t have. Meanwhile, Enid walks through the short candy aisle, with a gentle nod, passes Fran and stands a little further down the refrigerated row, in front of the Stella Artois cans.
Enter the man with the gun. His arm, his extension. His dull steps inundate the silent accord between the three women. He squeezes behind Fran. Startles her. She steps forward, turns to look at the implacable visage – he couldn’t have always been so, right? – and sees the pointed gun. All that she believes in comes undone in that moment. As her knees give way, so does the silence. It bursts into a billion small droplets that wash the glass fridge door. No energy drinks were harmed in the making of this murder. Only Enid.
“I haven’t paid for this.”
Fran manages
to talk
first, holding
the can of diet coke.
(She will become a drinker.)
Quietly Reign
pushes back the hand
reaching toward her:
“It’s done.”
No one had really paid attention to the two of them, except for the impatient officer with the surgical set of questions, and the paramedic who asked them to follow the finger and the light. After the body bag was filled, the shop owner who rushed from two blocks down was tranquilized (“You may reopen in the morning”), and the children were collected by social services,
Fran and Reign were the only ones left
in the wet, cataclysmic parking lot.
That’s when they started talking.
Asking each other questions they could not
ask themselves.
Whoso List to Hunt
Every morning, all summer they go to the nearby lake. There’s a swimming club on the banks for the residents of the area. It’s convenient: food, drinks, facilities (a floating dock, a pier with newly reinstalled aluminum stairs, changing cabins and showers). It’s also safe for the children to play freely because everyone knows everyone. Some are known better than others. Take the gentleman who’s been renting the cabin on the opposite shore for the past two years; he is less well-known. He’s polite: always with a tame smile, holds the door for Nancy and Pat, occasionally joins in a game of whist with Al, Robert, and Eddie – the retired colleagues who’ve been coming to the same timeshare for the past thirty or so years with their wives – never without saving a playful comment for the waiter, Jimmy. He must be around forty. Comes in around 9. Spends around 45 dollars. By now, he has his usual spot at the restaurant, right by the water. Rests one arm on the top deck railing, gaze intermittently holding the horizon, luring the lake’s commotion: every morning, all summer, a single steady swimmer has been creasing and uncreasing the sky that falls into the mirror surrounding her. Reads his newspapers for a while, national and local – that Pat really admires; no one reads the local news anymore, no one appreciates the hard work that goes into the paper, and no one remembers that kind young men, the reporter, who would come into her bakery, who would gaze into her eyes with a mischievous smile and that appreciative upward curve at the corner of his rosy mouth, and who would always have, at the tip of his tongue and in his column, a nice word for her pies.
Every morning, all summer, whenever they arrive, as soon as they arrive, Daph throws herself into the water and doesn’t come out until the end of the day, until she is the wrinkled skin of the milk.
She goes into the water and stays there, under the August sun, swimming, thinking, crying, not thinking, until her blood reaches boiling temperature, her blood curdles, she becomes an evasive, slightly repulsive, negligible desire, wild silk. She is twelve.
Mid-Autumn
It is impossible not to hear the leaves. They take over your auditory faculties as if they have fallen right into your ear canals. They cover these inner moss paths with layers of bronze that crunch sound into a million flakes. If you stand still and listen, you’ll hear pressure surging and waning, the making and unmaking of possibilities. The flakes, restless, cling in vain to the green of warmer seasons.
Each step into the woods eddies you into its crowded center, disintegrating your sense of place, like limestone contemplating water.
I don’t know where to go from here. Here where I come to clear my head, here, now flooded with the notes of an orchestra tuning its instruments before a concert, the strings warming up, without acknowledging me, their shivering audience. As the woods tune to their reference pitch, I struggle to discern their sounds from that of my own thoughts. I think I introduce discord into the air. I hope it breeds variety and not dissonance.
The air is not aware of this. It carries the weight, but it is crisp. I try biting into it like an apple from the orchard one town over. Failing that, I feel I can crawl inside it instead. Pluck its stem and inchworm through the tunnel. Carve in its flesh an atrium. Walls awash in high-pitched juice, seeds playing a deciduous tune. If I succeed, I can finally grow to be a strain of this orchard.
Can you, when you hold onto your own rootstock? Isn’t what we desire in apple is its ability to retain its traits through propagation? You are not bred for this climate. Your rootstock isn’t planted in this soil. What if you’re never selected for cultivation here?
I can let go of the rootstock.
And then what? What are you without the seeds, without the roots, without the native soil?
