The Tail of a Gypsy Moth - Sarp Sozdinler
States hear from each other from one disaster to another, your cellmate used to say (“like family members”). Like when the earth splits and swallows a village. Like when two planes ride into as many towers. When a fucker tries and blows up an airport. Take California for instance, he’d say, or Mexico at your will, where everyone talks about cartels, about how dangerous life could get in those places, how drugs run like water, what have you. No one mentions the upsides when sober. Stereotypes strangle everyone like a handwoven scarf from home, and we all battle the collective ghost of other people constitutionally similar to us, day in and day out.
Today, it’s the absence of news that tells you a lot about what has become of your life lately. Just the night before, you closed your eyes to a world without hope and opened them to one full of possibilities. You aimed for a world beyond the four walls of your jail cell but ended up in this six-by-eight motel room roughly the size of a coffin. Maybe the world didn’t spin fast enough, after all. Maybe all of this was designed in a way to leave your thirty-two-year-old heart broken again and again, you who was once full of life and had chestnut color around your chest unlike the inch of blondish white regrowth invading the root of your horseshoe hair these days.
Today, none of it makes a difference.
Today, you turn on your laptop and embark on a journey on Google Street View. You start from your motel room in San Francisco, then click eastward once, and then click on and on. You click your way through Nevada, Utah, Colorado; from Ohio and Pennsylvania to New Hampshire; from one Portland to another, and from there all the way to the easternmost point of America. The nation on the screen offers you a curious vista: cascading tract house suburbs and trailer parks and grain silos and gun stores and strip clubs and hypermarkets and self-storage facilities are shaping the tail of a gypsy moth; the longleaf pines its head. The fuzzy portraits of men and women of all ages, weight, and complexion, sharing drinks in the parking lots or surviving on odd jobs or selling door-to-door magazine subscriptions or drilling at oilfields or riding along the ocean-like plateaus of the West Coast, until they flock to the next best deal the moment they get bored or run out of money.
Today won’t allow any room for boredom, so you invent another game. One you have dreamt about since your days in journalism school, years before they locked you up for nothing. One with a smiley picture of yourself cropped on the sidebar, taken on the day of your graduation. With a black-and-white picture of the Pacific Ocean placed onto the header, and the Atlantic on the footer. One with a subtitle that reads, A community for the great beyond—something you came up with while staring at that old round clock on the prison yard for long, uninterrupted hours. You sketch on the screen a black circle with crude contours, then upload it as the logo. The circle is empty inside its orbit, a form without a beginning or an end, the perfect shelter for infinity. You crop and filter each screenshot of America you’ve taken on Street View, then drag them all into the body of your first post.
And then that’s it: your blog is all set up, ready to share with what your cellmate liked to call the “Other Side.” With the matchless pride of an artist, you roll back in your chair and stare at the first real work you’ve done as a free man. Letters indeed look grander on the screen, you’ll give your cellmate that. Those words that you have carried in your mind all day—all those years—even the commas and spaces in between, are now resonating more profoundly on the pixels of your newly launched blog.
Before publishing your first post, you smoke two cigarettes by the window, lighting the second one before extinguishing the first. You get back to your desk, type in a few more lines on the screen, edit this word or that, fill in your cellmate’s email address, and finally click the SUBMIT button.
Originally published by Pigeon Review, 2021
A Turkish writer, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, HAD, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
