Nocturnal Journal #3
Fiction & Poetry Newsletter by Ecem Yucel
-Poetry-
Suicidal Pigeon
“Who would’ve thought
wings could be a burden?”
asks my brother when
I tell him about the pigeon
I saw the other day.
“Certainly not us,
the species that call themselves
humans,” I reply.
Then, my mind drags itself back
to the scene I watched for a while:
One talon curled over
the edge of the roof,
the other is a bit behind
supporting the bodyweight
and ready to kick the ground
in any minute,
in case the world is found
meaningless enough,
and the bird decides to end it all
human style:
Suicidal pigeon,
brewing his resolution,
is on the brink
of a freefall.
“Too bad for him,”
says my brother,
“for he couldn’t kill himself
no matter how hard
he kicked off the roof,
how desperately
he threw himself in the air,
and dropped down,
since those wings would open
instinctively and save him
from himself.”
So, feeling the pity
which only humans would feel
when they secretly know that they are
inferior to the creature they pity,
I want to ask you
my dear bird:
just what is it that you seek
from life?
Do you crave glory
like the rest of us?
Maybe desire to be immortalized
in the oil painting
of a famous artist,
hung on a wall in Louvre
for centuries?
Or would you like to be a part of
something of everyday use,
like the sparrows crocheted
on my duvet cover
with colorful threads:
mass production by Ikea?
Or do you regret that
you have yet to taste love?
Love: that invisible flame
that consumes the wingless,
crippled bipeds
you fly over each day.
Suicidal pigeon;
feeling the weariness
and the weight of his wings,
looks down from the edge,
brooding like a pigeon,
noble as kings.
Or would you rather be a fish?
-Fiction-
I’ll Take It
Harry didn’t know one could see ghosts until the day she died.
He was watching television, a rerun of “It’s a Wonderful Life” at one o’clock in the morning. As George Bailey said, ‘What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary,’ she came out of the bedroom, and he saw her sitting next to him on the couch with the corner of his eye.
She said, “I’ll take it,” in unison with Mary, and he smiled.
“It’s my favourite scene,” she said after.
“I know, it’s like you felt it in your sleep and woke up to see it,” he replied.
“About that,” she said, in a soft, but serious tone, “I’d like to tell you something. It’s better for you to hear it from me before you see it for yourself.”
Something in her voice made him mute the sound of the TV and face her.
“What is it? You’re scaring me.” Harry searched her pale face for answers. He thought she seemed different, but how, he couldn’t pin down.
“I’m sorry. Really sorry,” she said, looking at him. He realized he’d never seen so much sorrow in her eyes during their four years of relationship. That scared him.
“What, babe?”
“Something happened,” she said. “While I was sleeping. Something bad. Something called an aneurysm.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked now with a low but panicking voice. His remote control holding hand started to tremble a little.
“I’ve just died,” she said and pointed the bedroom door with her head. “In there. Ten minutes ago, or so.”
Harry’s initial reaction was to laugh; though it was mostly a forced laugh since his heart was beating so fast out of fear, and his eyes were now noticing how she didn’t have any weight enough to crush the couch cushion. His subconscious was also picking up a weird, far away feeling hanging over the space between them. As if, though she was sitting next to him, she was miles away, someplace he could never reach for her again.
He stood up, went to the bedroom door, and turned on the light. At the threshold he stood still; his eyes wandered from her lifeless body lying on the bed to her spectre sitting on the couch.
“This is a nightmare,” Harry murmured to himself before he went to try to wake her up. A nightmare, his thoughts echoed. I must have fallen asleep in front of the TV.
He walked to her side of the bed and looked at her. Her eyes were open, lifeless, and cold as if glass marbles were put in the places of her always warm, lively looking blue eyes. She seemed even paler than her spectre, and her cracked lips were half-open. Scared to death, Harry reached out and shook her; slowly at first, then, wildly. He also called her name. Again, and again, and again.
She didn’t wake up.
Neither did he.
Harry let a cry out.
——
“What is it you want Harry?” she asked the day after her funeral. She’d been dead for four days now. Harry was there, next to her, collapsed on their — now his — couch. His eyes were on the TV (which was turned on to a shopping channel) not seeing, bloodshot. A two-day stubble covered his cheeks, and he still wore the black shirt and the black pants he wore at her funeral the day before. His pants were creased badly, and his unbuttoned shirt had whiskey stains all over due to his excessive drinking with his all-time trembling hands. Whiskey seemed like the only medicine to numb the pain.
“What do you want?” she asked again, as Harry half-sipped, half-spilled the whiskey in his hand. “You want the moon?”
“I want you, damn it!” he yelled, spilling more whiskey from his glass. “I fucking want you back!” His shoulders started to shake terribly, and he lost himself in his sobs.
“Just say the word,” she said in an otherworldly manner, reaching out to caress his hair with her non-existing hand.
——
A few days later, Harry went out to buy more whiskey. He was drinking a bottle a day now. Her ghost followed him to the liquor store. Nowadays, it seemed, it was all the ghost was doing, following Harry everywhere, and always saying the same thing, like a broken record.
“What is it you want Harry?” she asked for the umpteenth time as Harry stared at the whiskey selection on the aisle. He didn’t know whether she was a fragment of his imagination or a real ghost. He didn’t know if he cared either way. It appeared as she had lost her ability to talk normally after that night when she came to him to announce her death. Now, whenever she talked to him, she only quoted the lines from the scene he was watching when she died. It was maddening.
“What do you want?” she asked, and Harry answered exhaustedly, “More alcohol.”
Ten minutes later, as they walked in the street, she asked again, “What is it you want Harry?”
“Why the hell do you keep asking me this?” he said angrily, making a couple of people turn and look at him.
She answered, “What do you want? You want the moon?”
“Told you, didn’t I?” he growled under his breath, “I want you. I want you back so much. Might as well be the moon.”
She looked at him with a sad smile. “Just say the word,” she said.
“I’m saying it, but you’re not listening, are you? You’re still gone, and I’m going mad, talking back to a hallucination in the middle of the street!”
He had just finished his sentence when he heard the bitter screeches of tires and a loud thud. Turning his eyes from the ghost with a beautiful, sad smile next to him, he quickly looked around, scared. That was when he saw the accident.
Harry instantly dropped the bag full of whiskey bottles on the ground and ran to the young woman lying on the road, in a puddle of her blood, in front of a dented car bumper. The driver, a young man around his twenties, got out of his car slowly, trembling from head to toe.
“She just came out nowhere!” the driver said to Harry in a crazed mode.
“Call an ambulance!” Harry told the driver as he kneeled to check the pulse of the woman. It didn’t seem good; he couldn’t feel her pulse, nor she breathed. Her body looked like a deflated balloon, and her eyes were open, lifeless, and glassy, fixed at the grey sky. Just like her eyes, Harry thought, and for a moment, he saw his girlfriend’s dead face in front of him again. He felt the pain like a sharp knife in his ribs, rising toward his heart, and fell down onto his butt, desperate.
A man ran toward them and asked, “Do you know how to perform CPR?” Harry shook his head tiredly and watched the man as he kneeled on the other side of the woman and started doing CPR. He also heard the driver calling for an ambulance. He wanted to tell them that there was no use anymore. Nothing would bring her back. Everything was meaningless and everyone was dying. What was the point of living anyway, if you were going to die so young, so sudden, whether on a bed in your sleep or on the road, hit by a car? As tears streamed down his cheeks, Harry wished it was him who had died instead of this woman. He wished for that final, dark abyss, where he wouldn’t see more death or his dead girlfriend’s ghost, nor hear the damn movie quotes from her lips. It’s a wonderful life, my ass.
——
The CPR wasn’t working. Harry couldn’t stand to watch the man’s empty efforts to bring the dead woman to life anymore, so he looked elsewhere. Only then, he saw the ghost of his girlfriend standing over the young woman’s body. He was surprised. She seemed somewhat excited, and he couldn’t understand why. He just watched the ghost as she took a position in front of the feet of the dead young woman, her back turned to the body as if she was aligning herself according to it.
She turned to Harry with a smile not as sad as the previous ones, and said, “You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”
As Harry’s eyes opened wide, the man stopped doing CPR tiredly and leaned back, and the ghost of Harry’s girlfriend tilted, let herself fall on her back, right on the dead woman’s body, and disappeared inside of it. Harry felt an overwhelming shockwave, so did the CPR man, the driver and other bystanders who gathered around to watch. “What the hell was that?” the driver asked, afraid.
A moment later the dead woman took a deep breath.
Harry and others held their breath in awe and watched her as she opened her eyes, panting hard. Her pain could be seen on her face. Yet, she forced her eyes to wander around, like she was searching for something. Finally, her eyes stopped on Harry. Her painful expression dissolved into a softer one. Harry, who initially didn’t understand what had happened at all, saw in her eyes that this woman he had never seen in his life before, remembered him. She knew him. She loved him.
His brain went numb as he understood. She smiled at him.
“You said the word,” she murmured.
The siren of the ambulance was heard somewhere nearby.
“I’ll take it,” Harry said, crying.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more poetry from me, please check out my new poetry book ‘The Anguish of an Oyster’ here.
You can also check my website for more information.
Fabulous, Ecem. 🙂