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Terra Infirma

Faruk Ulay
translated from the Turkish by
Özlem Sensoy

When the sky darkens, the wolves will loom. We'll seize our rifles and head outside. It will be good then.

2.
Death turns on the tips of our tongues. Whereas we're still outside. Birds on our shoulders. Shit upon.

3.
The buzzers sound alarm. We recede from the tone as the door chimes. Eyes fisted, darkness jaundiced as our fingers press down.

4.
Returning home, the soup placed before us carries the scent of the streets. Winged arthropods tip around the rim of the metal cups chained to street corner fountains.

5.
When we realize that no one will remember us when we die, we search for ways to keep death at a distance. We don't even know who we are.

6.
Those of us thinking of escape emerge among those who don't know where to escape to. It is up to us to help them flee. Unsure of where they're going.

7.
The hail of the bells when still is missed. A stranger in its home. The shadows rise quickly, calling for the night. Most of our children still awake.

8.
Everyone is together. Time passes with conversation. Still, the only sound is the breeze of the tune upstairs.

9.
As the wall clock is about to chime, we hang onto the pendulum. We stop the clock, until it's time to chime again. We've forgotten to draw back the curtains.

10.
The weather vane sits like a stone upon the roof. We are below. Our breath unable to catch the wind.

11.
We could forget the existence of the walls, were it not for the crack where they seam. The milk sours in its glass bottle.

12.
As we walk, we sweat. The dog pursues the drops we leave behind. The barrages are muddy cavities. The fruit of quick multiplication is drought.

13.
We tear and paste the blank sheet, so there is no space for words. Pencil-less-ness.

14.
The darkness of the strait between the two islands leaves them solitary, and it uncrossable. We watch the distant shore from the third island where we've taken shelter.

15.
With the news helicopters, we fly from here to there, all day long, unable to witness events. The sounds of the city's barbaric plunder soar up to these heights.

16.
While falling, we look up to the mouth of the well to see where time flows to. The bottom is mossless.

17.
We go to bed early. Those of us who cannot sleep greet the morning, gathered at the windows, casting thoughts to the balconies across the way.

18.
While the knives are sharp, we place our throats against them. The pain not frightening when not felt.

19.
A place with no crow or squirrel. The horses chase. As their braided manes slap against their necks, the sound like a heart beating.

20.
The wind traveling among the highlands greets us with a savage laugh. We haven't brought our hiding corners with us. The wind bites.

21.
The birds, that blacken the sky, that take flight as one. Still, they don't know how to fly among people.

22.
The revolution that's turned the wheat fields into tractor lots, now pursues us. Not leaving it, we won't be caught by it.

23.
As he fans the fire, he thinks to speak to us. We don't understand what he says. Our minds are trapped inside the veins of the marble at our backs.

24.
The tired fields cannot nurse the crop. And the water looks sadly, still, among the two fields. Time, it is time for harvest, but there is no sound.

25.
The mallard ducks manage to escape every trap they're caught in. They can only be hunted if shot.

26.
The four fingers of our left hands are calloused from playing the bowed strings. They tap like fingernails upon reading glasses.

27.
The blue eyed, curly haired, broad faced, dark skinned children. They pelt rocks at the twilight moon.

28.
A flower secretly blooms, and folds. It does this to remain forever a bud, it tells us as we capture it in full bloom.

29.
The mud gathers at the end of the street to splash on the long-legged ones among us. We hold the street at one end. We're all tall.

30.
Our hands are pinched in the crack of the footstool. We've placed them there to carry it, bringing it along with us. We console ourselves, thinking, we'll sit when tired.

31.
We can't keep our eyes from darting from their sockets. Each in each of our palms. Our palms in our pockets. Each of us trousered.

32.
The young girl says she's a princess. With a sweet voice, the mother whose path we've cut, hushes her child.

33.
To break from the place at which it holds the tree, the branch buds leaves and grows quickly. From afar, a thin brake.

34.
The woman with butterfly dusted across her chest passes by again. The same lunch basket always in her hand. Always empty.

35.
The old ladies grasping at their skirts lifted by the wind, fall virginal, but death isn't near here.

36.
A child occupied with birds gliding near the horizon. At the end of a long tether, running, falling and rising.

37.
On darkly clouded nights, when sleeping is onerous, we talk to ourselves. The sun appears quickly then.

38.
They want to sell us the dog, the dog they bought to lick stamps. We meet them at the police station. They tell us that they've left the dog at home.

39.
All together, we scold the one speaking so loudly around the dead. Out on the kitchen balcony, there is a broken planter where the water dripping from the plastic demijohn pools.

40.
The three rats wedged between the bales of straw are blind. They're just like that, says the farmer welcoming us into his shed.

41.
As we work to get the less-talkative one accustomed to listening, we notice that the water flowing can only be heard in the silence.

42.
The butcher is caught selling fur-trade animals. None of us knows who betrayed him. The cages remain empty for a long while.

43.
When the landscape glooms, the mist settles early. The poppies have spotted the pastures, but they can't be seen. The ship is there.

44.
One of every three pictures we draw on the wall contains a stain resembling a heart. We see this stain not with the coloured chalk, but when we use charcoal.

45.
Fish, strung upon twine are looped around tree trunks, we walk with our noses pinched. Twin steatite lion sculptures mark the forest's exit. The lions sit.

46.
Among the shape shifters, we forget who we are. Flies pass us by.

47.
When we tell them that we nourish ourselves with royal jelly, the children chase us away, bursting the paper bags they've inflated. We flee, feigning freight.

48.
The houses thick with bugs, and the outside with smells. When we ask, why do you look at us like that, he says, I can't see how I look.

49.
He reads us the letter his father wrote. I didn't chase you away to have you be my enemy. Return at the first chance. We don't let him return.

50.
We're very calm. And very well-behaved. We're quite far removed from stoic idleness unbecoming adults. We live without burdening anyone. Even our hair doesn't grow.

51.
It is the dead leaf upon his forehead that betrays him. He moves among us, not knowing that he'll be caught. It isn't in any of us to catch him.

52.
Running in the passageways between the cellars, life flows like water. The underground shelters a thousand and one excuses within its silence.

53.
We stuff the year's coldest day by handfuls into our pockets. The coming summer, our insides will be warm.

54.
We find ourselves foolishly separating two dogs fighting. They become one and attack us. The pickpockets are everywhere tonight. Watching fear from afar isn't frightening.

55.
How difficult it is to find a tone that will inspire meaningful dialogues. We wait for the technology that brings the cinema to our house to come knocking on the door.

56.
The silver, when rubbed, dulls quicker. The servant woman lays fault with time. Hiding her face with her skirt, she says she wants to divorce.

57.
The foreign musicians alter the familiar tunes as they play. Among them, the fiddler and flautist are the best. Our ears afire.

58.
Another storm. Stealing our shingles. Our women resist looking in the mirrors, for fear that they will not be able to find the lines upon their faces.

59.
If the warm wine is red, and drunk on an empty stomach, it will cause nausea. One among us trims toenails with a shard of green glass.

60.
On the table, a meal simpler than bread. No forks, no knives, no plates. The beer arrives in copper cups. We cleanse as we eat.

61.
It is a town where even the dogs attend the cats' burial processions. Respect for the dead is acute. Here, the cold can't chill anyone.

62.
When we step outside, groggy with sleep, we come upon animals with transparent ears. Their earless shadows pressed upon the walls.

63.
We don't touch our drinks until the moth flutters its wings. The one who made us believe this to be the sign we'd been waiting for, we hold his glass hostage.

64.
The vestibule crackles with seeds fallen from a seldom-found tree. Dripless candles in our hands, we search for the lock on the door.

65.
We are on a street the width of a sidewalk, among walls covered with childrens' paint-dripping palm prints. The scent of roasted chestnuts cuts our path.

66.
At twilight, a bat-winged automobile. Its headlights off. It passes us with an inaudible pitch. The man standing beside me, waiting to cross the street, whispers in my ear.

67.
A wind, hiding at the mountain's summit, traps the clouds, combs their hair, and sends them to us.

68.
A bundled baby emerges from a basket suspended from a moon tower. When we grow tired of pounding on the tower door, we leave stuffed sparrows.

69.
We find it, hiding behind the label of a cork-stopped bottle. Realizing that it's been seen, it puffs the cork open, and fizzes away before we press our hands over the mouth of the bottle.

70.
The fog drapes over the factories first. Then the bakeries disappear. We lose our homes last. We pass the night outdoors.

71.
The black roses are our cousins. As they bloom, the sky darkens. To speak is a dangerous act.

72.
The wave comes days after the quake. It passes over us without touching the shore. In the days to follow, saltwater rain.

73.
The shutters pound their heads against the wall. Those that don't shut, break and fall. The last of the shutters is melted away by acid rain. Thieves steal the shutterless structure, brick by brick.

74.
Their threadlike arms cannot lift their hands, their hands larger than their faces. Shoulders fallen, their backs bent. But tall and proud. Beautiful. They walk towards us.

75.
As we pass through the turnstile, our heels are scraped. Golddust burst from our shoes. And thin pins pierce our backs.

76.
With every passing of the helicopter, the windows of the working district tremble. Yet the calls of the owls are crystal clear.

77.
The roof is littered with satellite dishes. We search for a spot to have a picnic. Plastic meadows in our backpacks. Cats are laid out on discarded cigarette butts, grooming.

78.
Rather than barking, the well-off canines wander, howling. Most limp on one posterior paw.

79.
A balloon wrapped around the lip of a champagne bottle inflates as the bubbles burst. Three rounds are fired from a cork gun. The women all have blue eyes. Their eyes all closed. Their hearts crowded in their throats.

80.
The beaks of owls in leather pouches. The pouches flinch. Rattling in the back room.

81.
The miracles come one after another. To ease the troubles of living, ordered miracles, expensive miracles. We scatter the leftovers among the children.

82.
We cough, looking up to the sky. Signs, left just for us among the clouds. The wind scatters them so we can't see.

83.
Someone is after us. As soon as we turn the corner, we raise our umbrellas. Ice cream season's just begun.

84.
They're standing among the fallen trees. Among the dust and fog, their legs caught by a snaking cloud. We watch from our train car, as they fall to the ground and disappear.

85.
Slicing his throat, he casts a shadow over our intimacy. It doesn't yet effect our friendship. We call the girls to us.

86.
We pull the pregnant woman behind a bush. We forgot to bring the scissors. Everything that stirs is frozen. From afar, the sound of water bursting.

87.
The machine records everything that is breaking. Anything soft dissolves before being recorded. The world is cornered.

88.
He puts such a distance between himself and us that were unable to know what he says. We do not know him. His unintelligible words are like a stranger signalling from afar.

89.
In the light of the strung lanterns, some things resembling women dressed in white garments flutter. Lightning is the only natural phenomenon exacting caution.

90.
We use our own voices when we ask. We use their voices when we answer. The water flows slow.

91.
Twin clouds. God isn't present, and thus their presence. The birds also fly in pairs. The moon rises before the sun sets. A hellish heat in the air. Our feet frozen.

92.
The waterspiders and frogs wait among the flowers that release their fragrance when bruised. The forest weaves its web, nursing from the water.

93.
A settlement plan drawn on glass. We argue about the equal parceling of the map, and about the direction to which we will go.

94.
The birds are free falling. The sun is setting incomplete. The water's skin wrinkles. The bed is tousled. The streets soaked with people.

95.
There is no end to patience. Cynical and worn, we cannot remain this way forever. We are reminded of one another, even now. And we are broke.

96.
To see so much in such little light. In the mirror that looks at us, faces content and unabashed are reflected.

97.
He swallows the key to the room he's locked himself into, so as not to be free. About to die of hunger. When we break down the door, we trip over a scrap of paper that tells us so.

98.
He sleeps stealthily. They call him by name, the green and blue rays dancing on the frosted window. For him to return the dreams he drew from us, awaking first.

99.
The terra firma carries us. Space envelops us. Neither stands on the ground. We balance, arms around one another. In the heavens.

Story copyright © 2003 by Fiction International.
Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.

Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1957 and now lives in Pasadena, California, where he works as a graphic designer and publishes an online literary magazine Locus Novus (www.locusnovus.com). He is the author of six collections of stories and a novel.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.