I didn’t realize how sticky human blood was until I slipped in my kitchen last August and fell into the mouth of my pried-open dishwasher with a butter knife resting edge-up. I remember thinking that I was like a piñata filled with black cherries, the way I flowed out of myself like an unusually red slushy.
Before it happened, I was washing dishes and thinking about why my mother is the way she is. I thought about her immigrating to America at 20, trickling limply through grocery stores looking for jarred grape leaves, her seer, pearly eyes radiating restlessness, somehow turning 45, becoming a wife and a mother, and disappearing among a chorus of greetings at the school pick-up zone, fond of sayings like Salutations and How do you do? (remnants of her ESOL education at a Long Island school she forgets the name of) confused why the other parents never said anything back. I thought about how tiring it must be to have spent a life excusing yourself and explaining yourself, then waking up at 64 and wondering what happened to you after a lifetime of accommodating, all in a country that cannot seem to love you back. I thought about the dappled smell of Vicks and köfte shaped by her hands and the old cotton blankets she wrapped around pots of homemade yogurt so they’d clot overnight. I thought about how she bought yogurt from the store now and that one day, her death would fall in my lifetime and I wouldn’t know how to live in its wake. I imagined her face, creased like a palm, unloading the dishwasher as a 64-year-old and it blurred my vision, so I turned the faucet from lukewarm all the way to hot.
I thought about my childhood in Lake County—the velvety green skies in mid-April, crowdfunded school play sets and sweet corn on styrofoam plates and the angry geese with their spring honking. How often I marveled at contrails sprawling in the early morning sky, how rockets always seemed to be going to the moon! How the pin oaks and sugar maples in my backyard shuddered to life when the adults disappeared. “We die for nothing,” they’d say to me, and “don’t let us disappear.” How I’d promptly thrown out my mom’s grocery store paperbacks and petitioned against my Kumon homework, crying because, what if one day I ended up a tree and all I had to watch over me was a child?
I remembered, too, how badly I used to crave pumpkin pie in the dead of a Midwestern summer. I thought I’d go to Costco and buy pumpkin pie later that night, after the dishes, because I was 25 and no longer had to wait for an occasion to eat pumpkin pie. I remembered that my tank was on E and I needed to stop for gas first but the gas station was out of the way and I didn’t want to drive 40 minutes total just to get a stomachache from pie, so I thought I’d go the next day after work.
I thought about my exes and re-imagined them as bow-legged lambs. I envisioned every sext I’ve ever sent in a fugue state, blown up on some perverted subreddit and ruining my life. I thought about constantly feeling unnatural in my womanhood, maybe because I’d always felt like a daughter first, and I’d always be a daughter before I could be a woman. I thought about the dish soap drying my knuckles, my zombie fingers, how my hair was getting longer but in an unkempt way, Brazilian waxes and how the idea of getting one now was laughable, yet I almost wished to be back on that spa table with the parchment paper on Stevens Creek because then I’d been 20, a starry-eyed dynamo, choked with hope because all pain was measured and manageable, and mostly, I felt everything was still possible.
I didn’t want to think anymore, but my phone was out of reach, and the dishes were nearly done, so I thought about everything I’d watched that day on my phone. A gaunt ankle challenge, chewy soybeans, neon green slick, jumbo radioactive pickles stuffed with cream cheese and Takis, an ad for gut-biome friendly antacids, a bomb dropping over a hospital, the supply-chain crisis behind butterboards, DIY brine shrimp egg hatchery, a group of villagers in Taiwan unknowingly recorded on eyeglasses, a recruitment ad for the US Marine Corps, bi-coastal influencers tasting profiteroles on camera, a six-year-old looking for her mother in the rubble, a proboscis monkey wriggling its phallic-looking nose making noises that sounded vaguely like “hep,” hep,” “hep,” a demo video of a missile packed with six blades and no warhead, air-fryer recipes for busy corporate boyfriends, a hiring ad posted by the LAPD, a list of daily facial exercises (because emoting supposedly resulted in quaggy jowls and gizzards), a makeshift apple bong passed between yabbering teenagers in a dope-fogged Nissan Altima, and an old woman with fatigue-flattened eyes, red streaked on her forehead, palms cupped to the sky, screaming “my son!”
I thought about how I hadn’t talked to my grandmother in months. I thought about the Turkish economy, then my favorite soup, analı kızlı—with mothers, with daughters—the meatballs the mothers, the chickpeas the daughters. I thought American soups hardly had that kind of semantic ambition, then I thought about my grandmother again and my grandfather while I was at it, my aunts and uncles and cousins, feeling ashamed I was this mute little girl in America, existing wantonly among thongs and bacon cheeseburgers and Republicans. I thought I’d call everyone the next day, in descending order of age, on my way to Costco for pumpkin pie. I thought about visiting, off-season ticket prices, the 14-hour flight time from LAX to Istanbul, the clunky UX of the Turkish Airlines app, and then about Germanwings 9525. I thought about planes and how a plane can fly safely if one engine dies and even reasonably glide for a bit if it loses all its engines and then I thought about how none of those things mattered for the 149 people on that Germanwings 9525 flight. I thought about the occasional futility of kindness, how you could spend your life being good-natured and forgiving and moral, but it wouldn’t mean a thing if one stranger had already decided to end your life on a random Tuesday.
I thought about religious persuasion and prison dinners and e‑blasts and the price of chicken and hiatal hernias and trees and hellfire missiles and the complex dust structures hiding under my oven. I thought about how my hand was burning because the water was too hot and then I stepped back and slipped on the trail of water I’d been leaving across the kitchen floor and while I tried to catch my balance, I landed stomach-first on the open dishwasher and then I’d never thought about anything more clearly in my life.
~
Didem Arslanoglu is a Turkish-American writer/editor living in Los Angeles. Her fiction appears in Astrolabe, The Ana, and is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine.