Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich
by Sarp Sozdinler
Asya and I are sunning along the rocks by the lake. We are arguing about Run-DMC, about their place in the hall of fame of music. She’s pissed at me for having claimed Ruben is a better producer than Dre. She’s practically yelling at me, calling me a seronja, switching back and forth between English and Bosnian whenever she’s feeling at a loss for words, and the next thing I know we are dead silent. I’m pretending to look out at the lake for a while when in truth I pray for the sun to stoop its head over one of those smudgy-looking clouds in the distance and melt the ice of our mood. I pray for one of those fish in the lake to jump out all of a sudden and bless Asya with freshwater, the same as it has been at our birth, the same as it has been when I first kissed her, the same as it has been with that big black rock now spinning below our feet with determination, humming and crying after us in circles.
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Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Normal School, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.
