By Sarp Sozdinler

I.

You forage the beach for pebbles, two at a time. Only a few turn up globular, shiny, probably good for the shivering, crablike hands of your mother. The last palmful comes in one, missing its pair. It wriggles in your palms, restless to escape like a fish. You liberate the pebble back into the sea where it gets immediately swallowed by a slouching wave. When you turn around, a drowning image of your mother appears far from where you left her, vomiting pills and saltwater. You stand still, barely cocking your head, unsure whether it’s her mind or body failing to sail toward the shore.

~

II.

On the morning of your seventh birthday, you jump off the roof of the garage and land on a jutting curbstone. A girl from PE called you on a dare just the day before, claiming number seven is not about luck as most people make of it. “Contrary to popular opinion,” your mother agreed, “luck is what happens to you until you get pregnant.” Today, it’s your luck stretching out across a hospital bed in pain like your mother before you, only with a much livelier color on your face. Any dreams you might have of becoming a professional cyclist by then get crushed on your birthday, along with your legs. Only if you pedal your bed straight and sit still enough, you can feel the earth moving under your feet, grunting and grunting in cycles.

~

III.

On your last morning together, your mother told you that your father fought as a mercenary overseas before spending a decade in the army and got shot not only in both of his ears but in the face, chest, arms, and legs, too, yet couldn’t be killed in any wars in recent history, from Iraq and Congo to Afghanistan, including a hideout mission in the thick of Honduras forests like in Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” his all-time favorite. She said he filled each bullet hole with another story at the cost of losing all his body parts he needed to tell those stories with, much less to express any kind of reaction without going too strong on morphine.

That was before she herself got fully submerged under the influence of drugs and into the bowels of her consciousness.

That was before she told you, “The day you were born, God knows you just looked like a wound to me. One with a heart and the ugliest voice.”

~

IV.

You, as always, seek Jesus, but in today’s case, one Jesús Parejo, your father, the first of many, as is printed on the birth certificate in your hands. You made all twelve-hundred miles across the blacktopped guts of the Midwest just to see him, past towns that looked like condensed or expanded versions of one another. Roads kept doubling back on themselves as if your mother, by the help of some deathbed magic, concealed the traces that would lead to the man.

Before knocking on the door, you pop a pill that looks empty on the surface, like most things about your hometown. The peephole blooms into one big sun as muffled footfalls grow louder on the other side. Your mind, thanks to your narcotic fog, won’t allow you to register what follows. Your words, before they could even find a voice, turn to bones, breaking off at places where you least expect it.

~

V.

“So, what’s her sense of humor like?” she asks.

“I don’t think she has any,” you find yourself saying.

“What would you say her favorite topics of conversation be, then?”

“She doesn’t speak that much, really.”

“Favorite food?”

You pull into a lifeless street, and the roof of your childhood home emerges downhill, where your skull once met the curb. “I wouldn’t really know.”

Today, there’s a girl who meets your hand on the gearshift like a blind man’s assistant, and you like the feeling, the effortlessness with which your body moves around hers. You two met each other at the clinic you’d checked in to get rid of some of your worse habits, where she worked as a nurse. Now the memories of those days blur into one another as your once-muddy past comes into view on the windshield. For the first time in twenty years, you feel determined to ask questions to the woman who made you, and, this time, demand some answers, too.

~

VI.

The distorted image of a new life. The vibrations of what’s inside your partner’s belly. For now, the baby on the ultrasound monitor resembles those blurry black-and-white posters of asteroids on the walls of your childhood room. Your partner is in pain, breathing through sedatives and a trace of morphine. Her stretched skin talks to everyone in the room through beats and bumps, in a language none of you cannot yet master or decipher. You hold her hand on the bedside while staring lifelessly into the ultrasound screen. You remember the night your mother pointed at the sky and told you the brightest star up north would be your father. You remember how her casket, in its morbid symmetry, smelled like childbirth.

“I know it’s Mom who’s passed away,” you remember telling your father then, “but for some reason, it’s me who actually feels like getting erased.”

~

VII.

So, this is what it is: a stroke, quick and hard, taking away what little clarity remained in your old man’s head. First it was breath he longed for, and then a drop of morphine. You’re trying to find a reflection of yourself in this strange man who’s only dreaming of tumors and black horses these days. Even your daughter, after three years apart, arrived from the city when she got the news. You can still see it if you look at her long enough, one thing that tethers her face to your mother’s in the same way yours is to your father’s. She, too, told you the bones would hurt.

“More than the heart,” she said.