Eating Flowers
by Sarp Sozdinler
The dawn broke. Waves sloshed against the windblown sand and drifted our rowboat like detritus. At the foot of the pier, two officers with white block letters printed on their backs cut a beached baby whale open with surgical blades. They towered above the creature as if the longer they stared at it, the sooner they would identify the bones in its belly. The spectators on the beach glanced at one another to figure out the moral of this bizarre scene. I craned around from the bow to look at my father, who was busy parking our boat with more groans than muscle effort. Marjo was chewing on daisies at the gunwale, oblivious to the activity of grownups. With the turn of the weather, the officers started shouting orders and spun their fingers in the air. They rigged up tarps around the carcass and isolated this part of the beach from the rest with barricade tape. Frogs retreated to the churning waters. The crowd thinned and dissipated like fog.
During lunch break the next day, a boy from Marjo’s class told us it was Hue’s bones that they’d found at the beach, the custodian’s daughter.
“You know,” he said, “Dad says the sea ate her.”
The boys in Marjo’s class talked a lot of trash but the news wouldn’t surprise me even if it turned out to be true. In this town, kids sometimes dozed outdoors at night. It was a time-honored tradition. Be it bad boys or runaway girls passed out on booze or drugs, anyone could spot them on roadsides or under the bus-stop benches, each blanketed with sand like the beached baby whale. They’d become a natural part of the landscape over time, inseparable from the indigenous trees or centuries-old slithering stones. The morning after, they usually got up one by one and headed back home before the sanitation workers would arrive to pick up the actual litter. Those who didn’t would be found in the waters some days or weeks later, their bodies cold as the waves that floated them to the surface.
This time it was the forces of nature, and not the perpetrator, that buried Hue.
On our way home after school, I steered us off the route to visit the beach. Marjo protested the decision right away but she was easy to bribe with another daisy to munch. We talked about Hue the whole time, but neither of us could remember when it was we last saw or spoke with her. I didn’t remember much of anything lately, including Mom; only how much she, like everyone else back in Kansas, smoked and drank too much, and how we used to voyage into the desolate, blacktopped guts of the Midwest in her baby-blue Ford Lotus come sunset. I remembered how some thunderstruck trees along the way looked warped and stunted to the point of resembling her bedridden body. I remembered counting the hours Marjo and I had spent in the backseats of Greyhound on our way to living with Dad, and how mature and drunk and free I felt arriving in North Carolina as if it were a mythical party to which I could never be sure whether I was invited or not.
Devoid of daylight, the beach looked like a whole new place. Neither the whale nor the officers were there anymore, but a certain thickness lingered in the air. The dimpled spot in the sand where the bones had been recovered was decorated with ribbons and candles as if it were an ancient burial ground. Early moonlight cast upon the surrounding rock formations a cold blue haze, turning them into totems and tombstones.
“I wanna go home,” Marjo whined, but didn’t follow through. She took a pressed lily from the breast pocket of her cherry sundress to eat her way out of a freshly surging emotion she couldn’t name.
On the other half of the beach, some townies seemed to have built a bonfire to pay their respects to the dead. A funnel cloud was gaining strength above them one howl at a time, so symbolic of something I failed to place. Heat gave everyone a facelift as we approached, peeling away at their smiles like dead skin. A barefoot old man in a patched brown robe welcomed us with open arms, reeking of alcohol and other bad habits.
“At your age,” his pockmarked face glowed pink in the firelight, “the Lord may not be famous for burning an awful lot of things.” I could feel Marjo’s hand getting sweaty in my palm, or perhaps it was the other way around. “Unless you’re a bloody Communist.”
The flurry of activity around the bonfire allowed the collective body odor to assume a muffling quality and made a girl I knew from calculus cough from the depths of her lungs. Or that’s what I figured then, anyway. The next cough came from a boy from our block. A second later, another cough—louder, more determined than the first, almost like a proper word. An old lady replied with a cough of her own from the other side of the flames, and then a one-eyed boy did the same, and then there they all were, getting it out one by one, as though they were the victims of some mysterious epidemic. They gradually synchronized their breaths and coughs into a hymn of sorts, a rhythmic growl of a gigantic animal in distress. They frantically danced their arms and legs as if they were trying to get rid of their limbs. They heaped together and then rushed to their separate ways like a swarm of beetles. Then, out of nowhere, the barefoot old man from before lamented a howl. Everyone remained silent until one of the boys scurried to hug him from behind, and then the old lady did the same, and then some others, each in a suspiciously choreographed way.
Looking at the man in this new light and angle, I recognized him as our school custodian, Hue’s father.
“Whatsss a communisss?” Marjo glanced up at me with expectant eyes, but I told her that it didn’t matter.
As the rain broke and started to trample the fire, the townies broke free from the custodian and held hands. The man’s lips moved, but I couldn’t make out what he said. All eyes and ears were tuned to him, but he didn’t return the gesture. He closed his eyes instead and took a deep breath. He covered his ears with his hands and opened his mouth as if he was about to scream, only he didn’t scream; it was the world screaming through his mouth, wordlessly.
“I wanna go home.” Marjo took another anxious bite from her lily, and this time I held her hand tighter.
I remembered the day Mom pulled me closer in bed and held onto me as the bag of bones that she’d become. “No matter if it’s the sea or the desert,” she whispered to me then, “it’s always the girls that keep dying.”
Sarp Sozdinler (he/they) is a Turkish writer currently based between New York and Amsterdam. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, It’s Nice That Magazine, Solstice, Passages North, The Racket, among other publications. Some of his longer pieces have been selected as a finalist at literary contests, including Waasnode Short Fiction Prize judged by Jonathan Escoffery. He is working on his first novel.
