Dreamspinning

As a kid, Nehisi used to sleep in a treehouse. He could curl right into it from his bedroom window. He would have a hard time falling asleep every time his parents got loud or physical. Whatever his parents lacked in romance as a couple, they compensated it with fighting. They did less lovemaking than shouting at each other over trivial matters that only made sense in the acoustic ambiance of their two-bedroom apartment. In those days, Nehisi used to read a lot about skin cells and bad growth. A substitute teacher had once made them watch a documentary about STDs, cautioning the students about all forms of intimacy. All Nehisi saw was heartbreak.

Every time his parents got out of control, Nehisi would swipe one of those old mason jars in the kitchen and try to entrap his parents’ loud voices. It was not long ago that his grandmother lent him those jars to preserve the worms he caught in the backyard, for those jars, as she claimed, had a way of keeping everything intact, including her dentures, including time. Whenever his parents started fighting, Nehisi would walk out of his room with the mason jar in his hands and wait at the doorstep with the lid open. Later, in the treehouse, he would slice each entrapped word with care, dissecting the syllables into angry letters. He would dream about planting those jars in his grandparents’ backyard to watch them grow into gnarly trees. He would dream about selling them in the upcoming county fair, fast and easy, so someone would be kind enough to take all those memories away from him.

One day, nearing the end of the fifth grade, Harold the family labrador barged into Nehisi’s bedroom while he was asleep and broke the jars on his desk with a slap of its tail. Upon the shattering of glass, Nehisi’s room filled with all the captive sounds from the fights his parents had ever had in his presence. Their consonants prolonged and the vowels contracted for emphasis. Hearing those words uttered with the same fervor again and again hurt him even more after all the time apart. There was his mother’s voice, telling her husband to leave for knocking up that other woman. There was his father, yelling back at her in the same way Nehisi’s grandfather would yell at the rest of his family. Nehisi, not knowing what to do with the delirious sounds flooding his room, decided to escape into the treehouse. He climbed out of the window and crawled onto the big, slanted branch of oak. He curled fetus-like on the hard flat surface of the treehouse and tried to fall asleep. He tried to conjure in his mind the images of wars, roadkills, and baseball, but none stuck around for long enough to put him to sleep. He parted his lips and opened them wide wide wide to scream, though all that would stumble out was silence.

A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals.