Sarp Sozdinler
The first time we play, it’s January and it’s snowing in circles. We are still children, sort of. We tie sheets around our necks like capes and run through the basement shouting, “We are orphans! We are orphans!” in fake British accents. We eat canned peaches with our fingers. We call the furnace The Burning Father, whom we must never awaken.
The rules are unclear but urgent.
We aren’t allowed to speak to adults during the game. If we do, we’re out. We must forage for food (Triscuits, mostly). We must write letters to our dead parents and burn them in the sink.
My sister says this is how orphans keep from going mad.
***
We don’t have real parents, only ghost parents. Our father lives in a condo out West with a woman named Shauna who has veneers and a miniature dog named Steve. He plays racquetball on Tuesdays and says “Christ” like a cough when we talk too loud. Our mother wears too much perfume and once painted a mural in the garage of two wolves looking at the moon. Sometimes she sleeps for twelve hours. Sometimes she doesn’t sleep at all. She forgets to buy milk but remembers every word in the Bible.
By spring, the game has evolved. Now we leave offerings for our ghost parents in the crawlspace: a decapitated Barbie head, a rusted dime, a broken glowstick. We make up songs with minor chords. We call our bruises “survival tattoos.” My sister braids my hair and says I’d make a beautiful Dickens character if I didn’t look this American in the face.
We go three full days without speaking to our mother. On the third night, she yells, “Are you girls on drugs or what?” We pretend not to hear. We hold hands under the blanket and sing a dirge until we fall asleep.
We dream of suitcases. We dream of faraway train stations. We dream of British accents that actually stick.
***
In July, our mother gets a boyfriend who wears rings and drives a Jeep with no doors. He leaves his socks in the oven. He calls us “little weirdos” and offers to take us camping. We say yes too fast, like we’re afraid he’ll change his mind.
During one of our trips, my sister invents a spin-off game called Dead in the Woods. We wear face paint and dig a hole for a time capsule that contains a Rite Aid receipt, two Capri Suns, and a note that reads, “We were here first.”
We watch our mother’s boyfriend sleep through the tent mesh. We whisper what-if scenarios into the wind. What if he doesn’t wake up? What if we just walk into the trees and start over?
In the morning, we are covered in mosquito bites and we hear our mother singing the national anthem in the kitchen. She only sings when she thinks no one is watching. Sister Margaret from St. Mary’s once told us the Lord is always watching. We know The Burning Father is watching. The birds are watching. We are watching.
***
Later, our father takes us to the beach and forgets to take the sunscreen. My sister burns in patches. She peels like birch bark. I help her flake off the skin in secret, behind a curtain of jagged rocks. “We’re becoming all-new girls,” she says. “Little Catholic snakes.”
She often gets quiet around boys. She’s less shy than strategic. She carries a red notebook and writes everything down. Once I read a poem she wrote about a girl who eats her own shadow to feel whole. Watching a fraternity of cadet boys, I ask her if she’s ever felt that way, like a full person. She shrugs and tucks the notebook into her pocket. “Not everyone has interesting parts to pick,” she says.
***
That fall, my sister stops playing Orphan.
She says it’s not funny anymore. That it never really was. She starts painting her nails black and uses words like palpable and trajectory in casual conversation. She tells me I’m too soft for the world. That I still act like a character in a sad little book. That I’ll end up with someone who talks down to me at dinner parties and smells like an old basement.
I tell her she’s being mean. She tells me I’m being meek.
We don’t speak for two weeks. I sleep in the basement, next to The Burning Father. I write letters to my ghost parents, alone in the dark.
***
The following summer, my sister disappears for an entire weekend. When she comes back, she has a tattoo of a thistle on her hip. She won’t tell me who paid for it. She makes a grilled cheese and offers me half. I say nothing. We chew in silence, side by side. The crusts feel too hard in my mouth.
She leans her head on my shoulder and says, “Okay. One more round.”
We go down to the basement where it’s still cold. Still smells like rust and dog. We wrap ourselves in old sheets. We write new rules.
This time, we’re not orphans. This time, we’re escapees. We’re sisters hiding out from the war.
We only speak in code. We light candles and speak to the ghosts of our former selves for a change, the ones who still thought something or someone was coming to save them.
We take turns being the brave one.
We say: You go first. I’ll be right behind you.
And we mean it. We mean it more than anything.
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Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Maudlin House, HAD, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. His stories have been selected as finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize. His work has been selected or nominated for several anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the online journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com.