SARP SOZDINLER
PRIMARIES
Grandpa gets his news from a messenger pigeon club that has survived since World War II. He says it’s a necessary form of communication between like-minded people, what with the mainstream media and its misleading propaganda. Every Sunday morning, shortly after sunup, the bird flies in from the east and chirps twice before leaving the ribboned parchment on the top of our porch stairs. One week the news is about an engineered flood in Tokyo and the next a school shooting in Colorado. There is a different pigeon for each type of content depending on the animal’s speed and the urgency of the news item, each determined weekly by the editors of the club.
Some mornings, on my way to school, I pass by the club’s headquarters downtown. The mustachioed birdkeeper releases the birds into a whirling flock, and the birds make one monstrous shadow before breaking into different routes for their designated delivery. Mostly shrouded in the sun by day, by night the building shines with weird interior lights. I rate its design as a nightmarish version of all those zoos we used to visit with Mom, looking less of a news outlet than an intensely crowded display of dismembered birdlike mannequins and whatnot. The vitrine is, by comparison, rather uneventful except for a gold-veneered frame and a bronze bust of Mercury, the messenger god. The picture within the frame changes every week, ranging from the news clip of the President pardoning a turkey to a bird’s eye view of our town. Every time I pass by the building I make a mental note of documenting the series with Mom’s old polaroid camera, but I always forget about it afterward.
One day, on my way back home from school, I see the birdkeeper nursing a pigeon perched on his right hand. He is feeding her a palmful of bread crumbs with his thick red glove and caressing her right wing spotted with clots of blood. The sound of daytime TV buzzing out of the birdkeeper’s booth makes it difficult to understand the words coming out of his mouth. As I draw near, I recognize the bird on his arm as the one that delivers us the news whenever there is war-related stuff giving on. In this low, grumbly voice the birdkeeper sings to her what sounds like the national anthem of a faraway land and after a while the animal works up the courage to flutter her wings, only to fight for her balance against the immediate pull of gravity. She strikes it right on the third try and chirps deliriously before heading westward, where our home is, like a missile.
When I tell Grandpa what I witnessed the day before, he simply ignores me. He talks nonstop about his plans on how to stock up our shelter while going on with his morning routine, shaving and whatnot. He turns around to lock his gaze on me when he says that even a simple bottle of water will double its price in time of war, which, in his opinion, will be much sooner than I anticipated. I ask and ask but he won’t tell me when. The whole weekend I fear for Sunday to come, for the pigeon to deliver the bad news, but no one arrives, not even a neighbor.
The next evening, I find the pigeon from the other day lying motionless on one of the dirt roads leading to our house, her wounded wing folded over a parchment. The page corners are fluttering in the wind like feathers, and the ribbon on it looks wet and wavy around the edges because of the fresh blood. I stoop to pick up the parchment from under the bird’s wing and check its dry part under the weak street light. The news shows the black-and-white picture of an old aircraft, warning the reader of the deep state’s plans for an airborne spray of the bird flu virus. I put the dead bird in my backpack and carry her all the way home. When I arrive, Grandpa is busy hauling in his wheelbarrow some cans of what he calls the Primary, a mixture of water and some precarious energy-boosting ingredients the club’s newsletter gave the recipe a few months back as a precaution. He says the war is imminent now and that I better pack a suitcase before it’s too late. He tells me that I at least owe my mother that. I run up to my room and unzip my backpack to rest the bird on my bed. I take a damp towel from the bathroom and only after I clean her wings does she look peaceful in her marble-like state, almost as beautiful as Mom, her eye-rings unevenly colored in blue. I pluck a bloodied feather from her wounded wing and put it between the pages of my diary in her memory. I pray for them both at night.
These days, on the patchy acre of land where Grandpa used to tend his garden, I keep a graveyard full of raw, tender bones; my diary is bulky with the dead hands of nature. Grandpa now lives fully underground, sending me messages for this need or that. Behind the hills in the distance, I occasionally spot some shadows darkening the sky but I can’t make out whether they are birds or bombs. On and on they fall in front of my eyes, like the chemical rain in Mom’s war tales. The night before she died, she told me that I should look for the sun whenever I would feel lonely or scared, for it was the home of one true God. Today, a poem about the bird that burned up her wings flying toward the sun fills the frame on the vitrine of the pigeon club. The birdkeeper is watching the afternoon news in his booth, and I can’t bring myself to ask the inevitable question.
Home I walk.
Sarp Sozdinler is a Turkish writer based in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Normal School, Hobart, Maudlin House, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere. Some of their pieces have been anthologized and received a mention at literary events, including the Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery.